Rapidly expanding studies investigate the effects of e-commerce on company operations in the retail market.  However, the interaction between agri-food e-commerce (AEC) and the traditional agri-food wholesale industry (AWI) has not received enough attention in the existing literature.  Based on the provincial panel data from 2013 to 2020 in China, this paper examines the effect of AEC on AWI, comprising three dimensions: digitalization (DIGITAL), agri-food e-commerce infrastructure and supporting services (AECI), and agri-food e-commerce economy (AECE).  First, AWI and AEC are measured using an entropy-based combination of indicators.  The results indicate that for China as a whole, AWI has remained practically unchanged, whereas AEC exhibits a significant rising trend.  Second, the findings of the fixed-effect regression reveal that DIGITAL and AECE tend to raise AWI, whereas AECI negatively affects AWI.  Third, threshold regression results indicate that AECI tends to diminish AWI with three-stage inhibitory intensity, which manifests as a first increase and then a drop in the inhibition degree.  These results suggest that with the introduction of e-commerce for agricultural product circulation, digital development will have catfish effects that tend to stimulate the vitality of the conventional wholesale industry and promote technical progress.  Furthermore, the traditional wholesale industry benefits financially from e-commerce even while it diverts part of the traditional wholesale circulation for agricultural products.

Roots are vital for crop growth, development, yield and tolerance to various types of environmental stress.  Numerous genetic loci associated with soybean root morphological traits have been identified, but few genes associated with these traits have been identified.  In this study, seven quantitative trait loci (QTLs) containing stable SNPs significantly associated with the root dry weight in soybeans were identified through a genome-wide association study.  Among these QTLs, qRDW14-2 presented the greatest significance.  In qRDW14-2, the gene GmRGD14, encoding the lysophosphatidic acid acyltransferase LPAT4, was identified as a candidate.  GmRGD14, in block63, which contained the significant SNP S14_6521715, had the highest expression level in soybean roots, and its Arabidopsis homologous mutant lpat4 presented more lateral roots than did the control Col-0.  GmRGD14 was localized primarily to the cell membrane and endoplasmic reticulum.  The heterologous overexpression of GmRGD14 in Arabidopsis significantly increased the lateral root number, which was similar to the phenotype of atlpat4.  Furthermore, overexpression of GmRGD14 resulted in a greater total root length, root tip number, root surface area and root volume in the hairy roots of transgenic soybean plants than in those of WT soybean plants, whereas knockdown of the gene via RNA interference in soybean hairy roots resulted in the opposite phenotype.  GmRGD14, which is highly genetically variable in wild soybean, has been gradually utilized during soybean domestication.  Overall, this study revealed that GmRGD14 is a new key gene that plays a role in root growth, providing a new genetic target for breeding elite soybean varieties with strong root systems.