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In plants, the shoot apical meristem generates all of the above ground organs and meristem morphology may predict important agricultural traits. Here Leiboff et al. use high throughput phenotyping and a genome-wide association study to uncover genes associated with variation in maize meristem size.

The positive thermal expansion exhibited by most materials at increased temperatures is a severe issue for many high precision applications. Here, Xing and co-workers show that redox intercalation of Li ions into a ScF₃framework offers effective control of the thermal expansion for this simple material.

A directional electrodynamic decomposition method using a LaNiO₃ sacrificial layer is proposed for freestanding films. It boosts oxide film release rate to 600 mm² /min via electric field-enhanced adsorption energy and electron transfer.

The authors present a feasible strategy of anion-induced strain engineering to regulate the lattice structure and properties of super-elongated BiFeO₃ epitaxial films, revealing the correlations among lattice distortion, local electronic hybridization, and multiferroic properties.

Plant architecture transition is one of the great consequences during rice domestication. Here, the authors find that chromosomal deletions linked to the previously known PROG1 gene also participate in plant architecture domestication in both Asian and African cultivated rice.

Tannins in grains prevent sparrow consumption but cause bitterness for people with sensitive taste. A study uncovered genes controlling tannin presence in sorghum and revealed a coevolution among humans, sorghums and birds linked by tannins in African agroecosystems.

Zero thermal expansion (ZTE) alloys with multi-properties are important for high-precision applications, but scarce. Here the authors incorporate a boron-migration-mediated solid-state reaction to construct a dual-phase ZTE alloy with enhanced mechanical properties and cyclic thermal stabilities.

Zero thermal expansion materials play an increasingly important role in modern high-precision applications, but they are relatively scarce. Here, the authors achieve an isotropic zero thermal expansion with a very high toughness by manipulating chemical partitioning in chemically complex alloys.

Chuanqing Sun and colleagues show that the gene PROG1, encoding a zinc-finger protein, determines the erect growth habit in rice. Sequencing of 182 varieties of cultivated rice reveals an identical mutation in the PROG1 coding region, suggesting a common origin for erect growth during rice domestication.

Zero thermal expansion alloys have unique dimensional stability but suffer from inherent brittleness and compositional sensitivity. Here the authors present the one-step eutectic reaction approach to produce a dual-phase alloy with an axial zero expansion and promising mechanical properties.

Understanding high piezoelectricity in relaxors is challenging due to the heterogeneous structures. Here, the authors demonstrate that the competing local polar order-disorder state with balanced length and direction randomness is the key.

Negative thermal expansion alloys possess an important role in regulating thermal expansion. Here, the authors report a giant uniaxial negative thermal expansion, mainly driven by high-frequency optical branches, in metallic FeZr₂ from 93 to 1078 K.

A proof-of-concept study developed and validated a high-accuracy model to predict traits based on genotypes using data from a set of sorghum accessions, demonstrating a global strategy to assess and utilize the valuable germplasms in gene banks.

Nanosized ceria has conventionally been thought to have a cubic fluorite structure. Here, the authors use a combination of experiments and simulations to show that oxygen vacancies in ceria promote a charge-transfer induced phase transition from tetragonal to cubic.

A key step in domestication of cereals was loss of seed shattering. Jianming Yu and colleagues show that seed shattering is controlled by alleles at Sh1 in sorghum. The authors also identify an insertion in the ortholog of Sh1 in a shattering-resistant mutant in rice and orthologs of Sh1 located in two narrow quantitative trait locus (QTL) intervals that regulate shattering in maize. The data suggest parallel selection on Sh1 in the domestication of cereals.