Oil palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) is the number one source of consumed vegetable oil nowadays. It is cultivated in areas of tropical rainforest, where it meets its natural condition of high rainfall throughout the year. The palm oil industry faces criticism due to a series of practices that was considered not environmentally sustainable, and it finds itself under pressure to adopt new and innovative procedures to reverse this negative public perception. Cultivating this oilseed crop outside the rainforest zone is only possible using artificial irrigation. Close to 30% of the world’s irrigated agricultural lands also face problems due to salinity stress. Consequently, the research community must consider drought and salinity together when studying to empower breeding programs in order to develop superior genotypes adapted to those potential new areas for oil palm cultivation. Multi-Omics Integration (MOI) offers a new window of opportunity for the non-trivial challenge of unraveling the mechanisms behind multigenic traits, such as drought and salinity tolerance. The current study carried out a comprehensive, large-scale, single-omics analysis (SOA), and MOI study on the leaves of young oil palm plants submitted to very high salinity stress. Taken together, a total of 1239 proteins were positively regulated, and 1660 were negatively regulated in transcriptomics and proteomics analyses. Meanwhile, the metabolomics analysis revealed 37 metabolites that were upregulated and 92 that were downregulated. After performing SOA, 436 differentially expressed (DE) full-length transcripts, 74 DE proteins, and 19 DE metabolites underwent MOI analysis, revealing several pathways affected by this stress, with at least one DE molecule in all three omics platforms used. The Cysteine and methionine metabolism (map00270) and Glycolysis/Gluconeogenesis (map00010) pathways were the most affected ones, each one with 20 DE molecules.

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This paper describes a study of the variability of measured composition for a single bulk sugarcane bagasse conducted across eight laboratories using similar analytical methods, with the purpose of determining the expected variation for compositional analysis performed by different laboratories. The results show good agreement of measured composition within a single laboratory, but greater variability when results are compared among laboratories. These interlaboratory variabilities do not seem to be associated with a specific method or technique or any single piece of instrumentation. The summary censored statistics provide mean values and pooled standard deviations as follows: total extractives 6.7% (0.6%), whole ash 1.5% (0.2%), glucan 42.3% (1.2%), xylan 22.3% (0.5%), total lignin 21.3% (0.4%), and total mass closure 99.4% (2.9%).

MIKANIA GLOMERATA and MIKANIA LAEVIGATA (Asteraceae) are medicinal plants popularly named 'guaco' in Brazil. The leaves of both species are used to treat respiratory diseases, with coumarin (CO) and kaurane-type diterpenes being regarded as the bioactive constituents. A new and simple RP-HPLC method was developed and validated for the simultaneous quantification of CO, O-coumaric (OC), benzoylgrandifloric (BA), cinnamoylgrandifloric (CA) and kaurenoic (KA) acids in the species. Optimal separation was achieved with an alternating gradient elution of methanol and acetonitrile and detection was carried out by DAD at three different wavelengths: 210 nm for CO, OC, KA; 230 nm for BA; and 270 nm for CA. The extracts showed good stability during 42 hours under normal laboratory conditions (temperature of 23 +/- 2 degrees C). The standard curves were linear over the range 0.5 - 5.0 microg (CO), 0.25 - 4.0 microg (OC), 1.0 - 8.0 microg (BA), 0.5 - 3.0 microg (CA) and 0.8 - 12.0 microg (KA), with R(2) > 0.999 for all compounds. The method showed good precision for intra-day (RSD < 4.6 %) and inter-day assays (RSD < 4.4 %). The recovery was between 99.9 and 105.3 %, except for CO and OC in M. glomerata (73.2 - 91.6 % and 86.3 - 117.4 %, respectively). The limits of quantification and detection were in the range of 0.025 - 0.800 microg and 0.007 - 0.240 microg. The method was tested for new and old columns, temperature variation (26 and 28 degrees C) and by different operators in the same laboratory. The method was successfully applied to samples of both species.

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