There’s a great photo on the cover of Plant Physiology this month.
The paper in question looks at the “ionome” of sorghum seeds. That’s a new one on me too. It’s the genes responsible for the accumulation of different elements in whatever tissue. The authors measured the levels of a whole suite of elements in the seeds of a carefully chosen set of very diverse, and equally carefully genotyped, sorghum accessions representing all races. By comparing phenotype with genoptype, they identified gene variants associated with high levels of zinc, manganese, nickel, calcium, and cadmium. Now breeders interested in biofortification know what to include in their crossing programs.