The study investigates how miR394 influences flowering time in Arabidopsis thaliana by combining transcriptomic profiling of mir394a mir394b double mutants with histological analysis of reporter lines. Bioinformatic analysis identified a novel lncRNA overlapping MIR394B (named MIRAST), and differential promoter activity of MIR394A and MIR394B suggests miR394 fine‑tunes flower development through transcription factor and chromatin remodeler regulation.
A maize near-isogenic line population designed for gene discovery and characterization of allelic effects
Authors: Zhong, T., Mullens, A., Morales, L., Swarts, K., Stafstrom, W., He, Y., Sermons, S., Yang, Q., Lopez-Zuniga, L. O., Rucker, E., Thomason, W., Nelson, R., Jamann, T. M., Balint-Kurti, P., Holland, J. B.
The study characterized 1,264 maize near‑isogenic lines derived from 18 donor inbreds crossed to the recurrent parent B73, using genotyping‑by‑sequencing and SNP‑chip data to detect 2,972 introgression segments via a novel hidden Markov model pipeline. Disease phenotyping enabled QTL mapping for foliar disease resistance, revealing extensive allelic variation among donor lines, and establishing the nNIL population as a valuable resource for dissecting complex traits in maize.