Michela Osnato

The evolutionary paths of humans and plants have crossed more than once throughout millennia. While agriculture contributed to the evolution of societies in prehistory, human selection of desirable traits contributed to the evolution of crops during centuries of cultivation. Among cereal crops, rice is currently grown around the globe and represents staple food for almost half of the world population. Over time, rice cultivation has expanded from subtropical to temperate regions thanks to artificial selection of mutants with impaired response to photoperiod. Additional regulatory mechanisms control flowering in response to diverse environmental cues, anticipating or delaying the floral transition to produce seeds in more favourable conditions. Nevertheless, the changing climate is threatening grain production because modern cultivars are sensitive to external fluctuations that go beyond their physiological range. One possibility to guarantee food production could be the exploitation of novel varieties obtained by crossing highly productive Asian rice with stress tolerant African rice. This review explores the genetic basis of the key traits that marked the long journey of rice cultivation from the end of the paleolithic to the anthropocene, with a focus on heading date. By 2050, will rice plants of the future flower in the outer space?

Throughout the history of agriculture, humans have selected plants with the most favorable characteristics that confer higher productivity or better adaptation to new territories. Conventional breeding relies on the exploitation of genetic variation obtained by crossing varieties with desirable traits followed by the analysis of phenotypic variation among their progeny and the selection of individuals with improved characteristics. However, this is a slow process that requires multiple generations of crossing; it can take years to obtain a new variety and often leads to only modest improvements. In addition, several yield-related traits are controlled by multiple genes having redundant functions in plant development, or by many distinct genes acting in the same pathway, each having a small effect on the final phenotype (nicely reviewed by Mickelbart et al., 2015,), implying that several chromosomal segments must be combined to achieve considerable improvements. Modern genomics tools promise to greatly enhance the speed and precision of plant breeding ( Van Vu et al. 2022), but improvements are still needed to fully realize their benefits ( Gaillochet et al., 2021).

Michela Osnato; CKI1-ARRs specify the central cell in Arabidopsis, The Plant Cell, , koac293, https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koac293

Michela Osnato; From the archives: A rice grain size regulatory module, GWAS of primary plant metabolism, and promoter trapping of polarity markers, The Plant C

Michela Osnato; Novel dwarfing alleles for the next green revolution: mutations in DTL and OSH15 alter internode elongation and grain size in rice, The Plant Ce

Fluctuations in environmental conditions greatly influence life on earth. Plants, as sessile organisms, have developed molecular mechanisms to adapt their development to changes in daylength, or photoperiod. One of the first plant features that comes to mind as affected by the duration of the day is flowering time; we all bring up a clear image of spring blossom. However, for many plants flowering happens at other times of the year, and many other developmental aspects are also affected by changes in daylength, which range from hypocotyl elongation in Arabidopsis thaliana to tuberization in potato or autumn growth cessation in trees. Strikingly, many of the processes affected by photoperiod employ similar gene networks to respond to changes in the length of light/dark cycles. In this review, we have focused on developmental processes affected by photoperiod that share similar genes and gene regulatory networks.

The Plant Cell, https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koab244.