Search

Mushrooms are a nutritionally rich and sustainably-produced food with a growing global market. Agaricus bisporus accounts for 11% of the total world mushroom production and it is the dominant species cultivated in Europe. It faces threats from pathogens that cause important production losses, including the mycoparasite Lecanicillium fungicola, the causative agent of dry bubble disease. Through quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR), we determine the impact of L. fungicola infection on the transcription patterns of A. bisporus genes involved in key cellular processes. Notably, genes related to cell division, fruiting body development, and apoptosis exhibit dynamic transcriptional changes in response to infection. Furthermore, A. bisporus infected with L. fungicola were found to accumulate increased levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Interestingly, the transcription levels of genes involved in the production and scavenging mechanisms of ROS were also increased, suggesting the involvement of changes to ROS homeostasis in response to L. fungicola infection. These findings identify potential links between enhanced cell proliferation, impaired fruiting body development, and ROS-mediated defence strategies during the A. bisporus (host)–L. fungicola (pathogen) interaction, and offer avenues for innovative disease control strategies and improved understanding of fungal pathogenesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amongst the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), ensuring energy access in developing countries while reducing global emissions of greenhouse gases is critical. To achieve such goals, international cooperation combined with investments in research, technology, infrastructures and capacity building are paramount. The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 on access to affordable and clean energy, includes both targets at the domestic and international stages of energy policy. However, trade-offs are emerging in the monitoring phase of SDG7 and its targets, signalling the need for stronger coherence at all stages. Here, we assess to what extent policy coherence exists, and is or is not maintained, considering internal and external energy policy in Europe. We find that a higher level of coherence exists in internal than external energy policy. This result questions the overall positive contribution and commitment of European countries when it comes to facilitating energy access in developing countries. The results also highlight the positive effect of common policy frameworks and the need to rely more extensively on new means for governing and improving international policy coherence. We identify key trade-offs and co-benefits to be addressed for achieving improved policy coherence and call for a common framework that unifies internal and external energy policy in Europe for accelerating progress towards global access to clean energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrialised agriculture is heavily reliant upon synthetic nitrogen fertilisers and imported protein feeds, posing environmental and food security challenges. Increasing the cultivation of leguminous crops that biologically fix nitrogen and provide high protein feed and food could help to address these challenges. We report on the innovative use of an important leguminous crop, pea (Pisum sativum L.), as a source of starch for alcohol (gin) production, yielding protein-rich animal feed as a co-product. We undertook life cycle assessment (LCA) to compare the environmental footprint of 1 L of packaged gin produced from either 1.43 kg of wheat grain or 2.42 kg of peas via fermentation and distillation into neutral spirit. Allocated environmental footprints for pea-gin were smaller than for wheat-gin across 12 of 14 environmental impact categories considered. Global warming, resource depletion, human toxicity, acidification and terrestrial eutrophication footprints were, respectively, 12%, 15%, 15%, 48% and 68% smaller, but direct land occupation was 112% greater, for pea-gin versus wheat-gin. Expansion of LCA boundaries indicated that co-products arising from the production of 1 L of wheat- or pea-gin could substitute up to 0.33 or 0.66 kg soybean animal feed, respectively, mitigating considerable greenhouse gas emissions associated with land clearing, cultivation, processing and transport of such feed. For pea-gin, this mitigation effect exceeds emissions from gin production and packaging, so that each L of bottled pea gin avoids 2.2 kg CO 2 eq. There is great potential to scale the use of legume starches in production of alcoholic beverages and biofuels, reducing dependence on Latin American soybean associated with deforestation and offering considerable global mitigation potential in terms of climate change and nutrient leakage - estimated at circa 439 Tg CO 2 eq. and 8.45 Tg N eq. annually., (Copyright © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Background: Domestication of the now-extinct wild aurochs, Bos primigenius, gave rise to the two major domestic extant cattle taxa, B. taurus and B. indicus. While previous genetic studies have shed some light on the evolutionary relationships between European aurochs and modern cattle, important questions remain unanswered, including the phylogenetic status of aurochs, whether gene flow from aurochs into early domestic populations occurred, and which genomic regions were subject to selection processes during and after domestication. Here, we address these questions using whole-genome sequencing data generated from an approximately 6,750-year-old British aurochs bone and genome sequence data from 81 additional cattle plus genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism data from a diverse panel of 1,225 modern animals., Results: Phylogenomic analyses place the aurochs as a distinct outgroup to the domestic B. taurus lineage, supporting the predominant Near Eastern origin of European cattle. Conversely, traditional British and Irish breeds share more genetic variants with this aurochs specimen than other European populations, supporting localized gene flow from aurochs into the ancestors of modern British and Irish cattle, perhaps through purposeful restocking by early herders in Britain. Finally, the functions of genes showing evidence for positive selection in B. taurus are enriched for neurobiology, growth, metabolism and immunobiology, suggesting that these biological processes have been important in the domestication of cattle., Conclusions: This work provides important new information regarding the origins and functional evolution of modern cattle, revealing that the interface between early European domestic populations and wild aurochs was significantly more complex than previously thought.