Ancient maize (~6700-5000 BP) from Paredones, Peru, originated in Mesoamerica, suffered a rapid domestication process, and fast coastal migration to Peru, involving adaptation to both Mesoamerican and South American lowlands with no relevant introgression from teosinte mexicana.

Heritable variation in the benefit maize plants receive from arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi supports the feasibility of breeding crops to optimize use of this ancient symbiosis.

Comprehensive analyses of host genetics, root-associated microbiomes, and plant phenotypes under two nitrogen treatments reveals host genetic control of microbe abundance which, in turn, affects plant performance.

A fungal effector secreted by the corn smut pathogen increases the virulence of the pathogen by elevating anthocyanin production and reducing lignification in maize.

Convolutional neural networks and graph partitioning algorithms can be combined into an easy-to-use tool for segmentation of cells in dense plant tissue volumes imaged with light microscopy.

Phylogenetic analyses demonstrate an evolutionary trade-off between the amount of harm inflicted by a broad host-range virus and how effectively the virus positions itself within plants to enable onward transmission.

Comparing maize to its wild ancestor teosinte advances our understanding of how it and other cereal crops evolved, and also identifies the genetic variation that can contribute to important agricultural traits.

Ribosome profiling and loss-of-function during human ESC pancreatic differentiation reveal abundant lncRNA translation and an essential role for translated LINC00261 in beta cell differentiation, likely through a trans-regulatory, microprotein-independent mechanism.

Transposition reactions that occur during DNA replication and involve the termini of adjacent transposons can induce genome expansion by re-replication of transposon-flanking sequences.

Analysis of epigenome maps from human pancreatic progenitors and functional validation in zebrafish identify LAMA1 and CRB2 as type 2 diabetes risk-associated genes with roles in pancreatic development.