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Capparis spinosa L. is a xerophytic shrub that is well adapted to drought and has promising potential for significant adaptation to harsh environments. Here, we sequenced and assembled the C. spinosa reference genome using the combination of PacBio HiFi sequencing and Hi-C data.

Nitrogen (N) is the important nutrition that regulatory plant functioning and environmental stability of invasive plant species under flooding (F) conditions. Little information clarifies the role of nitrogen enrichment and flooding on the invasive plant functional traits and competition with native competitors. Plant functional traits play an essential role in the successful growth of plants under different environmental conditions. Therefore, greenhouse pots experiment was conducted with invasive plant species (Wedelia trilobata, WT), and its native competitor (Wedelia chinensis, WC) in monoculture and cocultivation culture, along with flooding and nitrogen enrichment conditions. Considering the impact of flooding (F) and nitrogen (N) on an individual basis, the plant physiological traits of WC were nonsignificant compared to that of WT. However, in the combination of flooding × additional nitrogen (F.N, F.2N), plant physiological traits of WT were comparatively higher than those of WC, especially in cocultivation. In flooding × additional nitrogen (F.N and F.2N), better phenotypic plasticity at different plant traits makes WT more dominant in resource competition over WC. In conclusion, improved functional traits of WT under nitrogen enrichment and flooding conditions enhanced its competitiveness over native competitors.

In this study,five common annual halophytes(Salicornia europaea,Suaeda acuminate,Petrosimonia sibirica,Salsola subcrassa,Kochia scoparia) in hungriness-oasis ecotone of south border region of Gurbantonggut Desert were grown in undisturbed saline soil and sandy soil,and their growth and mineral constituents in shoots were compared.The results showed that: 1) the pH value of the undisturbed saline soil was lower,while electrical conductivity and water content were significantly higher than those of the sandy soil in each of the soil layers from 0 to 100 cm in depth;2) shoot dry weight(DW) of plants grown in the saline soil was 7 to 118 times higher than DW of plants grown in the sandy soil,and the root/shoot DW ratio of plants in the sandy soil was 2 to 6 times higher;3) water contents in shoots of these annual halophytes ranged from 52% to 81%.The differences in shoot water content in the mid and low salt-resistant halophytes grown in both soils was significant(P0.05),while that in the super salt-resistant halophytes grown in both soils were similar;4) shoot N concentration of the 5 annual halophytes ranged from 11 to 34 g/kg and the higher the available N in soil,the higher the N concentration in shoots of these plants.Shoot P concentration ranged 1—4 g/kg.The correlations between the shoot P concentration and the available soil P were similar to that for N(except for S.europaeae).By contrast,shoot K concentration of the plants grown in sandy soil was higher than that of plants grown in saline soil,although K concentration in the 0—60 cm soil was higher in the saline soil than that in the sandy soil;5) although the contents of the soluble Ca,Mg,Na,S and Cl in each layer of the soils from 0 to 100 cm in depth in saline soil were significantly higher than those in sandy soil,the ratios of the Na,Cl and S concentrations in shoots of plants grown in saline soil to those in sandy soil were far lower than those in the both soils,and even Ca and Mg concentrations in shoots of the plants grown in saline soil were equal or significantly lower than those in sandy soil.The results indicate that the saline soil significantly affects not only the growth of annual halophytes,but also the uptake and accumulation of the mineral nutrients by plants.The results could provide clues for the further studies on the adaptive mechanisms of halophytes to saline soil,and help select plant species for phytoremediation of saline soil.

Glycophytic plants suffer from severe stress and injury when roots are exposed to high salinity in the rhizosphere. In contrast, the euhalophyte Salicornia europaea grows well at 200 mM NaCl and can withstand up to 1000 mM NaCl in the root zone. Analysis of gene expression profiles and the underlying molecular mechanisms responsible for this tolerance have been largely overlooked. Using the Illumina sequencing platform and the short-reads assembly programme Trinity, we generated a total of 40 and 39 million clean reads and further 140,086 and 122,728 unigenes from the 200 mM NaCl and 0 mM NaCl treated tissues of S. europaea roots, respectively. All unigenes in this study were functionally annotated within context of the COG, GO and KEGG pathways. Unigene functional annotation analysis allowed us to identify hundreds of ion transporters related to homeostasis and osmotic adaptation as well as a variety of proteins related to cation, amino acid, lipid and sugar transport. We found significant enrichment in response to stress including the functional categories of “antioxidant activity”, “catalytic activity” and “response to stimuli”. These findings represent for a useful resource for the scientific community working on salt tolerance mechanisms. Conversely, a total of 8639 EST-SSRs from 131,594 unigenes were identified and 4539 non-redundant SSRs primers pairs were developed. These data provide a good foundation for future studies on molecular adaptation mechanisms of euhalophytes roots under saline environments and will likely facilitate the identification of critical salt tolerance traits to be transferred in economically important crops.