Brassica and Its Close Allies: Cytogenetics and Evolution

TL;DR: Armed with new genetic resources from trigenomic bridges, Brassica breeders will be able to improve yield and broaden adaptation of Brassica crops to meet human demands for food and biofuel, particularly in the face of abiotic constraints caused by climate change.

TL;DR: This review introduces the Brassica crop species and their wild relatives, barriers to interspecific and intergeneric hybridization and methods to overcome them, previous successful and unsuccessful attempts at the use of interspecific hybridization for crop improvement in Brassica, and provides information about resources available to breeders wishing to take advantage of this method.

TL;DR: The marker data and geographic distribution of Groups 1 and 2 were consistent with two independent migrations of B. juncea from its center of origin in the Middle East and neighboring regions along trade routes to western China and northern India, followed by regional adaptation.

TL;DR: It is speculated that the putative candidate male sterility gene orf108 may not be responsible for the CMS observed in Brassica oxyrrhina and Diplotaxis catholica, and the potential coincidence of CMS in alloplasmic lines is proposed.

TL;DR: DNA amounts, by microdensitometry, are underestimated in nuclei with high DNA density, and it is suggested that the reduction in nuclear size in tetraploids is associated with greater condensation of chromosome material which, in turn, may reflect an adaptive “switching off” of redundant gene copies in the Tetraploid complement.

TL;DR: An efficient procedure for obtaining somatic hybrids between B. oleracea and B. campestris has been developed, showing the occurrence of multiple fusion and chromosome loss during the culture.

TL;DR: Comparative studies of the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana and its close relative Brassica oleracea have identified conserved regions that represent potentially functional sequences overlooked by previousArabidopsis genome annotation methods, and suggest that several thousand new Arabidops genes remain to be identified and annotated.

TL;DR: Phytopathological analysis of selfing progenies from 3 different highly resistant BC3 plants showed that seedling and adult plant resistance are probably conferred by different loci.