Emerging Topics in Life Sciences最新文献

Population-level lateralization in structure and function is a fundamental measure of the human nervous system. To what extent nonhuman primates exhibit similar patterns of asymmetry remains a topic of considerable scientific interest. In this mini-review, a brief summary of findings on brain asymmetries in nonhuman primates in brain regions considered to the homolog's to Broca's and Wernicke's area are presented. Limitations of existing and directions for future studies are discussed in the context of facilitating comparative investigations in primates.

Cattle microbiome plays a vital role in cattle growth and performance and affects many economically important traits such as feed efficiency, milk/meat yield and quality, methane emission, immunity and health. To date, most cattle microbiome research has focused on metataxonomic and metagenomic characterization to reveal who are there and what they may do, preventing the determination of the active functional dynamics in vivo and their causal relationships with the traits. Therefore, there is an urgent need to combine other advanced omics approaches to improve microbiome analysis to determine their mode of actions and host-microbiome interactions in vivo. This review will critically discuss the current multi-omics microbiome research in beef and dairy cattle, aiming to provide insights on how the information generated can be applied to future strategies to improve production efficiency, health and welfare, and environment-friendliness in cattle production through microbiome manipulations.

In natural environments, interaction between plant roots and microorganisms are common. These interactions between microbial species and plants inhabited by them are being studied using various techniques. Metabolomics research based on mass spectrometric techniques is one of the crucial approaches that underpins system biology and relies on precision instrument analysis. In the last decade, this emerging field has received extensive attention. It provides a qualitative and quantitative approach for determining the mechanisms of symbiosis of bacteria and fungi with plants and also helps to elucidate the tolerance mechanisms of host plants against various abiotic stresses. However, this -omics application and its tools in plant-microbe interaction studies is still underutilized compared with genomic and transcriptomic methods. Therefore, it is crucial to bring this field forward to bear on the study of plant resistance and susceptibility. This review describes the current status of methods and progress in metabolomics applications for plant-microbe interaction studies discussing current challenges and future prospects.

Current environmental monitoring efforts often focus on known, regulated contaminants ignoring the potential effects of unmeasured compounds and/or environmental factors. These specific, targeted approaches lack broader environmental information and understanding, hindering effective environmental management and policy. Switching to comprehensive, untargeted monitoring of contaminants, organism health, and environmental factors, such as nutrients, temperature, and pH, would provide more effective monitoring with a likely concomitant increase in environmental health. However, even this method would not capture subtle biochemical changes in organisms induced by chronic toxicant exposure. Ecosurveillance is the systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of ecosystem health-related data that can address this knowledge gap and provide much-needed additional lines of evidence to environmental monitoring programs. Its use would therefore be of great benefit to environmental management and assessment. Unfortunately, the science of 'ecosurveillance', especially omics-based ecosurveillance is not well known. Here, we give an overview of this emerging area and show how it has been beneficially applied in a range of systems. We anticipate this review to be a starting point for further efforts to improve environmental monitoring via the integration of comprehensive chemical assessments and molecular biology-based approaches. Bringing multiple levels of omics technology-based assessment together into a systems-wide ecosurveillance approach will bring a greater understanding of the environment, particularly the microbial communities upon which we ultimately rely to remediate perturbed ecosystems.

The individual tissues and cell types of plants each have characteristic properties that contribute to the function of the plant as a whole. These are reflected by unique patterns of gene expression, protein and metabolite content, which enable cell-type-specific patterns of growth, development and physiology. Gene regulatory networks act within the cell types to govern the production and activity of these components. For the broader organism to grow and reproduce successfully, cell-type-specific activity must also function within the context of surrounding cell types, which is achieved by coordination of signalling pathways. We can investigate how gene regulatory networks are constructed and function using integrative 'omics technologies. Historically such experiments in plant biological research have been performed at the bulk tissue level, to organ resolution at best. In this review, we describe recent advances in cell- and tissue-specific 'omics technologies that allow investigation at much improved resolution. We discuss the advantages of these approaches for fundamental and translational plant biology, illustrated through the examples of specialised metabolism in medicinal plants and seed germination. We also discuss the challenges that must be overcome for such approaches to be adopted widely by the community.

Epigenomics encompasses a broad field of study, including the investigation of chromatin states, chromatin modifications and their impact on gene regulation; as well as the phenomena of epigenetic inheritance. The epigenome is a multi-modal layer of information superimposed on DNA sequences, instructing their usage in gene expression. As such, it is an emerging focus of efforts to improve crop performance. Broadly, this might be divided into avenues that leverage chromatin information to better annotate and decode plant genomes, and into complementary strategies that aim to identify and select for heritable epialleles that control crop traits independent of underlying genotype. In this review, we focus on the first approach, which we term 'epigenome guided' improvement. This encompasses the use of chromatin profiles to enhance our understanding of the composition and structure of complex crop genomes. We discuss the current progress and future prospects towards integrating this epigenomic information into crop improvement strategies; in particular for CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing and precision genome engineering. We also highlight some specific opportunities and challenges for grain and horticultural crops.