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Public understanding about complex issues such as climate change relies heavily on online resources. Yet the role that online instruction should assume in post-secondary science education remains contentious despite its near ubiquity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The objective here was to compare the performance of 1790 undergraduates taking either an online or face-to-face version of an introductory course on climate change. Both versions were taught by a single instructor, thus, minimizing instructor bias. Women, seniors, English language learners, and humanities majors disproportionately chose to enroll in the online version because of its ease of scheduling and accessibility. After correcting for performance-gaps among different demographic groups, the COVID-19 pandemic had no significant effect on online student performance and students in the online version scored 2% lower (on a scale of 0–100) than those in the face-to-face version, a penalty that may be a reasonable tradeoff for the ease of scheduling and accessibility that these students desire.

 

Nitrogen is an essential element required for plant growth and productivity. Understanding the mechanisms and natural genetic variation underlying nitrogen use in plants will facilitate the engineering of plant nitrogen use to maximize crop productivity while minimizing environmental costs. To understand the scope of natural variation that may influence nitrogen use, we grew 1,135 Arabidopsis thaliana natural genotypes on two nitrogen sources, nitrate and ammonium, and measured both developmental and defense metabolite traits. By using different environments and focusing on multiple traits, we identified a wide array of different nitrogen responses. These responses are associated with numerous genes, most of which were not previously associated with nitrogen responses. Only a small portion of these genes appear to be shared between environments or traits, while most are predominantly specific to a developmental or defense trait under a specific nitrogen source. Finally, by using a large population, we were able to identify unique nitrogen responses, such as preferring ammonium or nitrate, which appear to be generated by combinations of loci rather than a few large-effect loci. This suggests that it may be possible to obtain novel phenotypes in complex nitrogen responses by manipulating sets of genes with small effects rather than solely focusing on large-effect single gene manipulations.

 

Wheat and rice produce nutritious grains that provide 32% of the protein in the human diet globally. Here, we examine how genetic modifications to improve assimilation of the inorganic nitrogen forms ammonium and nitrate into protein influence grain yield of these crops. Successful breeding for modified nitrogen metabolism has focused on genes that coordinate nitrogen and carbon metabolism, including those that regulate tillering, heading date, and ammonium assimilation. Gaps in our current understanding include (1) species differences among candidate genes in nitrogen metabolism pathways, (2) the extent to which relative abundance of these nitrogen forms across natural soil environments shape crop responses, and (3) natural variation and genetic architecture of nitrogen-mediated yield improvement. Despite extensive research on the genetics of nitrogen metabolism since the rise of synthetic fertilizers, only a few projects targeting nitrogen pathways have resulted in development of cultivars with higher yields. To continue improving grain yield and quality, breeding strategies need to focus concurrently on both carbon and nitrogen assimilation and consider manipulating genes with smaller effects or that underlie regulatory networks as well as genes directly associated with nitrogen metabolism. 

Abstract Premise: The agar‐based culture of Arabidopsis seedlings is widely used for quantifying root traits. Shoot traits are generally overlooked in these studies, probably because the rosettes are often askew. A technique to assess the shoot surface area of seedlings grown inside agar culture dishes would facilitate simultaneous root and shoot phenotyping. Methods: We developed an image processing workflow in Python that estimates rosette area of Arabidopsis seedlings on agar culture dishes. We validated this method by comparing its output with other metrics of seedling growth. As part of a larger study on genetic variation in plant responses to nitrogen form and concentration, we measured the rosette areas from more than 2000 plate images. Results: The rosette area measured from plate images was strongly correlated with the rosette area measured from directly overhead and moderately correlated with seedling mass. Rosette area in the large image set was significantly influenced by genotype and nitrogen treatment. The broad‐sense heritability of leaf area measured using this method was 0.28. Discussion: These results indicated that this approach for estimating rosette area produces accurate shoot phenotype data. It can be used with image sets for which other methods of leaf area quantification prove unsuitable. 

The extent to which rising atmospheric CO2 concentration has already influenced food production and quality is uncertain. Here, we analyzed annual field trials of fall-planted common wheat in California from 1985 to 2019, a period during which global atmospheric CO2 concentration increased 19%. Even after accounting for other major factors (cultivar, location, degree-days, soil temperature, total water applied, nitrogen fertilization, and pathogen infestation), wheat grain yield and protein yield declined 13% over this period, but grain protein content did not change. These results suggest that exposure to gradual CO2 enrichment over the past 35 years has adversely affected wheat grain and protein yield, but not grain protein content. 

Plants produce diverse metabolites to cope with the challenges presented by complex and ever-changing environments. These challenges drive the diversification of specialized metabolites within and between plant species. However, we are just beginning to understand how frequently new alleles arise controlling specialized metabolite diversity and how the geographic distribution of these alleles may be structured by ecological and demographic pressures. Here we measure the variation in specialized metabolites across a population of 797 natural Arabidopsis thaliana accessions. We show a combination of geography, environmental parameters, demography, and different genetic processes all combine to influence the specific chemotypes and their distribution. This showed that causal loci in specialized metabolism contain frequent independently generated alleles with patterns suggesting potential within species convergence. This provides a new perspective about the complexity of the selective forces and mechanisms that shape the generation and distribution of allelic variation that may influence local adaptation. 

Photorespiration, or C2 photosynthesis, is generally considered a futile cycle that potentially decreases photosynthetic carbon fixation by more than 25%. Nonetheless, many essential processes, such as nitrogen assimilation, C1 metabolism, and sulfur assimilation, depend on photorespiration. Most studies of photosynthetic and photorespiratory reactions are conducted with magnesium as the sole metal cofactor despite many of the enzymes involved in these reactions readily associating with manganese. Indeed, when manganese is present, the energy efficiency of these reactions may improve. This review summarizes some commonly used methods to quantify photorespiration, outlines the influence of metal cofactors on photorespiratory enzymes, and discusses why photorespiration may not be as wasteful as previously believed. 

We have proposed that rising atmospheric CO₂concentrations inhibit malate production in chloroplasts and thus impede assimilation of nitrate into protein in shoots of C₃plants, a phenomenon that will strongly influence primary productivity and food security under the environmental conditions anticipated during the next few decades. Although hundreds of studies support this proposal, several publications in 2018 and 2019 purport to present counterevidence. The following study evaluates these publications as well as presents new data that elevated CO₂enhances root nitrate assimilation in wheat andArabidopsiswhile it inhibits shoot nitrate assimilation.