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Background Gene duplication is a prevalent phenomenon and a major driving force underlying genome evolution. The process leading to the fixation of gene duplicates following duplication is critical to understand how genome evolves but remains fragmentally understood. Most previous studies on gene retention are based on gene duplicate analyses in single reference genome. No population-based comparative gene retention analysis has been performed to date. Results Taking advantage of recently published genomic data in Triticeae, we dissected a divergent homogentisate phytyltransferase (HPT2) lineage caught in the middle stage of gene fixation following duplication. The presence/absence of HPT2 in barley (diploid), wild emmer (tetraploid), and bread wheat (hexaploid) pangenome lines appears to be associated with gene dosage constraint and environmental adaption. Based on these observations, we adopted a phylogeny-based orthology inference approach and performed comparative gene retention analyses across barley, wild emmer, and bread wheat. This led to the identification of 326 HPT2-pattern-like genes at whole genome scale, representing a pool of gene duplicates in the middle stage of gene fixation. Majority of these HPT2-pattern-like genes were identified as small-scale duplicates, such as dispersed, tandem, and proximal duplications. Natural selection analyses showed that HPT2-pattern-like genes have experienced relaxed selection pressure, which is generally accompanied with partial positive selection and transcriptional divergence. Functional enrichment analyses showed that HPT2-pattern-like genes are over-represented with molecular-binding and defense response functions, supporting the potential role of environmental adaption during gene retention. We also observed that gene duplicates from larger gene family are more likely to be lost, implying a gene dosage constraint effect. Further comparative gene retention analysis in barley and bread wheat pangenome lines revealed combined effects of species-specific selection and gene dosage constraint. Conclusions Comparative gene retention analyses at the population level support gene dosage constraint, environmental adaption, and species-specific selection as three factors that may affect gene retention following gene duplication. Our findings shed light on the evolutionary process leading to the retention of newly formed gene duplicates and will greatly improve our understanding on genome evolution via duplication.

Pre-harvest sprouting (PHS) induced by the absence of seed dormancy causes a severe reduction in crop yield and flour quality. In this study, we isolated and characterized TaABI4, an ABA-responsive transcription factor that participates in regulating seed germination in wheat. Sequence analysis revealed that TaABI4 has three homologues, located on chromosomes 1A/1B/1D. TaABI4 contains a conserved AP2 domain, and AP2-associated, LRP and potential PEST motifs. Putative cis-acting regulatory elements (CE1-like box, W-box, ABRE elements and RY elements) were identified in the TaABI4 promoter region that showed high conservation in 17 wheat cultivars and wheat-related species. Expression profiling of TaABI4 indicated that it is a seed-specific gene accumulating during the middle stages of seed development. Transcript accumulation of TaABI4 in wheat cultivar Chuanmai 32 (CM32, PHS susceptible) was 5.07-fold and 1.39-fold higher than that in synthetic hexaploidy wheat SHW-L1 (PHS resistant) at 15 and 20 DPA, respectively. Six expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) of TaABI4 on chromosomes 2A, 2D, 3B and 4A were characterized based on the accumulated transcripts of TaABI4 in SHW-L1 and CM32-derived recombinant inbred lines. These QTLs explained 10.7 to 46.1% of the trait variation with 4.53–10.59 of LOD scores, which contain genes that may affect the expression of TaABI4.

This article discusses the thought of the contemporary French philosopher and economist Frédéric Lordon and analyses his responses to the 2008 global financial crisis. The key focus is on a play in alexandrine verse that Lordon wrote about the crisis, D'un retournement l'autre: comédie sérieuse sur la crise financière (2011). The article contextualizes the play and situates it within Lordon's wider intellectual project, which draws on Marx and Spinoza to provide a political theory of affects. I compare the ways Lordon explains the derivative finance at the heart of the subprime crisis in both his play and his economic writings. My discussion centres on the concepts of affect and image in Lordon's attempt to explain the crisis to the public, in whom Lordon wants to inspire the desire for political change. I conclude by asking critically how useful Lordon's theory and literary work are in a time of crisis.

Developing the notion of the filmic derivation broached in the previous chapters, Chapter 5 analyses three experimental films relating to the financial crash: The Fountainhead (2010) by Société Réaliste, who were a Paris-based artist cooperative, now dissolved; Film Socialisme (2010) by Jean-Luc Godard; and Film Catastrophe (2018) by Paul Grivas. These three films are in contextual terms films of the 2008 crash and are in stylistic terms ‘derivative films’; that is, films which are in large part derived from and which reconfigure other films and media, collapsing the relation between original and derivative into one of a general iconomy.

While broadly sketching the impact of the financial crisis in France, noting how the French bank BNP Paribas saw one of its early flash points in August 2007, Chapter 1 analyses the way Frédéric Lordon engages with this history. The main focus is on Lordon’s satirical play written in Alexandrine verse and loosely based on the Sarkozy government’s response to the financial crisis, D’un retournement l’autre: Comédie sérieuse sur la crise financière. En quatre actes, et en alexandrins (2011), and its film adaptation by the prolific left-wing director and writer Gérard Mordillat, Le Grand Retournement (2013). The chapter contextualises Lordon’s play, its style and its conceptual aims within his wider intellectual project, which draws on Marx and Spinoza to provide a theory of how affects underpin social and political structures, and also reads the play in relation to his more recent activism and engagement with documentary filmmaking.

Carrying forward the idea of a creative use of derivative procedures, this chapter analyses a group of literary and visual works which refashion the derivative in socially productive ways, even if they do not explicitly conceive of these procedures in derivative terms. One of the key examples is Christophe Hanna’s book Argent (2018), whose organising principle is an econometric which divides the French population into slices of net monthly income. The book – somewhere between a sociological report and a work of poetry – recounts Hanna’s discussions on the subject of money with one hundred (real) individuals, each individual corresponding to a percentile of income distribution and identified by their income amount.

Chapter 3 is the book’s core theoretical chapter in which I develop the phrase ‘derivative images’ to name the way this culture has been thought in relation to financial derivatives. The chapter shows how the concepts associated with the financial crash – primarily financial derivatives, but also, for example, the market and exchange – have been creatively refashioned by theorists to conceptualise media images. The chapter begins by fleshing out exactly what is meant by ‘derivative’ in this context, tracing its etymology and technical usage by financial professionals before discussing its application in a rich emerging seam of film theory concerned with finance. I suggest, drawing on an idea from the poet and theorist Christophe Hanna, that the derivative can be seen as a calque (‘tracing’) for thinking the audiovisual image today: in other words, we can think of images in terms of derivatives, tracing one on top of the other.

Continuing the examination of different strategies for putting the financial crisis in images, this chapter shows how two writers – the novelist Mathieu Larnaudie and the late philosopher Bernard Stiegler – understand the financial crash as marking the collapse of faith in a certain ideological fiction: that of the self-regulating free market. The primary focus is on the place of images in Larnaudie’s novel Les Effondrés (2010), which consists of short chapters (but long sentences) recounting in a stream-of-consciousness style the fates of the principal actors of the crisis. Les Effondrés offers a series of tableaux in which many of these figures undergo a kind of transvaluation in which a habitual relation to the market passing through images (via trading terminals or stock indices, for example) is broken. I examine not only how Larnaudie relates the manner in which the crisis manifests itself as a mediatised event, but also how Larnaudie derives a literary text across media from the images of the crisis (official government speeches and inquiries, press cuttings and other images) and thus shows how we live in a world of ‘derivative images’.

The focus of Chapter 4 is on the memoir of Jérôme Kerviel, its film adaptation, L’Outsider (Christophe Barratier, 2016), and the brand identity of the French bank where he worked, Société Générale. As is well known, Kerviel was a young man who worked as a derivatives trader until January 2008 when he became the object of a major scandal as he was accused by the bank of having taken huge unauthorised speculative positions on futures contracts which the bank unwound, incurring a record loss. I argue that the film and the source text can be taken together as an instructive comparative case study of the complexities of representing derivative financial culture in France in the run-up to 2008.

A theoretical, interdisciplinary reading of French film and literary texts inspired by the 2008 global financial crisis Draws on ideas by Peter Szendy, Yves Citton, Jonathan Beller and Christophe Hanna to theorise the derivative as a metaphor for thinking about the nature of contemporary audio-visual images Cuts across medial boundaries to analyse works by Sophie Bruneau, Paul Grivas, Jérôme Kerviel, Mathieu Larnaudie, Frédéric Lordon, Anna Malagrida, Société Réaliste and others Shows how such French-language writers, artists and filmmakers engage with the financial mechanisms at the heart of the 2008 crash in order to put them into images Focused on French cultural responses to the 2008 global financial crisis in cinema, literature and theory, Derivative Images offers detailed analyses of post-2008 French-language works, including Les Effondrés (2010), Le Grand Retournement (2013) and L'Outsider (2016), to show how they appropriate and reconfigure notions at the heart of the crisis, such as derivatives, financial trading and markets. Drawing on ideas from thinkers such as Jonathan Beller, Yves Citton and Peter Szendy, this book shows how derivatives can be taken as a conceptual resource for thinking about creative practice and the circulation of audio-visual images today.

MYB transcription factors (TFs) represents one of the largest TF families in plants. In this study, we performed genome-wide MYB-domain screening and identified a total of 997 MYBs in wheat (Triticum aestivum), among which 445 were 2-domain MYBs (R2R3-MYBs) that were clustered into 15 subgroups with varied conservation profiles. Homologous genes were highly conserved across the three subgenomes, with minor variations contributed by segmental duplications. Tandem and proximal gene duplications have contributed significantly to the expansion of the wheat Myb gene family. Furthermore, comprehensive transcriptome profiling of R2R3-Myb genes in 61 different tissue and time point samples revealed a clear pattern of temporal and spatial variations within six expression groups. The comprehensive genomic and transcriptional analyses provided valuable insights into the evolution and biological functions of R2R3-Myb genes in wheat. They would serve as a useful guide to further investigate the potential agronomic traits controlled by this large TF family.

Pre-harvest sprouting (PHS) induced by the decline of seed dormancy causes a severe reduction in crop yield and flour quality. In this study, we isolated and characterizedTaABI4,an ABA-responsive transcription factor that participates in regulating seed germination in wheat. Sequence analysis revealed thatTaABI4has three homologues, located on chromosomes 1A/1B/1D. TaABI4 contains a conserved AP2 domain, and AP2-associated, LRP, and potential PEST motifs. Putativecis-acting regulatory elements (CE1-like box, W-box, ABRE elements, and RY-elements) were identified in theTaABI4promoter region that showed high conservation in 17 wheat cultivars and wheat-related species. Expression profiling ofTaABI4indicated that it is a seed-specific gene accumulating during the middle stages of seed development. Transcript accumulation ofTaABI4in wheat cultivar Chuanmai 32 (CM32, PHS susceptible) was 5.07-fold and 1.39-fold higher than that in synthetic hexaploidy wheat SHW-L1 (PHS resistant) at 15DPA and 20DPA, respectively. Six expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) ofTaABI4on chromosome 2A, 2D, 3B, and 4A were characterized based on the accumulated transcripts ofTaABI4in SHW-L1 and CM32 derived recombinant inbred lines. These QTLs explained from 10.7% to 46.1% of the trait variation with 4.53~10.59 of LOD scores, which contain genes that may affect the expression ofTaABI4.

Predicted climate change is widely cited to significantly reduce yields of the major cereal crop species in a period where demand is rapidly rising due to a growing global population. This requires exhaustive research to develop genetic resources in order to address the expected production deficiencies which will largely be driven by abiotic stress. Modification of multiple genes is an approach that can address the predicted challenges; however, it is time-consuming and costly to modify multiple genes simultaneously. Transcription factors represent a group of proteins regulating multiple genes simultaneously and are therefore promising targets to concurrently improve multiple traits concurrently, such as abiotic stress tolerance and grain size (a contributor to yield). Many studies have identified the complex role that transcription factors of multiple families have contributed toward abiotic stress tolerance or grain size, although research addressing both simultaneously is in its infancy despite its potential significance for cereal crop improvement. Here we discuss the potential role that transcription factors may contribute toward improving cereal crop productivity under adverse environmental conditions and offer research objectives that need to be addressed before the modification of transcription factors becomes routinely used to positively manipulate multiple target traits.

A major grain length QTL on chromosome 5H was fine mapped from 180.5 to 1.7 Mb. Quantitative trait loci (QTLs) mapping has been used extensively in barley to detect QTLs that underlie complex traits such as grain size. In the present study, we utilised 312 double haploid lines derived from a cross between two Australian malting varieties, Vlamingh and Buloke, to dissect the genetic control of a number of grain size characteristics. Digital image analysis was used to measure grain size characteristics including length, width, thickness and plumpness which are important traits influencing barley yield and grain physical quality. Using data from four independent environments and molecular marker genotype data, we identified 23 significant QTLs for these four traits, ten of which were consensus QTLs and identified in two or more environments. A QTL region on chromosome 5H designated qGL5H that was associated with grain size was fine mapped to a 1.7 Mb interval. qGL5H was able to explain 21.6% of phenotypic variation for grain length within the population. This major QTL is an appropriate candidate for further genetic dissection.

Key message A major grain length QTL on chromosome 2H was fine mapped to a 140.9 Kb region containing three genes. Abstract Increasing yield is an important target for barley breeding programs. One approach to increase yield is by enhancing individual grain weights through the regulation of grain size. Fine mapping major grain size-related quantitative trait loci is necessary for future marker-assisted selection strategies, yet studies of this nature are limited in barley. In the present study, we utilised a doubled haploid population derived from two Australian malt barley varieties, Vlamingh and Buloke, coupled with extensive genotypic and phenotypic data from three independent environments. A major grain length locus identified on chromosome 2H designated qGL2H was fine mapped to a 140.9 Kb interval. qGL2H was able to account for 25.4% of the phenotypic variation for grain length and 10.2% for grain yield. Underlying qGL2H were three high-confidence predicted genes. One of these genes encodes a MYB transcription factor and represents a promising candidate for further genetic research.

This article argues that Maurice Blanchot is a significant presence in Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time series. The article first sets out Stiegler's invocation of the Blanchotian ‘change of epoch’ in the first volume, which attempts to situate Blanchot within the horizon of technics. I argue Blanchot's disaster is a hidden element in Stiegler's play on the motifs of the star and catastrophe. The article then traces how these motifs emerge in the second and third volumes, in which the technical forms of photography and cinema become more important and where the motifs are woven together through reference to works by Roland Barthes, D. W. Winnicott and Federico Fellini. Stiegler filters these references to apparently disparate figures through Blanchot's analyses of writing and temporality. Tracing both overt and unacknowledged references to Blanchot in Stiegler's text, I conclude that Stiegler's use of Blanchot destabilizes his conceptions of time and epochality.

This article is based around an interpretation of the opening line of Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010), ‘money is a public good’. This line is spoken by the economist Bernard Maris (1946–2015), who was killed during the assassinations in Paris in January 2015. The article identifies the source of this line and explores its context in Maris’s writings in the magazine Charlie Hebdo at the time of the financial crisis of 2008. Examining the meaning and implications of the line in relation to Maris’s reading of the British economist John Maynard Keynes, the article situates Godard’s film in relation to the contemporary events to which the line is a response. Furthermore, the article considers the filmic uses to which Godard puts the figure of Maris and how this allows the viewer to understand Maris, including the position Godard puts him in in relation to other real-life figures appearing in the film, namely Bob Maloubier and Alain Badiou. The article concludes by considering how an understand...

The gene HvDEP1, on barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) chromosome 5H, encodes a γ-subunit of the heterotrimeric G-protein complex and was previously determined to be a candidate gene underlying a major quantitative trait locus for grain length. In the present study, we identified a 9 bp indel (insertion–deletion mutation) at position –84 bp from the start codon within a reported upstream open reading frame located in the 5′ UTR (untranslated region) and developed a diagnostic molecular marker. We also identified a 13 bp indel (–514 bp) in linkage disequilibrium that bridges an important regulatory motif. Using a doubled-haploid population and a barley diversity panel, we were able to show that the effects of these indels were environmentally stable and consistently delineated phenotypic groups based on grain length and 1000-grain weight. Genotypes represented by deletions at these two positions relative to the reference cv. Morex had consistently shorter grains, by 3.69–3.96%, and lower 1000-grain weight, by 2.38–4.21%, in a doubled-haploid population studied. Additionally, a diversity panel was tested but consistent differences were observed only for grain length, reinforcing literature indicating the importance of this gene for grain-length regulation. The frequency of the longer and heavier grained reference allele was higher in modern cultivars, suggesting that indirect selection for longer grain may have occurred through direct selection for grain yield via grain-weight improvement. These results indicate that grain length and 1000-grain weight in barley can be manipulated by targeting variation in gene promoters through marker-assisted selection.

Alcoholism forms a constant presence in the films of Béla Tarr. The focus of this chapter is on one episode from Tarr’s seven-hour-long masterpiece Satantango (1994), a film about life in a collective farm during the end of communism in Hungary. The episode centres on a reclusive, obese, and severely alcoholic doctor, played by Peter Berling, whose chief pastime is to sit at his desk drinking and obsessively recording every aspect of the petty goings-on at the estate in a journal. However, in this episode he finds himself having run out of alcohol and reluctantly resolves that he must leave to get some more. In this hour-long episode the camera follows this sick man on a veritable odyssey through the rain to the pub where the rest of the peasants are cavorting riotously. This intimate and yet epic treatment of bodily needs has few equals in cinema. In this chapter I show through close formal analysis of scenes featuring the doctor that what is often considered the essence of Tarr’s style – slowness – is found to have its roots in an attentive depiction of the physical life of the body. In addition, it is typical of Tarr’s style to situate the body within a material environment, a theme brought out in Satantango through vast images of the Great Hungarian Plain and as the doctor is shown reading from what seems to be a geological prehistory of Central Europe. Through an engagement with key writers on Tarr (András Bálint Kovács and Jacques Rancière) as well as Gilles Deleuze, I suggest there are two times at work in Tarr’s depiction of alcoholism: the heavy present of the body and another time which takes flight from the travails of the body.