Lixin Duan

TL;DR: Along the way, Shang et al. have worked out the biosynthetic pathway of cucurbitacin and discovered genetic traces of the domestication process and unraveled the mystery of why some cucumbers, if grown in chilly conditions, become bitter.

TL;DR: Comparison of the genomes of cucumber, melon and watermelon uncovered conserved syntenic loci encoding metabolic genes for distinct cucurbitacins and discovered a syntenic gene cluster of transcription factors that regulates the tissue-specific biosynthesis of cucurbits and may confer the loss of bitterness phenotypes associated with convergent domestication of wild cucurbits.

TL;DR: The phylogenetic analysis suggests that expansion of OSC members in higher plants has occurred mainly through tandem duplication followed by positive selection and diversifying evolution, and consolidated the previous suggestion that dicot triterpene synthases have been derived from an ancestral lanosterol synthase instead of directly from their cycloartenol synthases.

TL;DR: Molecular insights are provided into the evolutionary diversification of functional diterpenoids in plants and the correlation between conservation pattern and stereochemical product outcome of the CPSs observed here suggests a degree of correlation that, especially when combined with the identity of certain key residues, may be predictive.

TL;DR: AFLP based genetic fingerprinting and GC-TOF/MS-based metabolic fingerprinting were used to successfully discriminate the two species and the results of AFLP supported the opinion that Menggu Huangqi was a variant of Mojia Huangqi.