The wheat tribe Triticeae, widely known for its economic importance, is a species-diverse and polyploid-rich group in Poaceae. However, despite decades of intensive efforts, the phylogenetic relationships, genome origins, and diversification dynamics of Triticeae species remain uncertain. Here, we infer the phylogenetic and diversification patterns of Triticeae using 1,546 nuclear genes from 164 transcriptomes/genomes that represent ∼83% of the recognized genera. Our phylogeny provides robust and well-supported estimates of the relationships among diploids and polyploids, which will be indispensable for studying biodiversity and breeding innovative germplasms. Diversification dynamic analysis suggests that Triticeae has undergone continuous evolutionary diversification to varying degrees since its origin during the Miocene, with acceleration in the St-ortholog lineages, indicating asymmetric diversification patterns among the homoeologous lineages in the St-genome-containing polyploid radiation. Multiple factors, including extinct donors and nonreciprocal recombination, complicated the origin of the B and G genomes of wheat and the Y and Xm genomes of wheatgrass. Asymmetric polyploidization and mixed-ploidy introgression might have constituted an evolutionary impetus driving rapid radiation and hyperdiversity of the St-genome-containing polyploid species in Triticeae. Our results provide new insights into the evolutionary origins of Triticeae that could promote the study of other rapidly radiated lineages in terms of polyploid origin and diversification processes.

IntroductionWheat is the primary raw material for traditional Baijiu Daqu fermentation, yet its role as a carrier of functional microbiota and its contribution to Daqu quality remain poorly understood.MethodsA total of 135 wheat samples representing five geographic regions and nine cultivars were subjected to sensory evaluation, physicochemical analysis, and 16S rRNA gene and ITS amplicon sequencing. Microbial community composition, predicted functional potential, and their associations with wheat quality traits were analyzed using PICRUSt2, Mantel tests, and correlation analyses.ResultsSensory evaluation indicated that the cultivation environment had a greater impact on Daqu quality than wheat cultivar, with wheat from the Dayi region and the MM916 cultivar exhibiting the most favorable characteristics. Sequencing identified 1,732 bacterial and 484 fungal amplicon sequence variants (ASVs), revealing significant geographic and varietal differences in microbial communities, while core taxa dominated by Pseudomonadota and Basidiomycota were consistently detected across all samples. Functional prediction suggested that microbial communities were primarily enriched in metabolic pathways, particularly carbohydrate metabolism, energy metabolism, and cofactor and vitamin metabolism. Spatial variation was observed in starch and sucrose metabolism, acetoin biosynthesis, and enzymes such as β-glucosidase and alcohol dehydrogenase. Wheat quality traits, especially protein, starch, and wet gluten content, were significantly associated with microbial composition and predicted functions. Thirty-two genera, including Sphingomonas, Pedobacter, and Martelella, showed strong correlations with these quality traits.DiscussionGeographic origin and wheat cultivar jointly shape the microbial communities and functional potential of brewing wheat, providing pre-existing microbial resources that may influence early Daqu fermentation and flavor formation. These findings offer a microbiome-based framework for evaluating and selecting high-quality wheat for Baijiu production.

Non-glaucous wheat can reduce solar light reflection in low-light cultivation regions, enhancing photosynthetic efficiency and potentially increasing yield. In previous work, a non-glaucous cuticular line, YL-429, was discovered in derivatives of pentaploid hybrids by crossing the synthetic wheat LM/AT23 (non-glaucous cuticular) with its tetraploid donor parent LM (glaucous) and selfing to F7 generations. In the present study, multicolor fluorescence in situ hybridization was used to characterize the karyotype of the YL-429 line; genome resequencing was performed to identify the breakpoint of the 2D-2A chromosome translocation of YL-429; and bulk sequencing analysis was conducted to detect the SNP in the translocated fragment and accordingly develop specific kompetitive allele-specific PCR markers for use in breeding. The line YL-429 was preliminarily determined as a 2DS and 2AS translocation (LM T2DS-2AS.2AL) line through karyotyping. Genome alignment identified an approximately 13.8 Mb segment, including the wax inhibitor gene Iw2, in the telomeric region of the 2DS chromosome arm replacing an approximately 16.1 Mb segment in that of the 2AS chromosome arm. According to the bulk DNA sequencing data, 27 specific KASP markers were developed for detecting the translocated fragment from the 2DS of Aegilops tauschii. The LM T2DS-2AS.2AL translocation line YL-429 could be helpful in improving the photosynthesis of durum wheat cultivated in low-light cultivation regions. The developed markers can assist the screening of the T2DS-2AS.2AL translocation in breeding.

BACKGROUND:Plant height (PH), as a key trait of plant architecture, is the embodiment of biomass accumulation and plays a critical role in determining wheat yield. Excavating diverse PH genes and understanding their pleiotropic effects on important agronomic traits are essential to enrich the PH gene pool and facilitate their further application in breeding. RESULTS:In this study, five stable PH QTLs were identified on chromosome 2B, 4A, 4B, 5A and 6A in a double haploid (DH) population from the cross between two elite wheat cultivars, Chuanmai 42 and Kechengmai 1. The QPh.cib-4B and QPh.cib-6A were major QTL and had a significant additive effect on PH. The QPh.cib-4B was confirmed as the Rht-B1, and QPh.cib-6A might be a new QTL. The major QTLs were further validated in different genetic backgrounds using the Kompetitive Allele-Specific PCR (KASP) markers. Using near-isogenic lines (NILs), QPh.cib-6A was demonstrated to pleiotropically increase plant height (PH), thousand grain weight (TGW), and spike length (SL) without negatively affecting grain number per spike (GNS) or spikelet number per spike (SNS). In contrast, QPh.cib-4B exhibited significant effects on PH but had no influence on TGW, GNS, SL, or SNS. Notably, the frequency of elite haplotype of QPh.cib-6A remains relatively low in Chinese wheat varieties. Thus, the combination of QPh.cib-4B and QPh.cib-6A represents a promising genetic module with considerable potential for high-yield wheat breeding. Expression analysis in NILs and sequence characterization identified TraesCS6A02G234400 and TraesCS6A02G235300 as the candidate genes for QPh.cib-6A. CONCLUSIONS:This study identified five QTLs for PH in wheat. Two major QTLs were further validated in different genetic backgrounds, and their genetic effects on yield-related traits were analyzed in near-isogenic lines (NILs) to evaluate their potential in wheat breeding. Taken together, our results advance our understanding of the genetic basis for PH and enrich the PH QTL pool. CLINICAL TRIAL NUMBER:Not applicable.

Toll/interleukin-1 receptor (TIR) domain proteins are immune signalling components and function as NAD+-cleaving enzymes to activate defence responses. In plants, TIR activation triggers cell death and severely represses growth, especially under osmotic stress, while in animals, it promotes axon degeneration. However, the mechanisms regulating TIR suppression remain unclear. Here we show that TIR NADase activity requires a conserved serine residue spatially close to the catalytic glutamate. The osmotic-stress-activated plant Ca2+-dependent protein kinases (CPKs), the mammalian Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II delta (CAMK2D) and TANK-binding kinase 1 (TBK1) phosphorylate TIR domains at this conserved serine, which blocks TIR NADase activities and functions, thereby maintaining growth in plants and suppressing SARM1 TIR signalling in animals. Our findings define a fundamental molecular mechanism by which phosphorylation at a conserved serine residue inhibits TIR signalling in plants and animals and sustains plant growth.

Stripe rust is prevalent in the wheat-growing region of southwestern China. Frequent changes in stripe rust pathogen virulence in this region lead to a rapid loss of disease resistance among wheat varieties. However, Chinese wheat landrace Yizhanghongkemai (YZHK) has exhibited adult-plant stripe rust resistance for more than one decade in a disease nursery in southwestern China. To elucidate the underlying genetic basis, quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for adult-plant stripe rust resistance in YZHK were analyzed using an inclusive composite interval mapping method. Six QTLs for adult-plant stripe rust resistance were detected on chromosomes 1BL, 2BL, 3DS, 5BL, 5DL, and 7DS in multiple environments. Notably, QYrYZHK.saas-1B, QYrYZHK.saas-2B and QYrCY.saas-5D were likely new disease resistance loci. By comparing the effects of QTL alleles on yield and its related components in field trials in which stripe rust was severe and effectively controlled, we determined that three QTLs significantly decreased yield losses due to stripe rust, among which the QTLs on chromosomes 1BL and 7DS were from YZHK, whereas the QTL on chromosome 5DL was from the other parent Chuanyu 12. These QTLs represent elite genetic resources for developing wheat varieties with adult-plant stripe rust resistance in the wheat-growing region of southwestern China.

Seven stable QTLs for TGW, GW and GL were identified, and two major QTLs were stable in various genetic backgrounds and environments. Thousand grain weight (TGW), mainly determined by grain length (GL) and width (GW), is an important yield component of wheat. In the study, combined with phenotyping in four field trials and a high-quality genetic map constructed with the wheat 55 K SNP array, a total of seven stable QTLs for TGW, GW and GL were identified in a doubled haploid (DH) population derived from the cross between Chuanmai 42 (CM42) and Kechengmai 4 (K4), in which QTgw.CK4-cib-3D, QGw.CK4-cib-2D and QGl.CK4-cib-5 A.1 were novel, and QTgw/Gw.CK4-cib-6 A and QGl.CK4-cib-5 A.1 were major QTLs explaining more than 10

Synthetic hexaploid wheats (SHWs) are effective genetic resources for transferring agronomically important genes from wild relatives to common wheat (Triticum aestivum L.). Dozens of reference-quality pseudomolecule assemblies of hexaploid wheat have been generated, but none is reported for SHW-derived cultivars. Here, we generated a chromosome-scale assembly for the SHW-derived cultivar ‘Chuanmai 104’ based on PacBio HiFi reads and chromosome conformation capture sequencing. The total assembly size was 14.81 Gb with a contig N50 length of 58.25 Mb. A BUSCO analysis yielded a completeness score of 99.30%. In total, repetitive elements comprised 81.36% of the genome and 122,554 high-confidence protein-coding gene models were predicted. In summary, the first chromosome-level assembly for a SHW-derived cultivar presents a promising outlook for the study and utilization of SHWs in wheat improvement, which is essential to meet the global food demand.

The Purpose of the present study was to quantify the responses of ten cell lines (HeLa, HepG2, HEK293, MDAMB-231, A498, A549, A357, 3 T3, BALB-C3 T3, and NIH-3 T3) to spent fluid catalytic cracking catalysts (SFCCCs) from different petroleum refineries, and relate these responses to metal concentrations of SFCCC leachates (SFCCCLs). Cytotoxicity of SFCCCs were significantly different depending on cell lines. A357 and 3 T3 cell were the most sensitive, and A498 and HeLa cells were the least sensitive. HEK293 cells showed the least fluctuation in toxic response to different SFCCCLs among all cells. Cytotoxic IC50 values of SFCCCs to 7 kinds of cells were the most correlated with vanadium (V) concentration in SFCCCLs. V is the most critical toxic factor of SFCCC. Glutathione synthesis was induced in HepG2 cells exposed to higher concentrations of SFCCCLs. SFCCCLs with low concentration of V can induce the decrease of GSH/GSSG ratio in HepG2 cells, suggesting that high concentration of V inhibits the detoxification of glutathione.

Chuanmai104 (CM104), an elite wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) variety that currently produces the highest yield per unit area in southwestern China, plays a critical role in wheat production. The high quality and stability of grain traits are important factors that ensure the high, stable yields of CM104 in different production areas. In this study, six grain traits of CM104 sampled from 19 environments in five provinces of China during 2018–2022 were evaluated. The traits comprised thousand-kernel weight, grain length, grain width, grain length–width ratio, grain circumference, and grain surface area. Fifteen quantitative trait loci (QTLs) associated with the grain traits were identified based on a recombinant inbred lines (F9–10) population derived from the cross between CM104 and the landrace Baimaomai (BMM), nine and six QTLs derived from CM104 and BMM, respectively. Three mainly pleiotropic QTLs derived from CM104, namely QTL10 (grain circumference, grain surface area), QTL11 (grain length, grain circumference), and QTL12 (grain length, grain circumference), were expressed significantly and stably in multiple environments, and explained 3.34–5.06

The grain-filling stage is highly sensitive to heat, impacting wheat yield and quality. This study uncovered Chuanmai104's grain spatial transcriptome atlas under heat stress, identifying over 120 specifically expressed genes crucial for cell sorting and subsequent spatial sequencing across twelve cell types. The cell differentiation trajectory of endosperm indicated high expression of genes for cell development and programmed cell death at early stages, and the subsequent expressed genes enable grains accumulate nutrients. At 15 DAP, recovery grains under heat stress showed significant gene expression changes, especially in the nucellar projection, endosperm near the scutellum, and embryo. Heat stress reduced starch and ABA synthesis gene expression, shortening grain-filling time, reducing grain weight by 28.9%, and raising germination rates from 7.9% to 52.0%. Spatial transcriptomics revealed unexpected shifts in the major expression domains for 189 genes due to heat stress, featuring three major spatial shifts: AL-SCU, ENC-PR, and EXC-NP.

Synthetic hexaploid wheat (SHW) is a useful genetic resource that can be used to improve the performance of common wheat by transferring favorable genes from a wide range of tetraploid or diploid donors. From the perspectives of physiology, cultivation, and molecular genetics, the use of SHW has the potential to increase wheat yield. Moreover, genomic variation and recombination were enhanced in newly formed SHW, which could generate more genovariation or new gene combinations compared to ancestral genomes. Accordingly, we presented a breeding strategy for the application of SHW-the 'large population with limited backcrossing method'-and we pyramided stripe rust resistance and big-spike-related QTLs/genes from SHW into new high-yield cultivars, which represents an important genetic basis of big-spike wheat in southwestern China. For further breeding applications of SHW-derived cultivars, we used the 'recombinant inbred line-based breeding method' that combines both phenotypic and genotypic evaluations to pyramid multi-spike and pre-harvest sprouting resistance QTLs/genes from other germplasms to SHW-derived cultivars; consequently, we created record-breaking high-yield wheat in southwestern China. To meet upcoming environmental challenges and continuous global demand for wheat production, SHW with broad genetic resources from wild donor species will play a major role in wheat breeding.

Learning user preferences by modeling historical purchase behaviors has significantly succeeded in existing recommender systems. Most use trained models to make predictions for users, and they assume that the training data samples and test data sample sets come from the same distribution. However, in practical applications, the distribution of users’ true preferences may be more complicated, and data drift can easily make the trained model invalid on the test dataset. In this case, to accurately model user preferences based on their historical behavior, two difficulties need to be addressed. First, it is difficult to model various purchase behavior shift situations due to their complexity. Second, inferring users’ true preferences from the complicated shifting cases is challenging. To solve the above problems, we build a robust recommender system to predict possible user purchase shifts and make recommendations for users. First, we propose a simulating strategy to cover possible scenarios when user purchase behavior shifts. Second, we build a novel voting framework to ensure the robustness of predicting results based on learned preferences. Extensive experiments were conducted, and the results demonstrate the outstanding performance of the proposed method on MovieLens-1M and LastFM datasets, providing at most 37.31% and 30.95% relative performance gains, respectively.

Even though conventional methods have contributed a lot to understanding information diffusion to a certain extent, they are limited by the neglect of considering survivors (i.e., non-participants). As the counterpart to participants, survivors exert analogously a vital role in cascade analysis, which represent the inaccessible scope of the message. To characterize participants and survivors simultaneously and assemble them into the macro-level cascade representation, we propose an end-to-end model, named complement coupling network, which utilizes multi-gating mechanism to coalesce inhomogeneous input. We first design a novel strategy for sampling survivors, which extracts a sequence of emblematic survivors corresponding to the sequence of observed participants. Afterwards, the complement gate is designed to weigh the contributions of the participant and survivor to the cascade at each timestamp. The reset and output gates are reformed to update the cell state and output the cascade snapshot, respectively. Furthermore, an attention mechanism keyed by the source node is introduced to assemble all snapshots within the observation window for predicting multiple subsequent activated users. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Rye (Secale cereale L.) is an important genetic resource for improving the disease resistance of wheat. An increasing number of rye chromosome segments have been transferred into modern wheat cultivars via chromatin insertions. In this study, 185 recombinant inbred lines (RILs) derived from a cross between a wheat accession containing rye chromosomes 1RS and 3R and a wheat-breeding founder parent Chuanmai 42 from southwestern China were used to decipher the cytological and genetic effects of 1RS and 3R via fluorescence/genomic in situ hybridization and quantitative trait locus (QTL) analyses. Chromosome centromere breakage and fusion were detected in the RIL population. Additionally, the recombination of chromosomes 1BS and 3D from Chuanmai 42 was completely suppressed by 1RS and 3R in the RIL population. In contrast to chromosome 3D of Chuanmai 42, rye chromosome 3R was significantly associated with white seed coats and decreased yield-related traits, as revealed by QTL and single marker analyses, whereas it had no effect on stripe rust resistance. Rye chromosome 1RS did not affect yield-related traits and it increased the susceptibility of plants to stripe rust. Most of the detected QTLs that positively affected yield-related traits were from Chuanmai 42. The findings of this study suggest that the negative effects of rye-wheat substitutions or translocations, including the suppression of the pyramiding of favorable QTLs on paired wheat chromosomes from different parents and the transfer of disadvantageous alleles to filial generations, should be considered when selecting alien germplasm to enhance wheat-breeding founder parents or to breed new varieties.

The members of PHOSPHATE 1 (PHO1) family play important roles in plant phosphate (Pi) transport and adaptation to Pi deficiency. The functions of PHO1 family proteins have been reported in several plant species, with the exception of Brassica species. Here, we identified 23, 23, and 44 putative PHO1 family genes in Brassica rapa, Brassica oleracea, and Brassica napus by whole genome analysis, respectively. The phylogenetic analysis divided PHO1 family proteins into eight groups, which represented the orthologous relationships among PHO1 members. The gene structure and the conserved motif analysis indicated that the most PHO1 family genes had similar gene structures and the PHO1 proteins shared mutual conserved motifs. The chromosome distribution analysis showed that the majority of BnPHO1 family genes distributed analogously at chromosomes with BrPHO1 and BoPHO1 family genes. The data showed that PHO1 family genes were highly conserved during evolution from diploid to tetraploid. Furthermore, the expression analysis showed that PHO1 family genes had different expression patterns in plant tissues, suggesting the diversity of gene functions in Brassica species. Meanwhile, the expression analysis also revealed that some PHO1 family genes were significantly responsive to Pi deficiency, suggesting that PHO1 family genes play critical roles in Pi uptake and homeostasis under low Pi stress. Altogether, the characteristics of PHO1 family genes provide a reliable groundwork for further dissecting their functions in Brassica species.

QTgw.saas-5B was validated as a major thousand-grain weight-related QTL in a founder parent used for wheat breeding and then precisely mapped to a 0.6 cM interval. Increasing the thousand-grain weight (TGW) is considered to be one of the most important ways to improve yield, which is a core objective among wheat breeders. Chuanmai42, which is a wheat cultivar with high TGW and a high and stable yield, is a parent of more than 30 new varieties grown in southwestern China. In this study, a Chuanmai42-derived recombinant inbred line (RIL) population was used to dissect the genetic basis of TGW. A major QTL (QTgw.saas-5B) mapped to the Xgwm213–Xgwm540 interval on chromosome 5B of Chuanmai42 explained up to 20

Aspect-oriented multimodal sentiment analysis aims to identify the sentiment associated with a given aspect using text and image inputs. Existing methods have focused on the interaction between aspects, text, and images, achieving significant progress through cross-modal transformers. However, they still suffer from three problems: (1) Ignoring the dependency relationships between objects within the image modality; (2) Failing to consider the role of syntactic dependency relationships within the text modality in capturing aspect-related opinion words; (3) Neglecting the inherent dependency relationships between modalities. To address these issues, we propose a fine-grained cross-modal graph convolutional network model (FCGCN). Specifically, we construct intra-modality dependency relationships using syntactic and spatial relationships and fuse the two modalities through semantic similarity calculation. We then design a GCN-Attention layer to capture richer multimodal fusion information. Additionally, an aspect-oriented transformer module is introduced to capture aspect features interactively. Experimental results on the Twitter datasets show that our FCGCN model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Even though conventional methods have contributed a lot to predicting information diffusion utilizing an end-to-end framework, they omit to consider the reason why each participant is involved in the cascade. Inspired by the ubiquitous pattern that users are inclined to take part in the discussion with attractive content and like-mind participants, we propose a temporal evolving interest-driven cascade prediction framework, named TEIC. The proposed TEIC is capable of automatically capturing the interest-driven forwarding behavior of individuals from the micro perspective and assembling them for macro-level cascade size prediction. Taking historical social actions as the input, the temporal evolving interest encoder is designed to characterize individual social preferences that change dynamically over time. Furthermore, we adopt a cascade aggregator to integrate microscopic interest-driven social actions into macroscopic cascade representations for predicting the incremental diffusion scale. We compare the TEIC with the multiple baselines, including hand-crafting feature regression, generative methods and deep learning-based models. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Sarcasm detection is crucial for natural language processing in various applications, such as affective computing and opinion mining. Multi-modal sarcasm detection, which combines information from different modalities, has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, many current methods concatenate image and text features directly without considering the contextual information between the cross-modal alignment and single-modal features simultaneously. Inspired by this observation, we propose a novel Global-Aware Attention Network (GAAN) for multi-modal sarcasm detection. Specifically, we investigate a cross-modal multi-granularity alignment module that captures align context features through coarse-grained and fine-grained attention. More importantly, considering the complementary effects of single-modal contextual information in sarcasm detection, we fuse textual, visual context features and alignment context features to obtain the global context features. We conducted extensive experiments on public datasets, and the results compared to the baselines illustrate that our proposed model obtains state-of-the-art performance in multi-modal sarcasm detection.