Sheath blight disease, caused by Rhizoctonia solani, is a major threat to rice production. Reliable sources of genetic resistance to sheath blight are limited. In this study, 500 indigenous rice landraces were field-screened across five locations: Indira Gandhi Krishi Vishwavidyalaya (IGKV), Raipur; Zonal Agricultural Research Station (ZARS), University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), Mandya, ICAR-National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (NBPGR), New Delhi; Assam Agricultural University (AAU), Jorhat, Assam; and ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi. IGKV, Raipur, recorded the highest disease severity, with most genotypes scoring 7–9. Whereas, ZARS, UAS, Mandya, displayed the widest variation in severity (3–9), while, NBPGR, New Delhi; IARI, New Delhi; and AAU, Assam, showed moderate to high severity, with bimodal distributions at disease scores 5 and 7. These results suggested strong genotype × environment interactions influenced sheath blight severity and symptom expression. Based on multi-location phenotypic evaluation, the landraces IC461731, IC466486, IC380508, IC612378, IC513569, IC134282, IC213421, IC464280, IC300201, IC99470, IC568270, IC455583, IC458743X, and IC265928 were identified as moderately resistant to sheath blight. Biochemical assays of selected genotypes demonstrated higher catalase and chitinase activities in landrace accessions IC464280 and IC265928. Relative gene expression analysis of candidate resistance genes (Chitinase, OsPAL1, and OsWRKY30) revealed significant expression of OsWRKY30 at 48 h after inoculation. Finally, integrated fields, biochemical, and molecular analyses identified accessions IC568270, IC265928, and IC380508 as promising sources of sheath blight resistance that can be utilized in future breeding programs.
Reliable phenotypic characterization of plant genetic resources is essential for germplasm evaluation and breeding use. Here, 2750 single-seed images from 11 genotype-designated basil breeding materials (TRB2–TRB12; 250 seeds per material), produced in 2021 and 2022 at a single site, were evaluated using a spatially calibrated 1200-dpi flatbed-scanner workflow. From 288 image-derived descriptors, 44 SD/CV-derived variables were excluded, leaving 244 hand-crafted predictors. Four classical machine-learning models, four deep-learning architectures, and two fixed 50:50 decision-fusion strategies were evaluated using five locked maternal-seed-lot-grouped outer folds. The highest mean outer-fold Macro-F1 was obtained by the ML-family mean + DL-family mean fusion (0.831 ± 0.012); ConvNeXtV2-Tiny and SwinV2-Tiny each achieved 0.798, and CatBoost was the strongest classical model (0.770 ± 0.014). No paired Wilcoxon comparison remained significant after Holm correction. Bidirectional production-year transfer with the classical models yielded lower Macro-F1 values (0.6439–0.6983), indicating reduced transferability across production years. Maternal-lot cluster bootstrap analyses quantified uncertainty without treating individual seeds as independent replicates. Grouped permutation importance, held-out SHAP, out-of-fold t-SNE, and architecture-specific Grad-CAM were used as interpretive diagnostics rather than causal evidence. The framework supports non-destructive germplasm documentation, breeding-material comparison, and preliminary seed-lot screening, but broader cultivar-authentication or genetic-identity claims require validation across additional environments, germplasm panels, imaging systems, and laboratories.
The eastern Tellian Atlas, on the Algerian–Tunisian border, is floristically rich but ethnobotanically underexplored. We documented the medicinal flora and local knowledge of three rural communes of Souk Ahras Province (Heddada, Khedara and Ouled Moumen) through semi-structured interviews with 200 members of agro-pastoral households. Participants cited 137 taxa in 49 families, yielding 1838 use-reports. Asteraceae (21 taxa) and Lamiaceae (20) are the best-represented families; leaves are the most frequently used plant part; infusion (33.4
Delphinium consolida L. (Larkspur) is an annual plant of significant ornamental and medicinal value. In this study, 21 individuals and combinations of inter -simple sequence repeat (ISSR) and inter- retrotransposon amplifiedpolymorphism (IRAP) primers were used for evaluation of genetic diversity among 40 D. consolida accessions. A total of 148 loci were amplified, of which 138 (93.24 H=0.5723,I=0.8257 ). To investigate the relationship between genomic patterns and phenotypic expression, six morphological traits were analyzed. The Mantel test showed a non-significant correlation between genetic and phenotypic distance matrices ( r=0.114 , P=0.2575 ), a finding supported by comparative matrix and heatmap analyses. However, forward stepwise multiple linear regression identified a subset of six molecular markers that collectively explained 54.1 R^2=0.541,P<0.001 ). These results suggest that while neutral genomic variation does not strictly mirror morphology, specific marker-trait associations remain highly informative for architectural traits, providing a framework for genotype identification and germplasm conservation in D. consolida breeding programs.
Vegetable soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] is an underutilized legume with potential to improve nutrition and diversify cropping systems in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). A panel of 191 soybean accessions, including the World Vegetable Center large-seeded soybean core collection and SSA elite grain soybean materials, was characterized using 21,970 genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers. Genetic relationships were investigated using principal component analysis, sparse non-negative matrix factorization, discriminant analysis of principal components, and neighbor-joining analysis. Cross-entropy was lowest at K = 7, while K = 3 was used to characterize the major population structure and for population-level analyses. At K = 3 and Q≥ 0.70, 121 accessions were assigned to three genetic groups. AMOVA attributed 83.78
