A review for the breeding of orchids: Current achievements and prospects

Orchids are horticultural plants with significant ornamental and economic value.Increasing market circulation and rising trade in orchids is forcing breeders to develop varieties with unique characteristics,including flower color,morphology,and resistance using a range of approaches,including traditional and molecular breeding.Advances in high-throughput technologies have generated extensive data sets with greater sequencing depths and broader coverage,providing the potential for discovering new genes/pathways that give rise to key traits.Several attempts have been made to use emerging molecular and omics methods to accelerate the breeding process in certain of the commercially valuable orchids.This review consolidates current approaches and achievements in orchid breeding and discusses their future applications for improving the resistance,ornamental,and other valuable characteristics of these plants.

Advances in Breeding of Festuca arundinacea Schreb.

In this paper, domestic and foreign advances in breeding situation and conventional breeding methods of Festuca arundinacea Schreb. and the applica- tion of modem biological techniques （ somaclonal variation, somatic cell hybridization, genetic map construction, genetic diversity, gene cloning and expression, ge- netic engineering） in breeding of new varieties of F. arundinacea were summarized, which proposed new ideas for the development of F. arundinacea breeding and provided reference for breeding of new varieties of F. arundinacea.

AN ENSEMBLE FORECAST EXPERIMENT OF A LANDING TYPHOON

Based on the Global Regional Assimilation and Prediction System-Tropical Cyclone Model(GRAPES-TCM),an ensemble forecast experiment was performed,in which Typhoon Wipha during the period immediately prior to landfall was selected for the study and the breeding of growing mode(BGM) method was used to perturb the initial conditions of the vortex field and the environment field.The results of the experiment indicate that each member had a different initial status in BGM processing and they show a reasonable spread among members along with the forecast phase.Changes in the large-scale field,thermodynamic structure,and spread among members took place when Wipha made landfall.The steering effect of the large-scale field and the interaction between the thermodynamics and the dynamics resulted in different tracks of the members.Meanwhile,the forecast uncertainty increased.In summary,the ensemble mean did not perform as well as the control forecast,but the cluster mean provided some useful information,and performed better than the control in some instances.The position error was 34 km for 24 h forecast,153 km for 48 h forecast,and 191 km for 66 h forecast.The strike probability chart qualitatively described the forecast uncertainty.

Innovation of Super Early-Mature Millet Germplasm with Sweet-Stem and Multi-Spikes

A new millet (Setaria italica Beauv) variety, super early-mature millet No.1, was bred by means of gene bank breedingmethod of target characters. This variety has the following outstanding characters. (1) Super early-mature. This varietyonly needs 1550C effective accumulated temperature and can normally maturate in the Bashang Region in Hebei Provinceof Chi na, which can break through the limit zone of millet cultivation and move the cultivation zone northward greatly. (2)Multi-spikes, in addition to the effect tilling at the top, the nodes in the low-middle part also can produce spikes. (3) Sweetstem have high sugar content. The contents of whole-sugar, soluable sugar and deoxidized sugar are 74.8, 200.5, 237.2%higher than the regular varieties respectively. (4) High gross protein content. The content of gross protein is higher thanthe regular varieties by 3.9-30.4%. (5)Changeable grain color. The grain color of super early-mature millet No.1 is red inShijiazhuang, but yellow in the Bashang region. In addition, this variety is characterized by good quality, high yield, andgood synthetic traits