Explore the secrets behind the delicious lettuce

have no soul in a burger that doesn't have lettuce, and there must be lettuce in a vegetable salad. In recent years, lettuce has become a popular food among consumers, in which the knotted lettuce because of its rich nutrition and taste more crisp, fresh, in the lettuce "stand out."
can a ball of lettuce form a leaf ball? This aroused the curiosity of the scientists.
, however, unlike model plants, there are many kinds of vegetables, there are hundreds of species, the ball is a unique characteristic of vegetables, its complexity makes domestic and foreign related research stop.
Recently, the key laboratory of the Ministry of Horticultural Plant Biology of Huahua Agricultural University, Yan Hanxuan, successfully identified the gene that controls the ball of lettuce by positive genetic method, and verified the function and action of the gene by genetic transformation, which is of great scientific significance to the selection and breeding of varieties of ball vegetables.
study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.commonly referred to as lettuce is classified as leaf dates, while stem dates are called lettuce. As one of the important bulk vegetables, dates belong to the chrysanthemum family, originated in the Mediterranean region, has a very rich cultivation type, including Roman lettuce, loose leaf lettuce, cream lettuce, ball lettuce, rape wheat vegetables, lettuce and so on.
the morphological differences between the different cultivation types of radon, but the different types can be hybridized and can produce child-like offspring. Therefore, radon is an excellent material for studying the occurrence and evolution of plant morphology. In an interview with the China Science Daily, Mr. Yu said.
, the "knotted" characteristics of lettuce have aroused the interest of the task force.
ball is a special esogeois for blade development. The leaves of the balled vegetables have a common feature, that is, the leaves are bent from the outside and inside, layered, and the leaves form a spular structure, so that the leaves are almost sterile and very clean.
from a biological point of view, the spriting characteristics are somewhat at the opposite end of the "mission" of plant heirs. The purpose of plant growth is to pass on their genes to the next generation, and when they are balled, the plants do not bloom and will be destroyed.
the "harmful" nature of plant reproduction, but it is favored by artificial breeding.
" ball vegetable leaf ball has a more brittle and tender texture, taste is better, and easy to mechanize harvest, easy storage, shelf life is long, so ball lettuce by the market favorite, accounting for more than half of the total lettuce production and consumption, some places also rely on the cultivation of ball lettuce to get out of poverty. It is of practical significance to study ball lettuce. He said.
, however, this road is not a good one. Scientists at home and abroad have been conducting research for decades, but the secret to vegetable balls has not been cracked.
" is that the ball is a multi-gene-controlled number of signs, which makes it difficult to find traces. Yan Chenghuan, co-first author of the paper and a Ph.D. graduate of the School of Horticultural Foreculture at Central Agricultural University of China, told China Science Daily.
not only that, but than some traditional vegetables, ball lettuce is more susceptible to environmental influences, such as light, temperature and other factors may affect the ball esogeois. These factors make genetic research very difficult, and it has not been until now been ability to find the genetic regulatory gene formed by the leaf ococyte.'s easy to talk about trying to find this "main character." After the group selected the crossbreeding of ball lettuce with Roman lettuce to obtain the F1 generation, it further self-confessed to obtain the F2 group. The analysis of the spout estypes of the F2 group by the team members showed that the balling characteristics in the group ranged from tight ball to non-ball continuous distribution, indicating that the ball in the genetic group was a quantitative genetic characteristic.in order to break through the research barrier of quantitative genetic disorders controlled by multiple genes, it is necessary to carry out single-geneization in a short period of time. This is equivalent to "reducing" a multi-dimensional space into one-dimensional, the difficulties of which can be imagined.
"By comparing the genetic differences between the knotted and non-icing characters, we found two main effects of the knotted spots on chromosomes 4 and 7 of the lettuce and named them
and
. For these two bits, single genitification and genetic positioning respectively, it was found that
effect was stronger. In the paper, we selected this location for further study, locking it into an area of about 450kb, where genetic annotations found that there were 11 genes encoded in the region. Yan Chenghuan introduced.
, a corn gene is
the same gene that caught the attention of the task force,
. In corn,
gene is the gene that controls the development of plant stem-tip tissue.
fact,
gene is not unique to ball lettuce, it is found in all lettuce and asparagus. Because the mutation causes the ball, the variation is caused by a rot.
team found that a transsego was inserted into the first exon of the gene in the ball lettuce, and that the insertion of the rotell significantly increased the expression of the
gene, while the lettuce that was not inserted into the transstite did not. Therefore, they determined that
genes are the key to the painstaking search to control the icing sex.
to find the candidate gene, another important job is "functional verification." The genetic transformation of balled vegetables is very difficult to do, and the team has spent a lot of energy and time on this work.
", through genetic transformation complementary experiments, we found that this gene can fully complement the spout esoteric esotype of lettuce. Further, we constructed a knock-off mutant of the gene, whose esotype changed from a knotted ball to a completely non-knotted ball. Yu Changchun, co-first author of the paper and a postdoctoral student in the School of Horticultural Foreculture at Central Agricultural University of China, told the China Science Journal that complementary and knockout experiments in genetic transformation have validated the gene as a key gene for controlling balls in lettuce. icing esoly is a very important condition. In addition to lettuce and chrysanthemums in chrysanthemums, the common knotted vegetables in life include kale, cabbage, and spore kale from the crossflower.
" using our method to analyze the nature of vegetable balls, is a better model, can provide reference for kale, cabbage, spore kale and other related studies of balled vegetables. Yan Chenghuan said.
leaves have a back and abdomen, both of which have different effects and structures. Through paraffin slice analysis, the team found that the near-axis cells of the non-ball lettuce leaves were arranged neatly and closely, while the far-axis cells were arranged loosely, which showed obvious back-abdominal differentiation. In contrast, the ball lettuce near, far-axis cells are similar, there is no obvious abdominal differentiation. This shows that the back-abdominal development of leaves is involved in the formation of lettuce ball-like features.
the study of the icing on the icing system can be said to be a supplement to the whole study of plant leaf development theory, and plays a role in 'adding bricks and mortar'. Yu Changchun pointed out.
in the production process, the ball lettuce is actually more "emotional". The ball lettuce is very sensitive to the temperature, the winter ball is in good condition, but easy to "over-fire", the ball is very tight, and in the summer often the ball "failed", which makes the farmers very distressed.
" clones the key genes that regulate the ball, we can use this gene to assist in the breeding of ball lettuce varieties, and even accurately control the tightness of the leaf ball, and truly realize the 'private customization' of the ball lettuce. He said that this has a certain guiding significance for the selection and breeding of the whole ball vegetable variety. (Source: Zhang Qingdan, China Science Daily)
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