Articles & Publications 

 

Cytoplasmic-genetic male sterility gene provides direct evidence for some hybrid rice recently evolving into weedy rice

 

Zhang JX, Lu Z, Dai WM, Song XL, Peng Y, Valverde BE, Qiang S

 

ABSTRACT: Weedy rice infests paddy fields worldwide at an alarmingly increasing rate. There is substantial evidence indicating that many weedy rice forms originated from or are closely related to cultivated rice. There is suspicion that the outbreak of weedy rice in China may be related to widely grown hybrid rice due to its heterosis and the diversity of its progeny, but this notion remains unsupported by direct evidence. We screened weedy rice accessions by both genetic and molecular marker tests for the cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) ...

 

Scientific Reports 5:10591.  doi:10.1038/srep10591

 

 

ICE1 demethylation drives the range expansion of a plant invader through cold tolerance divergence  

 

Xie HJ, Li H, Liu D, Dai WM, He JY, Lin S, Duan H, Liu LL, Chen SG, Song XL, Valverde BE, and Qiang S.

 

ABSTRACT: Cold tolerance adaption is a crucial determinant for the establishment and expansion of invasive alien plants into new cold environments; however, its evolutionary mechanism is poorly understood. Crofton weed (Ageratina adenophora), a highly invasive alien plant, is continuously spreading across subtropical areas in China, north-eastward from the first colonized south-western tropical regions, through cold tolerance evolution... 

 

Molecular Ecology 24:835-850. 2015.