One of the key developmental processes in flowering plants is the differentiation of the shoot apical meristem into a floral meristem. This transition is regulated through the integration of ...environmental and endogenous stimuli, involving a complex, hierarchical signalling network. In arabidopsis, the FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) protein, a mobile signal recognized as a major component of florigen, has a central position in mediating the onset of flowering. FT‐like genes seem to be involved in regulating the floral transition in all angiosperms examined to date. Evidence from molecular evolution studies suggests that the emergence of FT‐like genes coincided with the evolution of the flowering plants. Hence, the role of FT in floral promotion is conserved, but appears to be restricted to the angiosperms. Besides flowering, FT‐like proteins have also been identified as major regulatory factors in a wide range of developmental processes including fruit set, vegetative growth, stomatal control and tuberization. These multifaceted roles of FT‐like proteins have resulted from extensive gene duplication events, which occurred independently in nearly all modern angiosperm lineages, followed by sub‐ or neo‐functionalization. This review assesses the plethora of roles that FT‐like genes have acquired during evolution and their implications in plant diversity, adaptation and domestication.
Participation in global value chains (GVCs) has become a central topic in trade and development policy. It has opened new ways to achieve industrial upgrading. However, some theoretical models ...suggest that not all countries will upgrade through participation in GVCs. Using panel data from the World Input‐Output Database, we examine the effects of backward and forward GVC participation on three dimensions of industrial upgrading (process, product and skill upgrading). We find that backward GVC participation provides more upgrading opportunities for developing countries as it enables a less developed country to import sophisticated inputs. This activates learning through embodied knowledge. In contrast, forward participation has higher level of upgrading effect on developed countries.
We spend much of our lives pursuing or avoiding affective experiences. However, surprisingly little is known about how these experiences are represented in the brain and if they are shared across ...individuals. Here, we explored variations in the construction of an affective experience during a naturalistic viewing paradigm based on subjective preferences in sociosexual desire and self-control using intersubject representational similarity analysis (IS-RSA). We found that when watching erotic movies, intersubject variations in sociosexual desire preferences of 26 heterosexual males were associated with similarly structured fluctuations in the cortico-striatal reward, default mode, and mentalizing networks. In contrast, variations in the self-control preferences were associated with shared dynamics in the fronto-parietal executive control and cingulo-insular salience networks. Importantly, these results were specific to the affective experience, as we did not observe any relationship with variation in preferences when individuals watched neutral movies. Moreover, these results appear to require multivariate representations of preferences as we did not observe any significant associations using single scalar summary scores. Our findings indicate that multidimensional variations in individual preferences can be used to uncover unique dimensions of an affective experience, and that IS-RSA can provide new insights into the neural processes underlying psychological experiences elicited through naturalistic experimental designs.
•Individual variations in neural dynamics map on to variations in behavioral preferences.•Using a multidimensional space provides more precision to measure behavioral preferences compared to scalar summary scores.•Intersubject representational similarity analysis can be used to identify affective experiences.
Parent-child similarities and discrepancies at multiple levels provide a window to understand the cultural transmission process. Although prior research has examined parent-child similarities at the ...belief, behavioral, and physiological levels across cultures, little is known about parent-child similarities at the neural level. The current review introduces an interdisciplinary computational cultural neuroscience approach, which utilizes computational methods to understand neural and psychological processes being involved during parent-child interactions at intra- and inter-personal level. This review provides three examples, including the application of intersubject representational similarity analysis to analyze naturalistic neuroimaging data, the usage of computer vision to capture non-verbal social signals during parent-child interactions, and unraveling the psychological complexities involved during real-time parent-child interactions based on their simultaneous recorded brain response patterns. We hope that this computational cultural neuroscience approach can provide researchers an alternative way to examine parent-child similarities and discrepancies across different cultural contexts and gain a better understanding of cultural transmission processes.
Life cycle adaptation to latitudinal and seasonal variation in photoperiod and temperature is a major determinant of evolutionary success in flowering plants. Whereas the life cycle of the ...dicotyledonous model species Arabidopsis thaliana is controlled by two epistatic genes, FLOWERING LOCUS C and FRIGIDA 1–3, three unrelated loci (VERNALIZATION 1–3) determine the spring and winter habits of monocotyledonous plants such as temperate cereals 4–6. In the core eudicot species Beta vulgaris, whose lineage diverged from that leading to Arabidopsis shortly after the monocot-dicot split 140 million years ago 7, 8, the bolting locus B 9 is a master switch distinguishing annuals from biennials. Here, we isolated B and show that the pseudo-response regulator gene BOLTING TIME CONTROL 1 (BvBTC1), through regulation of the FLOWERING LOCUS T genes 10, is absolutely necessary for flowering and mediates the response to both long days and vernalization. Our results suggest that domestication of beets involved the selection of a rare partial loss-of-function BvBTC1 allele that imparts reduced sensitivity to photoperiod that is restored by vernalization, thus conferring bienniality, and illustrate how evolutionary plasticity at a key regulatory point can enable new life cycle strategies.
► Map-based cloning of B in beet led to isolation of the PRR gene BvBTC1 ► BvBTC1 controls life cycle through differential regulation of the BvFT1/BvFT2 module ► BvBTC1 mediates floral transition in response to both long days and vernalization ► Beet domestication involved selection of a rare Bvbtc1 allele conferring bienniality
How we process ongoing experiences is shaped by our personal history, current needs, and future goals. Consequently, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity involved in processing these ...subjective appraisals appears to be highly idiosyncratic across individuals. To elucidate the role of the vmPFC in processing our ongoing experiences, we developed a computational framework and analysis pipeline to characterize the spatiotemporal dynamics of individual vmPFC responses as participants viewed a 45-minute television drama. Through a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging, facial expression tracking, and self-reported emotional experiences across four studies, our data suggest that the vmPFC slowly transitions through a series of discretized states that broadly map onto affective experiences. Although these transitions typically occur at idiosyncratic times across people, participants exhibited a marked increase in state alignment during high affectively valenced events in the show. Our work suggests that the vmPFC ascribes affective meaning to our ongoing experiences.
This survey of business cycle synchronization in the European monetary union focuses on two issues: have business cycles become more similar, and which factors drive business cycle synchronization. ...We conclude that business cycles in the euro area have gone through periods of both convergence and divergence. Still, there is quite some evidence that during the 1990s business cycle synchronization in the euro area has increased. Higher trade intensity is found to lead to more synchronization, but the point estimates vary widely. The evidence for other factors affecting business cycle synchronization is very mixed.
This paper re-examines the relationship between trade intensity and business cycle synchronization for 21 OECD countries in the period 1970–2003. Instead of using instrumental variables, we estimate ...a multivariate model including variables capturing specialization and similarity of economic policies. We confirm that trade intensity affects synchronization, but the effect is much smaller than previously reported. Other factors, like specialization and convergence in monetary and fiscal policies, have a similar impact on business cycle synchronization as trade intensity. The effect of trade on synchronization is not driven by outliers. However, the impact of trade on synchronization is not robust across deciles.
While two-rowed barley is usually preferred for malting and beer-making, six-rowed malting barley varieties appeared in Europe around 30 years ago, and several breeders have dedicated improvement ...programs on this specific germplasm. In this study, we evaluated the feasibility of genomic prediction for yield and malting related traits using 679 breeding lines from two French barley breeders, as well as a set of recently registered varieties. These lines were evaluated in five locations and two harvest years in an unbalanced design. Although the germplasm from the two breeders does show some trend towards differentiation, globally the whole panel did not show a clear-cut genetic structure. Predictive ability of GBLUP was evaluated through random cross-validation within and across breeder sets, and using cross-prediction between breeder sets. Results show moderate to high predictive ability (PA), particularly for malt friability and β-glucan content, for which predictive ability of 0.8 was obtained with training populations as small as 105 registered varieties and across breeding sets. The long range of useful linkage disequilibrium in this particular germplasm allows using as few as 2000 to 5000 markers to obtain high PA. Other prediction methods such as Bayesian LASSO, Bayes Cpi or EGBLUP did not improve predictive ability. These results are very encouraging for implementing genomic prediction of malting quality traits in applied breeding programs.
Crop productivity can be expressed as the product of the amount of radiation intercepted, radiation use efficiency and harvest index. Genetic variation for components of radiation use efficiency has ...rarely been explored due to the lack of appropriate equipment to determine parameters at the scale needed in plant breeding. On the other hand, responses of the photosynthetic apparatus to environmental conditions have not been extensively investigated under field conditions, due to the challenges posed by the fluctuating environmental conditions. This study applies a rapid, low-cost, and reliable high-throughput phenotyping tool to explore genotypic variation for photosynthetic performance of a set of hybrid barleys and their parents under mild water-stress and unstressed field conditions. We found differences among the genotypic sets that are relevant for plant breeders and geneticists. Hybrids showed lower leaf temperature differential and higher non-photochemical quenching, resembling closer the male parents. The combination of traits detected in hybrids seems favorable, and could indicate improved photoprotection and better fitness under stress conditions. Additionally, we proved the potential of a low-cost, field-based phenotyping equipment to be used routinely in barley breeding programs for early screening for stress tolerance.
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