Plants

While climate is known to regulate forest productivity, the mechanistic contribution of soil microbial communities—and whether it differs between natural and plantation forests—remains poorly quantified at broad scales. Here, we provide a synthesis-level, unified analysis that jointly evaluates climate, edaphic conditions, and soil microbes to compare mechanistic pathways underlying productivity divergence between forest types. We synthesized 237 observations across China and integrated productivity metrics—gross primary productivity (GPP) and net primary productivity (NPP)—with microbial diversity, dominant taxa, and soil drivers to compare natural and plantation forests within the current environmental coverage. Plantation productivity showed nonlinear responses to microbial diversity and appeared more sensitive than natural forests. Natural forests exhibited higher bacterial Shannon and Chao1 but lower fungal Chao1 and were characterized by taxa such as Nitrobacter, Bradyrhizobium, and Cortinarius. In contrast, plantations were characterized by taxa often associated with disturbance tolerance and opportunistic life-history strategies (e.g., Sphingomonas, Fusarium, Gemmatimonas), consistent with potential functional simplification. Structural equation models identified climate as the strongest correlate of productivity, while soil properties showed contrasting associations with microbial diversity across forest types. Random forest models further highlighted cation-exchange capacity and total nitrogen as key predictors of microbial diversity in plantations. Overall, our results indicate that soil microbial communities are differentially associated with forest productivity across forest types and environmental contexts and underscore the need for future climate-comparable designs and management-intensity information to more robustly isolate microbial contributions.

Angiosperms include many taxa with dimorphic unisexual reproductive structures. These are well studied in some grasses, with maize as a key model, but other wind-pollinated lineages in Poales remain less explored. Within Poales, the family Restionaceae has the highest known proportion of dioecious species. In its Australian subfamily Leptocarpoideae, the sexually dimorphic Leptocarpus denmarkicus has raised questions about the basic flowering unit and the developmental basis of dimorphism. Here, we analyze inflorescence architecture and floral development in Eurychorda complanata, the sister lineage to the remainder of Leptocarpoideae. Using comparative morphology, light microscopy and scanning electron microscopy, we reconstruct synflorescence topology, floral organography, and ontogeny in both sexes and compare them with those in L. denmarkicus. In Eurychorda, both sexes produce polytelic paniculate synflorescences with distinct inhibition zones and many-flowered simple spikelets as the basic flowering unit. Male and female spikelets bear up to 50 and up to 15 fertile flowers, respectively. Male flowers have two stamens and a dimerous pistillode, whereas female flowers possess two long filamentous staminodes and a dimerous gynoecium. Ontogenetic series show that flowers of both sexes initiate both androecial and gynoecial structures, and that functional unisexuality is achieved through late arrest of the organs of one sex. Defining spikelets as racemose axes with lateral sessile flowers clarifies homologies of reproductive structures and supports reinterpretation of the dimorphic female unit in L. denmarkicus as a derived compound spike generated through shifts in branching rank and the timing of lateral initiation. The compound female spike of L. denmarkicus has a striking overall similarity to the simple female spikelet in Eurychorda, illustrating fascinating parallelism in the evolution of reproductive organs within Restionaceae and Poales more broadly. At the male side, Eurychorda achieves anther exsertion via filament elongation, whereas in L. denmarkicus filaments are very short and anthers remain within the perianth, but male spikelets sit on long, flexible peduncles that invert the spikelet and promote trembling, thereby ventilating the perianth chamber and aiding pollen escape. These two solutions—filament elongation versus spikelet-peduncle flexibility—represent alternative strategies of pollen release in wind-pollinated flowers.

Background: The phytoene desaturase gene is a classical visual marker for validating CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in plants, as its loss of function produces a readily scorable albino phenotype. While the biochemical basis of pigment loss is well established, it remains unclear whether pds knockout elicits transcriptomic changes extending beyond carotenoid biosynthesis. Resolving this question is essential for correctly interpreting pds-based editing outcomes and for assessing the robustness of phenotype-only screening approaches. Methods: A CRISPR/Cas9 editing platform targeting pds was established in diploid potato. Albino, non-albino edited, and wild-type tissues were subjected to RNA-seq profiling. Differential expression, functional enrichment, and weighted gene co-expression network analysis were integrated to resolve phenotype-associated transcriptional modules, and hierarchical regulatory layers underlying albinism. Results: CRISPR/Cas9-mediated disruption of pds in potato-generated stable albino phenotypes and revealed extensive transcriptomic reprogramming that was not limited to pigment loss. Albino tissues exhibited more than 9700 differentially expressed genes relative to both wild-type and non-albino edited tissues, whereas non-albino edits showed substantially fewer changes. Functional enrichment demonstrated pervasive suppression of photosynthesis and carbon metabolism alongside activation of secondary metabolism, stress responses, hormone signaling, and cell wall remodeling. WGCNA and cross-validation resolved these changes into distinct, phenotype-associated regulatory layers: MEorangered4 captured coordinated repression of starch and sucrose metabolism (r = −0.998), MEdarkgreen marked albino-linked activation of secondary metabolism and barrier biogenesis (r = 0.855; overlap with Albino Core set, OR = 23.65), while MEblack and MEgrey60 reflected downregulation of stress signaling, proteostasis, and hormone-integrative control and were enriched in transgenic–background-associated gene sets. Conclusions: pds knockout in potato is accompanied by broad transcriptomic changes beyond pigment biosynthesis, suggesting that albinism involves coordinated regulatory and metabolic adjustment under plastid dysfunction rather than pigment loss alone. These results refine the use of pds as a visual editing marker and provide a framework for linking localized genome edits to coordinated network-level transcriptional responses in plants.