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Wild plants with a wide distribution, including those exposed to a wide variety of environmental conditions, may have variations in key functional traits relevant for agricultural applications. The East Asian wild radish ( Raphanus sativus var. raphanistroides ) is an appropriate model plant because it is widely distributed and has outstanding sink capacity as well as two cultivars within the species. Multiple common garden trials with 14 populations and three testing sites were conducted across the Japanese archipelago to quantify variations in yield and allocation. Significant inter-population variations and interaction effects with testing sites were detected for the root and shoot mass and the root mass fraction (RMF). While the rank order of the population changed drastically among sites and the variance components of genetic effects were small in yield traits (2.4%-4.7%), RMF displayed a large genetic variance (23.2%) and was consistently higher in the northern populations at all sites. Analyses revealed that the mean temperature of growing season of the seed origin was the most prominent factor explaining variation in RMF, irrespective of the sites. We concluded that the trait of resource allocation had a temperature-related cline and plants in cooler climates could invest more resources into their roots., (Copyright © 2020 by JAPANESE SOCIETY OF BREEDING.)

The development of sink organs such as fruits and seeds strongly depends on the amount of nitrogen that is moved within the phloem from photosynthetic-active source leaves to the reproductive sinks. In many plant species nitrogen is transported as amino acids. In pea (Pisum sativum L.), source to sink partitioning of amino acids requires at least two active transport events mediated by plasma membrane-localized proteins, and these are: (i) amino acid phloem loading; and (ii) import of amino acids into the seed cotyledons via epidermal transfer cells. As each of these transport steps might potentially be limiting to efficient nitrogen delivery to the pea embryo, we manipulated both simultaneously. Additional copies of the pea amino acid permease PsAAP1 were introduced into the pea genome and expression of the transporter was targeted to the sieve element-companion cell complexes of the leaf phloem and to the epidermis of the seed cotyledons. The transgenic pea plants showed increased phloem loading and embryo loading of amino acids resulting in improved long distance transport of nitrogen, sink development and seed protein accumulation. Analyses of root and leaf tissues further revealed that genetic manipulation positively affected root nitrogen uptake, as well as primary source and sink metabolism. Overall, the results suggest that amino acid phloem loading exerts regulatory control over pea biomass production and seed yield, and that import of amino acids into the cotyledons limits seed protein levels., (© 2014 The Authors The Plant Journal © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)