Synthetic nitrogen (N) fertilizer has made a great contribution to the improvement of soil fertility and productivity, but excessive application of synthetic N fertilizer may cause agroecosystem risks, such as soil acidification, groundwater contamination and biodiversity reduction.  Meanwhile, organic substitution has received increasing attention for its ecologically and environmentally friendly and productivity benefits.  However, the linkages between manure substitution, crop yield and the underlying microbial mechanisms remain uncertain.  To bridge this gap, a three-year field experiment was conducted with five fertilization regimes: i) Control, non-fertilization; CF, conventional synthetic fertilizer application; CF_1/2M_1/2, 1/2 N input via synthetic fertilizer and 1/2 N input via manure; CF_1/4M_3/4, 1/4 N input synthetic fertilizer and 3/4 N input via manure; M, manure application.  All fertilization treatments were designed to have equal N input.  Our results showed that all manure substituted treatments achieved high soil fertility indexes (SFI) and productivities by increasing the soil organic carbon (SOC), total N (TN) and available phosphorus (AP) concentrations, and by altering the bacterial community diversity and composition compared with CF.  SOC, AP, and the soil C:N ratio were mainly responsible for microbial community variations.  The co-occurrence network revealed that SOC and AP had strong positive associations with Rhodospirillales and Burkholderiales, while TN and C:N ratio had positive and negative associations with Micromonosporaceae, respectively.  These specific taxa are implicated in soil macroelement turnover.  Random Forest analysis predicted that both biotic (bacterial composition and Micromonosporaceae) and abiotic (AP, SOC, SFI, and TN) factors had significant effects on crop yield.  The present work strengthens our understanding of the effects of manure substitution on crop yield and provides theoretical support for optimizing fertilization strategies.

Tillering is a crucial trait closely associated with yield potential and environmental adaptation in cereal crops, regulated by the synergy of endogenous (genetic) and exogenous (environmental) factors.  The physiological and molecular regulation of tillering has been intensively studied in rice and wheat.  However, tillering research on barley is scarce.  This review used the recent advances in bioinformatics to map all known and potential barley tiller development genes with their chromosomal genetic and physical positions.  Many of them were mapped for the first time.  We also discussed tillering regulation at genetic, physiological, and environmental levels.  Moreover, we established a novel link between the genetic control of phytohormones and sugars with tillering.  We provided evidence of how environmental cues and cropping systems help optimize the tiller number.  This comprehensive review enhances the understanding of barley’s physiological and genetic mechanisms controlling tillering and other developmental traits.

Crop planting patterns are an important component of agricultural land systems.  These patterns have been significantly changed due to the combined impacts of climatic changes and socioeconomic developments.  However, the extent of these changes and their possible impacts on the environment, terrestrial landscapes and rural livelihoods are largely unknown due to the lack of spatially explicit datasets including crop planting patterns.  To fill this gap, this study proposes a new method for spatializing statistical data to generate multitemporal crop planting pattern datasets.  This method features a two-level model that combines a land-use simulation and a crop pattern simulation.  The output of the first level is the spatial distribution of the cropland, which is then used as the input for the second level, which allocates crop censuses to individual gridded cells according to certain rules.  The method was tested using data from 2000 to 2019 from Heilongjiang Province, China, and was validated using remote sensing images.  The results show that this method has high accuracy for crop area spatialization.  Spatial crop pattern datasets over a given time period can be important supplementary information for remote sensing and thus support a wide range of application in agricultural land systems.

As an emerging class of non-coding transcripts, circular RNAs (circRNAs) are proved to participate in the complex process of myogenesis in diverse species.  A previous study has identified circular RNA EDC3 (circEDC3) as a typical covalently closed circular RNA abundant in chicken skeletal muscle.  This study found that circEDC3 is a conservative circular RNA and performed functional analysis to investigate the role of circEDC3 in chicken muscle growth.  The results indicated that circEDC3 could inhibit (P<0.05) chicken skeletal muscle satellite cells (SMSCs) proliferation and differentiation but had no significant influence on SMSCs apoptosis.  Additionally, bioinformatics analysis showed that circEDC3 had promising coding potential.  The open reading frames (ORF) were found in circEDC3 in this study.  Furthermore, this study predicted that circEDC3 had internal ribosome entry sites (IRES) and N6-methyladenosine (m6A) motifs in different species, implying that circEDC3 might be translatable.  This study revealed that circEDC3 might be a negative regulator in chicken muscle development and suggested it has protein-coding potential in different species.