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As a result of thousands of years of agriculture, humans had created many crop varieties that became the basis of our daily diet, animal feed and also carry industrial application. Soybean is one of the most important crops worldwide and because of its high economic value the demand for soybean products is constantly growing. In Europe, due to unfavorable climate conditions, soybean cultivation is restricted and we are forced to rely on imported plant material. The development of agriculture requires continuous improvements in quality and yield of crop varieties under changing or adverse conditions, namely stresses. To achieve this goal we need to recognize and understand the molecular dependencies underlying plant stress responses. With the advent of new technologies in studies of plant transcriptomes and proteomes, now we have the tools necessary for fast and precise elucidation of desirable crop traits. Here, we present an overview of high-throughput techniques used to analyze soybean responses to different abiotic (drought, flooding, cold stress, salinity, phosphate deficiency) and biotic (infections by F. oxysporum, cyst nematode, SMV) stress conditions at the level of the transcriptome (mRNAs and miRNAs) and the proteome.

The gene encoding myostatin (MSTN), due to its crucial function for growth of skeletal muscle mass, is an important candidate for muscularity. In this study we analyzed the nucleotide sequence and FISH localization of this gene in 4 canids, including 3 farm species. The nucleotide sequence of the MSTN coding fragment turned out to be highly conserved, since its identity among the studied species was very high and varied between 99.4 and 99.7%. Only 1, widely spread, silent single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) was found in exon 1 of the Chinese raccoon dog. The MSTN gene was localized close to the centromere in one-armed chromosomes of the dog (37q11) and bi-armed chromosomes of the red fox (16p11) and arctic fox (10q11), with an exception of the Chinese raccoon dog chromosome (2q14–q21). This chromosome is orthologous to 3 canine chromosomes and thus the MSTN was found more interstitially. Our results are in agreement with the hypothesis that karyotypes of the canids evolved mainly through centric fusion/fission events, while tandem fusions occurred rarely.

Alternative splicing is a cellular process in which multiple mRNA transcripts are created from a single gene. Comparative studies of splicing on plant and animal systems have revealed differences between those two kingdoms in splice-site recognition, distribution of various splice types, and overall frequency of splicing events. Moreover, global analysis of plant genomes showed an impact of alternative splicing on crop domestication and trait selection. In recent years, new functions of this process in plant development and stress responses were described. From known examples of spliced transcripts emerges a complicated picture of mutual relationship of splicing process with various molecular machineries taking part in regulation of gene expression. For now, we know that splicing is coupled with nonsense-mediated mRNA decay and dependent on chromatin modification. It also influences miRNA pathway. This review summarizes the role of alternative spliced transcripts in expression of plant genetic information especially in response to biotic and abiotic stress conditions.