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or the development of effective interventions.Seedling pre-emergence is a critical phase of development for successful crop establishment because of its susceptibility to environmental conditions. In a context of reduced use of inorganic fertilizers, the genetic bases of the response of seedlings to nitrate supply received little attention. This issue is important even in legumes where nitrate absorption starts early after germination, before nodule development. Natural variation of traits characterizing seedling growth in the absence or presence of nitrate was investigated in a core collection of 192 accessions of Medicago truncatula. Plasticity indexes to the absence of nitrate were calculated. The genetic determinism of the traits was dissected by genome-wide association study (GWAS). The absence of nitrate affected seed biomass mobilization and root/shoot length ratio. However, the large range of genetic variability revealed different seedling performances within natural diversity. A principal component analysis (PCA) carried out with plasticity indexes highlighted four physiotypes of accessions differing in relationships between seedling elongation and seed biomass partitioning traits in response to the absence of nitrate. Finally, GWAS revealed 45 associations with single or combined traits corresponding to coordinates of accessions on PCA, as well as two clusters of genes encoding sugar transporters and glutathione transferases surrounding loci associated with seedling elongation traits.Overexploitation of marine communities can lead to modifications in the structure of the food web, and can force organisms like elasmobranchs, for example, to change their feeding habits. In order to evaluate the impact that fisheries have on food webs and on the interactions between species, it is necessary to describe and quantify the diet of the species involved and follow it through time. This study compares the diet of five skate species, by means of the data obtained from the bycatch of the Argentine hake (Merluccius hubbsi) fishery in north and central Patagonia, Argentina. Diet composition was assessed by analysing digestive tract contents and trophic overlapping between species of the genus Bathyraja B. albomaculata, B. brachyurops, B. macloviana, B. magellanica and B. multispinnis. A total of 184 stomachs were analysed. The B. albomaculata and B. macloviana diets were mainly comprised annelids, while the B. brachyurops diet primarily comprised fish, including hake heads discarded by the fishery. B. magellanica and B. multispinnis diets were largely based on crustaceans. Despite the morphological similarities and their shared preference for benthic habitats, no complete diet overlaps were found between the different species. These results suggest that these skate species have undergone a process of diet specialisation. This is a common feeding strategy that occurs in order to successfully eliminate competition when resources are limited, which corresponds to the conditions found in an environment being affected by the pressures of overfishing. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.The correlation of different microscopic imaging techniques alongside with microanalytical methods is crucial to better understand biological processes on a subcellular level. For that, micrographs and chemical maps exhibiting both, very different spatial resolution and field-of-view but also a highly multimodal content has to be co-registered. We developed the ImageJ/Fiji plug-in Correlia that provides an environment for handling multimodal correlative microscopy data. Several linear and nonlinear registration methods using either feature or area-based similarity measures can flexibly be cascaded to align and warp 2D microscopy data sets. The registration of data sets containing light- and electron micrographs as well as chemical maps acquired by secondary-ion mass spectroscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy is demonstrated. Correlia is an open-source tool developed particularly for the registration and analysis of highly multimodal 2D correlative microscopy data. LAY DESCRIPTION If a microscopic or we describe what is happening 'under the hood' and give two example data-sets from microbiology which were registered using Correlia. Correlia is open source software and available from www.ufz.de/correlia - including introductory examples, as the authors would like to encourage other scientists to process their individual correlative microscopy data using Correlia.Enzymes are industrially applied under increasingly diverse environmental conditions that are dictated by the efforts to optimize overall process efficiency. Engineering the operational stability of biocatalysts to enhance their half-lives under the desired process conditions is a widely applied strategy to reduce costs. Here, we present a simple method to enhance enzyme stability in the presence of monophasic aqueous/organic solvent mixtures based on the concept of strengthening the enzyme's surface hydrogen-bond network by exchanging surface-located amino acid residues for arginine. Suitable residues are identified from sequence comparisons with homologous enzymes from thermophilic organisms and combined using a shuffling approach to obtain an enzyme variant with increased stability in monophasic aqueous/organic solvent mixtures. With this approach, we increase the stability of the broad-spectrum amino acid racemase of Pseudomonas putida DSM 3263 eightfold in mixtures with 40% methanol and sixfold in mixtures with 30% acetonitrile.Cytosine methylation is an important defense against invasive DNAs. Bcl-2 activation Here, cytosine methylation profiles of a plant pararetrovirus, Cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV), were investigated. Nuclear CaMV DNA is highly methylated throughout the genome including at transcription regulatory regions, but the virion DNA is unmethylated. In vitro CG methylation of the viral 35S promoter reduces transcription from the downstream gene. Although nuclear CaMV DNA is highly methylated, its transcripts are accumulated in the nucleus. The data suggest that a small population of unmethylated viral genomes produced through reverse transcription are constantly delivered back to the nucleus. Small RNA profiles suggest that methylation of the CaMV DNA may be due to de novo methylation through 21-, 22-, and 24-nt small RNAs with adenines at their 5' terminus.