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How Circadian Changes in Metabolism Affect Hybrid Vigor

How Circadian Changes in Metabolism Affect Hybrid Vigor

By Linda Palmer    

Background: Heterosis or hybrid vigor refers to the superior growth or fitness in the hybrid progeny compared to one or both parents. Heterosis is widespread and commonly used in animal and crop production. Corn or maize (Zea mays) is an important staple crop and a model plant to study heterosis; nearly all corn grown in the world is hybrid. Recent studies on genomic and gene expression changes revealed a role for altered circadian rhythms in heterosis, but whether and how changes in proteins and metabolites mediate physiological pathways and growth vigor in the hybrids.

Question: Do proteins and metabolites change during the day and night? How do these changes modulate physiological processes and growth? Do these changes alter metabolic processes and vigor in the hybrids?

 Findings: We examined temporal changes in the proteome and metabolome in the corn hybrids and their inbred parents. We found daily rhythms for the majority of maize metabolites and proteins in corn seedlings in the hybrids. Rhythmic metabolites and proteins tend to be nonadditive (higher or lower than the mean value of the two parents) in the hybrids. However, the heterosis level for metabolites is smaller than that for phenotypic traits such as biomass, plant height, and yield. These small daily changes in metabolites and proteins may accelerate growth in hybrids. Notably, metabolites in the photosynthetic pathway show positive heterosis, whereas metabolites in the photorespiratory pathway show negative heterosis, which correspond to nonadditive abundance and activities of key enzymes in the respective pathways. Our results suggest that by diurnally orchestrating nonadditive expression of key enzymes involved in photosynthetic and photorespiratory pathways, hybrids may optimize the abundance of corresponding metabolites to improve carbon assimilation and detoxify toxic metabolites. A series of small cascade changes may accelerate physiological processes to produce greater heterosis.

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Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.