Creating future crops: a revolution for sustainable agriculture

Engineering the future cereal crops with big biological data: toward intelligence-driven breeding by design

How to feed 10 billion human populations is one of the challenges that need to be addressed in the following decades, especially under an unpredicted climate change. Crop breeding, initiating from the phenotype-based selection by local farmers and developing into current biotechnology-based breeding, has played a critical role in securing the global food supply. However, regarding the changing environment and ever-increasing human population, can we breed outstanding crop varieties fast enough to achieve high productivity, good quality, and widespread adaptability? This review outlines the recent achievements in understanding cereal crop breeding, including the current knowledge about crop agronomic traits, newly developed techniques, crop big biological data research, and the possibility of integrating them for intelligence-driven breeding by design, which ushers in a new era of crop breeding practice and shapes the novel architecture of future crops. This review focuses on the major cereal crops, including rice, maize, and wheat, to explain how intelligence-driven breeding by design is becoming a reality.

OsBCAT2, a gene responsible for the degradation of branched-chain amino acids, positively regulates salt tolerance by promoting the synthesis of vitamin B5

Salt stress negatively affects rice growth, development and yield. Metabolic adjustments contribute to the adaptation of rice under salt stress. Branched-chain amino acids (BCAA) are three essential amino acids that cannot be synthesized by humans or animals. However, little is known about the role of BCAA in response to salt stress in plants. Here, we showed that BCAAs may function as scavengers of reactive oxygen species (ROS) to provide protection against damage caused by salinity. We determined that branched-chain aminotransferase 2 (OsBCAT2), a protein responsible for the degradation of BCAA, positively regulates salt tolerance. Salt significantly induces the expression of OsBCAT2 rather than BCAA synthesis genes, which indicated that salt mainly promotes BCAA degradation and not de novo synthesis. Metabolomics analysis revealed that vitamin B5 (VB5) biosynthesis pathway intermediates were higher in the OsBCAT2-overexpressing plants but lower in osbcat2 mutants under salt stress. The salt stress-sensitive phenotypes of the osbcat2 mutants are rescued by exogenous VB5, indicating that OsBCAT2 affects rice salt tolerance by regulating VB5 synthesis. Our work provides new insights into the enzymes involved in BCAAs degradation and VB5 biosynthesis and sheds light on the molecular mechanism of BCAAs in response to salt stress.

Functions of Phytochrome Interacting Factors (PIFs) in Adapting Plants to Biotic and Abiotic Stresses

Plants possess the remarkable ability to sense detrimental environmental stimuli and launch sophisticated signal cascades that culminate in tailored responses to facilitate their survival, and transcription factors (TFs) are closely involved in these processes. Phytochrome interacting factors (PIFs) are among these TFs and belong to the basic helix-loop-helix family. PIFs are initially identified and have now been well established as core regulators of phytochrome-associated pathways in response to the light signal in plants. However, a growing body of evidence has unraveled that PIFs also play a crucial role in adapting plants to various biological and environmental pressures. In this review, we summarize and highlight that PIFs function as a signal hub that integrates multiple environmental cues, including abiotic (i.e., drought, temperature, and salinity) and biotic stresses to optimize plant growth and development. PIFs not only function as transcription factors to reprogram the expression of related genes, but also interact with various factors to adapt plants to harsh environments. This review will contribute to understanding the multifaceted functions of PIFs in response to different stress conditions, which will shed light on efforts to further dissect the novel functions of PIFs, especially in adaption to detrimental environments for a better survival of plants.