Search for: All records

Floral development is one of the model systems for investigating the mechanisms underlying organogenesis in plants. Floral organ identity is controlled by the well-known ABC model, which has been generalized to many flowering plants. Here, we report a previously uncharacterized MYB-like gene,AGAMOUS-LIKE FLOWER(AGLF), involved in flower development in the model legumeMedicago truncatula. Loss-of-function ofAGLFresults in flowers with stamens and carpel transformed into extra whorls of petals and sepals. Compared with the loss-of-function mutant of the class C geneAGAMOUS(MtAG) inM. truncatula, the defects in floral organ identity are similar betweenaglfandmtag, but the floral indeterminacy is enhanced in theaglfmutant. Knockout ofAGLFin the mutants of the class A geneMtAP1or the class B geneMtPIleads to an addition of a loss-of-C-function phenotype, reflecting a conventional relationship ofAGLFwith the canonical A and B genes. Furthermore, we demonstrate thatAGLFactivatesMtAGin transcriptional levels in control of floral organ identity. These data shed light on the conserved and diverged molecular mechanisms that control flower development and morphology among plant species.

Many news outlets allow users to contribute comments on topics about daily world events. News articles are the seeds that spring users' interest to contribute content, that is, comments. A news outlet may allow users to contribute comments on all their articles or a selected number of them. The topic of an article may lead to an apathetic user commenting activity (several tens of comments) or to a spontaneous fervent one (several thousands of comments). This environment creates a social dynamic that is little studied. The social dynamics around articles have the potential to reveal interesting facets of the user population at a news outlet. In this paper, we report the salient findings about these social media from 15 months worth of data collected from 17 news outlets comprising of over 38,000 news articles and about 21 million user comments. Analysis of the data reveals interesting insights such as there is an uneven relationship between news outlets and their user populations across outlets. Such observations and others have not been revealed, to our knowledge. We believe our analysis in this paper can contribute to news predictive analytics (e.g., user reaction to a news article or predicting the volume of comments posted to an article).

This article is categorized under:

Internet > Society and Culture