The study investigates the subfunctionalization of duplicated GIGANTEA paralogs in Petunia x hybrida, focusing on PhGI2's role in floral transition. While RNAi silencing of PhGI2 caused mixed vegetative and reproductive phenotypes, CRISPR/Cas9-generated loss‑of‑function alleles showed that PhGI2 specifically promotes flowering without affecting vegetative growth or scent. The findings reveal that PhGI2 is essential for maintaining circadian gene expression dynamics and regulating flowering time, separating vegetative growth from reproductive timing.

The study utilizes a large collection of fluorescently marked Ds-GFP insertional mutations in haploid maize pollen to link gene disruptions with quantitative fitness effects measured as transmission deviations. By integrating genome-derived features (e.g., codon usage) and expression profiling into interpretable machine learning models, they achieve high predictive performance (auROC >90%) for genes influencing pollen fitness, highlighting expression specificity as a key predictor.

The study examined how elevated atmospheric CO₂ (550 ppm) affects immunity in the C₄ cereal maize (Zea mays L.) by exposing plants grown under ambient and elevated CO₂ to a range of pathogens. Elevated CO₂ increased susceptibility to sugarcane mosaic virus, decreased susceptibility to several bacterial and fungal pathogens, and left susceptibility to others unchanged, with reduced bacterial disease linked to heightened basal immune responses. These findings provide a baseline for future investigations into CO₂‑responsive defense mechanisms in C₄ crops.

The authors used a bottom‑up thermodynamic modelling framework to investigate how plants decode calcium signals, starting from Ca2+ binding to EF‑hand proteins and extending to higher‑order decoding modules. They identified six universal Ca2+-decoding modules that can explain variations in calcium sensitivity among kinases and provide a theoretical basis for interpreting calcium signal amplitude and frequency in plant cells.

The study benchmarked over 20 web‑based gRNA on‑target efficiency prediction tools against an experimental plant CRISPR editing dataset, finding several machine‑learning based tools whose scores strongly correlated with observed InDel frequencies. Additionally, the performance of popular platforms such as CRISPOR and CRISPR‑P was assessed, offering guidance for improved gRNA design in plant genome editing.

The study evaluates the use of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data to predict plant metabolic pathway genes (MPGs) in Arabidopsis thaliana, comparing five multi-label machine‑learning algorithms against traditional bulk RNA‑seq approaches. scRNA‑seq generated co‑expression networks that, while different, yielded significantly higher MPG classification accuracy, especially when data were split by genetic background or tissue type, and deep learning outperformed classical methods. The authors conclude that scRNA‑seq offers superior predictive power and should be incorporated into future MPG discovery pipelines.

The study provides a comprehensive genome-wide catalog and single‑cell expression atlas of the carbonic anhydrase (CA) gene family in maize, identifying 18 CA genes across α, β, and γ subfamilies and detailing their structural and regulatory features. Phylogenetic, synteny, promoter motif, bulk tissue RNA‑seq, and single‑cell RNA‑seq analyses reveal distinct tissue and cell‑type specific expression patterns, highlighting β‑CAs as key players in C4 photosynthesis and γ‑CAs in ion/pH buffering, and propose cell‑type‑specific CA genes as targets for improving stress resilience.

The study integrated weekly morphophysiological measurements with high-density genotyping-by-sequencing data and a machine‑learning pipeline to dissect flowering time variation in diverse Cannabis sativa landraces. By applying mutual information, recursive feature elimination, random forest, and support vector machine classifiers to over 234,000 combined genetic, phenotypic, and environmental features, the authors identified 53 key markers that classify early, medium, and late flowering types with 96.6% accuracy. Notable loci, including CsFT3 and CsCFL1, were highlighted as promising targets for breeding and smart‑crop strategies.

The study used extensive gravimetric load‑cell and ambient sensor data collected over seven years from hundreds of greenhouse-grown crops to train machine‑learning models for predicting daily whole‑plant transpiration. Random Forest and XGBoost achieved the highest accuracy (R² up to 0.89), with ambient temperature identified as the dominant driver. These results highlight the promise of ML‑based tools for precise agricultural water management.

The study integrated genetic architecture derived from maize GWAS into phenotypic simulations of hybrid populations, using ≥200 top GWAS hits and adjusting marker effect sizes, which increased the correlation between simulated and empirical trait data across environments (r = 0.397–0.915). These informed simulations produced realistic trait distributions and genomic prediction results that closely matched empirical observations, demonstrating improved utility for digital breeding programs.