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[ Objective ] Expression of PYL genes in Luffa cylindrica under ABA treatment was studied to provide a reference for gene function and to provide foundation for molecular breeding to improve the quali- ty and yield of L . cylindrica . [ Methods ] Bioinformatics methods were used to analyze the distribution , chromosome location , gene structure , gene collinearity , selection pressure , evolutionary relationships , and cis -acting elements of the PYL gene family in L . cylindrica . Expression of the PYL gene family un- der different concentrations of ABA was verified by qRT-PCR. [ Results ] Eleven LcPYL genes were identi- fied in the genome of L . cylindrica . LcPYL genes had CDSs of 576-966 bp with typical PYR _ PYL _ RCAR _ like structures. Collinear analysis identified seven repeating gene pairs that were predicted to have similar functions. LcPYL promoters contained cis -acting elements associated with plant hormones , and the ex- pression of its members was tissue-specific. Expression of LcPYLs in L . cylindrica fruits did not change at 2 mg / mL ABA. However , the expression of LcPYL5 , LcPYL7 , and LcPYL11 was significantly in- creased at 4 mg / mL ABA , while LcPYL1 and LcPYL7 were expressed at the day of flowering at 8 mg / mL ABA. [ Conclusion ] Our findings suggest that LcPYL1 , LcPYL5 , LcPYL7 , and LcPYL11 may be closely linked to endogenous ABA biosynthesis.

Continuous application of fermented organic fertilizer can improve soil quality, while the performance of nitrogen (N) in the improved soils is rarely investigated. To investigate the fate of applied N in the soils with organic management history, the 15NH2CO15NH2 (15N abundance of 19.6 %) was employed as the exogenous N source to conduct an experiment in the Chinese cabbage and tomato rotation system under plastic shed condition. The cultivated soils have received 15-year of effective microorganism (EM) fermented organic fertilizer (EM-OF), N, P, K inorganic fertilizer (NPK-IF) and no fertilizer (NoF). The 15N use by cabbage and tomato, the soil 15N forms, as well as the 15N distribution were observed. Results showed that the 15N use efficiency of cabbage in the EM-OF, NPK-IF and NoF soils were 55.1 %, 37.3 % and 26.6 % respectively, showing significant (p ≤ 0.05) differences. The succeeding crop tomato could take up the soil residual 15N, and the highest 15N reuse efficiency was 7.1 % that detected in the NoF soil. The total 15N loss (6.0 %) from the rotation system was the lowest in the EM-OF soil, compared to that in the NPK-IF and NoF soils. It was concluded that the long-term fermented organic fertilizer applied soils can reduce urea 15N loss from plastic shed agriculture, mainly through improving the in-season crop 15N use efficiency.

Light is essential for plant growth. Light intensity, photoperiod and light quality all affect plant morphology and physiology. Compared to light intensity, photoperiod, little is known about the effects of different monochromatic lights on crop species. To investigate how different lighting conditions influence crops with heterogeneous colors in leaves, we examined photosynthetic characteristics and quality (regarding edibility and nutrition) of purple cabbage under different combinations of lights. Eight different treatments were applied including monochromic red (R), monochromic blue (B), monochromic yellow (Y), monochromic green (G) and the combination of red and blue (3/1, RB)， red/blue/yellow (3/1/1, RBY)， red /blue/green (3/1/1,RBG) and white light as the control. Our results indicate that RBY (3/1/1) treatment promotes the PSII activity of purple cabbage, resulting in improved light energy utilization. By contrast, both G and Y lights alone have inhibitory effect on the PSII activity of purple cabbage. In addition, RBY (3/1/1) significantly boosts the anthocyanin and flavonoids content compared with other treatments. Although we detected highest soluble protein and vitamin C content under B treatment (increased by 29.99% and 14.29% compared with the control respectively), RBY (3/1/1) appeared to be the second-best lighting condition (with soluble protein and vitamin C content increased by 8.63% and 4.07% respectively compared with the control). Thus we prove that the addition of yellow light to the traditional combination of red/blue lighting conditions is beneficial to synthesizing photosynthetic pigments and enables superior outcome of purple cabbage growth. Our results indicate that the growth and nutritional quality of purple cabbage are greatly enhanced under RBY (3/1/1) light, and suggest that strategical management of lighting conditions holds promise in maximizing the economic efficiency of plant production and food quality of vegetables grown in controlled environments.

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is a major economic vegetable crop globally, yet it is prone to gray mold disease caused by Botrytis cinerea infection during cultivation. Caffeoyl shikimate esterase (CSE) is a crucial component of the lignin biosynthesis pathway, which significantly contributes to plant stress resistance. Therefore, investigating the expression patterns of SlCSE after Botrytis cinerea infection may offer a theoretical foundation for breeding resistant tomato varieties. In this study, 11 SlCSE family members were identified from the tomato genome using bioinformatics analyses. Public transcriptome databases and RT-qPCR experiments were used to analyze gene expression in tomato tissues, responses to Botrytis cinerea infection, and the temporal characteristics of the response to 2-ethylfuran treatment during infection. These experiments resulted in the identification of the key gene SlCSE06. Transgenic tomato lines that overexpressed SlCSE06 were constructed to examine their resistance levels to gray mold disease. Many SlCSE genes were upregulated when tomato fruit were infected with Botrytis cinerea during the ripening stage. Furthermore, 24 h after treatment with 2-ethylfuran, most SlCSE genes exhibited increased expression levels compared with the control group, but they exhibited significantly lower levels at other time points. Thus, 2-ethylfuran treatment may enhance the responsiveness of SlCSEs. Based on this research, SlCSE06 was identified as the key gene involved in the response to Botrytis cinerea infection. The SlCSE06-overexpressing (OE6) tomato plants exhibited a 197.94% increase in expression levels compared to the wild type (WT). Furthermore, the lignin content in OE6 was significantly higher than in WT, suggesting that the overexpression of SlCSE06 enhanced lignin formation in tomato plants. At 5 days post-inoculation with Botrytis cinerea, the lesion diameter in OE6 decreased by 31.88% relative to the WT, whereas the lignin content increased by 370.90%. Furthermore, the expression level of SlCSE06 was significantly upregulated, showing a 17.08-fold increase compared with the WT. These findings suggest that 2-ethylfuran enhances the activation of the critical tomato disease resistance gene SlCSE06 in response to gray mold stress, thereby promoting lignin deposition to mitigate further infection by Botrytis cinerea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a crop with significant medicinal value and nutritional components, the market demand for bitter melon continues to grow. The diversity of bitter melon shapes has a direct impact on its market acceptance and consumer preferences, making precise identification of bitter melon germplasm resources crucial for breeding work. To address the limitations of time-consuming and less accurate traditional manual identification methods, there is a need to enhance the automation and intelligence of bitter melon phenotype detection. This study developed a bitter melon phenotype detection model named CSW-YOLO. By incorporating the ConvNeXt V2 module to replace the backbone network of YOLOv8, the model's focus on critical target features is enhanced. Additionally, the SimAM attention mechanism was introduced to compute attention weights for neurons without increasing the parameter count, further enhancing the model's recognition accuracy. Finally, WIoUv3 was introduced as the bounding box loss function to improve the model's convergence speed and positioning capabilities. The model was trained and tested on a bitter melon image dataset, achieving a precision of 94.6%, a recall of 80.6%, a mAP50 of 96.7%, and an F1 score of 87.04%. These results represent improvements of 8.5%, 0.4%, 11.1%, and 4% in precision, recall, mAP50, and F1 score, respectively, over the original YOLOv8 model. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the improvements was validated through heatmap analysis and ablation experiments, demonstrating that the CSW-YOLO model can more accurately focus on target features, reduce false detection rates, and enhance generalization capabilities. Comparative tests with various mainstream deep learning models also proved the superior performance of CSW-YOLO in bitter melon phenotype detection tasks. This research provides an accurate and reliable method for bitter melon phenotype identification and also offers technical support for the visual detection technologies of other agricultural products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Lipoxygenases (LOXs) are key enzymes in the unsaturated fatty acid oxidation reaction pathway and play an important regulatory role in the synthesis of fruit aroma volatiles. Methods: LOX gene family members were identified in the whole genome database of bitter gourd and analyzed bioinformatically. An RT-qPCR was used to analyze the expression differences in different tissues. Monoterpenes were determined by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) technique. Results: A total of 12 LOX gene family members were identified in the genome. The expression of LOX genes varied significantly among the tissues of roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds and tendrils. A total of 29 monoterpenes were detected in the fruits of five different fruit colors of bitter gourd, mainly containing six types of alcohols, aldehydes, terpenes, ketones, esters and alkynes, with the highest relative content of alcohols. Conclusions: The present study provides a reference for further elucidation of the biological functions of the LOX gene in the synthesis pathway of aroma volatiles in bitter gourd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of object detection, enhancing algorithm performance in complex scenarios represents a fundamental technological challenge. To address this issue, this paper presents an efficient optimized YOLOv8 model with extended vision (YOLO-EV), which optimizes the performance of the YOLOv8 model through a series of innovative improvement measures and strategies. First, we propose a multi-branch group-enhanced fusion attention (MGEFA) module and integrate it into YOLO-EV, which significantly boosts the model's feature extraction capabilities. Second, we enhance the existing spatial pyramid pooling fast (SPPF) layer by integrating large scale kernel attention (LSKA), improving the model's efficiency in processing spatial information. Additionally, we replace the traditional IOU loss function with the Wise-IOU loss function, thereby enhancing localization accuracy across various target sizes. We also introduce a P6 layer to augment the model's detection capabilities for multi-scale targets. Through network structure optimization, we achieve higher computational efficiency, ensuring that YOLO-EV consumes fewer computational resources than YOLOv8s. In the validation section, preliminary tests on the VOC12 dataset demonstrate YOLO-EV's effectiveness in standard object detection tasks. Moreover, YOLO-EV has been applied to the CottonWeedDet12 and CropWeed datasets, which are characterized by complex scenes, diverse weed morphologies, significant occlusions, and numerous small targets. Experimental results indicate that YOLO-EV exhibits superior detection accuracy in these complex agricultural environments compared to the original YOLOv8s and other state-of-the-art models, effectively identifying and locating various types of weeds, thus demonstrating its significant practical application potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic harvesting robots are crucial for enhancing agricultural productivity, and precise fruit maturity detection is a fundamental and core technology for efficient and accurate harvesting. Strawberries are distributed irregularly, and their images contain a wealth of characteristic information. This characteristic information includes both simple and intuitive features, as well as deeper abstract meanings. These complex features pose significant challenges to robots in determining fruit ripeness. To increase the precision, accuracy, and efficiency of robotic fruit maturity detection methods, a strawberry maturity detection algorithm based on an improved CES-YOLOv8 network structure from YOLOv8 was developed in this study. Initially, to reflect the characteristics of actual planting environments, the study collected image data under various lighting conditions, degrees of occlusion, and angles during the data collection phase. Subsequently, parts of the C2f module in the YOLOv8 model's backbone were replaced with the ConvNeXt V2 module to enhance the capture of features in strawberries of varying ripeness, and the ECA attention mechanism was introduced to further improve feature representation capability. Finally, the angle compensation and distance compensation of the SIoU loss function were employed to enhance the IoU, enabling the rapid localization of the model's prediction boxes. The experimental results show that the improved CES-YOLOv8 model achieves an accuracy, recall rate, mAP50, and F1 score of 88.20%, 89.80%, 92.10%, and 88.99%, respectively, in complex environments, indicating improvements of 4.8%, 2.9%, 2.05%, and 3.88%, respectively, over those of the original YOLOv8 network. This algorithm provides technical support for automated harvesting robots to achieve efficient and precise automated harvesting. Additionally, the algorithm is adaptable and can be extended to other fruit crops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1-deoxy-D-xylulose-5-phosphate synthase (DXS) is a rate-limiting enzyme in terpene synthesis that can affect the accumulation of secondary metabolites in plants. In this study, three DXS gene family members were identified in the tomato genome-wide database. Using bioinformatics methods, we analyzed the gene structure, evolutionary affinities, and cis-acting elements of the SlDXS gene family members. Promoters of SlDXS genes contain plant hormone-responsive elements such as the CGTCA-motif, TGACG-motif, ABRE, TCA-element, TGA-element, ERE, CAT-box, and AACA-motif, which suggested that the SlDXS gene family may play an important role in hormone response. The RT-qPCR analysis showed that the tomato DXS2 gene was able to respond upon exposure to methyl jasmonate (MeJA). The construction of a virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) vector for the SlDXS gene showed that the SlDXS2 gene was also able to respond to MeJA in silenced plants, but the induction level was lower relative to that of wild-type plants. The SlDXS1 gene is associated with the synthesis of photosynthetic pigments. This study provides a reference for the further elucidation of the DXS gene's biological function in the terpenoid synthesis pathway in tomatoes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lettuce is a water-sensitive stem-used plant, and its rapid growth process causes significant disturbances to the soil. Few studies have focused on the gaseous carbon emissions from lettuce fields under different irrigation methods. Therefore, this study investigated the effect of different drip-irrigation lower limits and methods (drip and furrow irrigation) on greenhouse gas (CO2, CH4) emissions from lettuce fields. Thus, drip irrigation (DI) was implemented using three different lower limits of irrigation corresponding to 75%, 65%, and 55% of the field capacity, and named DR1, DR2, and DR3, respectively. Furrow irrigation (FI) was used as a control treatment. The CO2 and CH4 emission fluxes, soil temperature, and soil enzyme activities were detected. The results showed that the cumulative CO2 emission was highest under DR3 and relatively lower under DR1. For the FI treatment, the cumulative CO2 emission (382.7 g C m−2) was higher than that under DR1 but 20.2% lower than that under DR2. The cumulative CH4 emissions under FI (0.012 g C m−2) were the greatest in the whole lettuce growth period, while DR2 and DR3 treatments emitted lower amounts of CH4. The irrigation method considerably enhanced the activity of urease and catalase, meanwhile promoting CO2 emission. The low irrigation amount each time combined with high irrigation frequency reduced soil CO2 emission while increasing CH4 emission. From the perspective of the total reduction of gaseous carbon, DR1 is the optimal drip irrigation method among all the irrigation lower limits and methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.) lateral branch elongation is influenced by a variety of environmental signals, including light [e.g., far-red (FR) light] and hormones. In this experiment, the effect of FR light on the lateral branch elongation of cucumber ('Zhongnong No. 26') seedlings was investigated. The results showed that FR light significantly inhibited the lateral branch elongation of cucumber seedlings. In addition, FR light significantly increased the auxin (indole-3-acetic acid, IAA) content, decreased the cytokinin (CTK; Zeatin) content, and suppressed the expression of most CTK synthetic-related genes, such as IPTs, in cucumber seedlings. The lateral branch elongation of cucumber seedlings was assessed in response to decapitation and exogenous 6-BA treatment to further investigate the relationship between IAA and CTK on the lateral branch elongation of cucumber seedlings under FR light. Both decapitation and exogenous 6-BA treatment eliminated the inhibitory effect of FR light on the lateral branch elongation of cucumber seedlings. In conclusion, these results indicated that IAA and CTK were involved in the regulatory effects of FR light on cucumber seedling lateral branch elongation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-heading Chinese cabbage prefers cool temperatures, and heat stress has become a major factor for reduced yield. The proline transporter protein (ProT) is highly selective for proline transport, contributing to the heat tolerance of non-heading Chinese cabbage. However, there has been no systematic study on the identification and potential functions of the ProT gene family in response to heat stress in non-heading Chinese cabbage. We identified six BchProT genes containing 11–12 transmembrane helices characteristic of membrane proteins through whole-genome sequencing. These genes diverged into three evolutionary branches and exhibited similarity in motifs and intron/exon numbers. Segmental duplication is the primary driving force for the amplification of BchProT. Notably, many stress-related elements have been identified in the promoters of BchProT using cis-acting element analysis. The expression level of BchProT6 was the highest in petioles, and the expression level of BchProT1 was the highest under high-temperature stress. Subcellular localization indicated their function at cell membranes. Heterologous expression of BchProT1 in Arabidopsis plants increased proline transport synthesis under heat-stress conditions. This study provides valuable information for exploring the molecular mechanisms underlying heat tolerance mediated by members of the BchProT family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To elucidate the physiological mechanisms underlying the impact of exogenous nickel ions (Ni2+) on the adaptability of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) seedling roots to low-nitrogen levels, the cultivar 'Micro Tom' was selected as the experimental material and cultivated hydroponically in the cultivation room of the Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University. Two distinct nitrogen concentrations (7.66 and 0.383 mmol·L−1) and two different levels of Ni2+ (0 and 0.1 mg·L−1 of NiSO4·6H2O) were employed as treatments. On the 9th day of cultivation, we measured the root biomass, the concentrations of antioxidant compounds, and the activities of antioxidant enzymes in the tomato seedlings. The study showed that when the nitrogen levels were low, the growth and development of the tomato seedling roots were hindered. This led to a significant increase in the levels of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), superoxide anion (O2−), and malondialdehyde (MDA), indicating oxidative damage to the roots. Conversely, treatment with Ni2+ induced a notable increase in the activity of antioxidant enzymes in the seedlings and augmented the accumulation of nonenzymatic antioxidants, such as ascorbic acid (ASA) and reduced glutathione (GSH), thereby enhancing the operational efficiency of the ascorbate–glutathione cycle (ASA–GSH). Consequently, this led to substantial reductions in the H2O2 and MDA levels, ultimately mitigating the oxidative damage inflicted on the tomato seedling roots subjected to low-nitrogen stress. In conclusion, exogenous Ni2+ can reduce the peroxidative damage of tomato seedlings by promoting antioxidase activity in tomato seedlings under low-nitrogen stress, improve the tolerance of tomato seedlings to low-nitrogen stress, and maintain the normal growth and development of tomato seedlings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]