Nitric oxide (NO) plays important roles in diverse physiological processes in plants. NO can provoke both beneficial and harmful effects, which depend on the concentration and location of NO in plant cells. This review is focused on NO synthesis and the functions of NO in plant responses to abiotic environmental stresses. Abiotic stresses mostly induce NO production in plants. NO alleviates the harmfulness of reactive oxygen species, and reacts with other target molecules, and regulates the expression of stress responsive genes under various stress conditions.

The chloroplast genome originated from photosynthetic organisms and has retained the core genes that mainly encode components of photosynthesis. However, the causes of variations in chloroplast genome size in seed plants have only been thoroughly analyzed within small subsets of spermatophytes. In this study, we conducted the first comparative analysis on a large scale to examine the relationship between sequence characteristics and genome size in 272 seed plants based on cross-species and phylogenetic signal analysis. Our results showed that inverted repeat regions, large or small single copies, intergenic regions, and gene number can be attributed to the variations in chloroplast genome size among closely related species. However, chloroplast gene length underwent evolution affecting chloroplast genome size in seed plants irrespective of whether phylogenetic information was incorporated. Among chloroplast genes, atpA, accD and ycf1 account for 13% of the variation in genome size, and the average Ka/Ks values of homologous pairs of the three genes are larger than 1. The relationship between chloroplast genome size and gene length might be affected by selection during the evolution of spermatophytes. The variation in chloroplast genome size may influence energy generation and ecological strategy in seed plants.

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A four-carbon dicarboxylic acid L-malate has recently attracted attention due to its potential applications in the fields of medicine and agriculture. In this study, Escherichia coli W3110 was engineered and optimized for L-malate production via one-step L-malate synthesis pathway. First, deletion of the genes encoding lactate dehydrogenase (ldhA), pyruvate oxidase (poxB), pyruvate formate lyase (pflB), phosphotransacetylase (pta), and acetate kinase A (ackA) in pta-ackA pathway led to accumulate 20.9 g/L pyruvate. Then, overexpression of NADP -dependent malic enzyme C490S mutant in this multi-deletion mutant resulted in the direct conversion of pyruvate into L-malate (3.62 g/L). Next, deletion of the genes responsible for succinate biosynthesis further enhanced L-malate production up to 7.78 g/L. Finally, L-malate production was elevated to 21.65 g/L with the L-malate yield to 0.36 g/g in a 5 L bioreactor by overexpressing the pos5 gene encoding NADH kinase in the engineered E. coli F0931 strain. This study demonstrates the potential utility of one-step pathway for efficient L-malate production. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2017;114: 656-664. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.