Authors report the assembly of the haplotype-resolved and telomere-to-telomere genome of a key rubber tree variety and uncover major structural variations. It is also revealed that jasmonic acid enhan...

VvPDS is an authentic trans-long-chain prenyl diphosphate synthase and is involved in ubiquinone 10 (UQ10) biosynthesis.

Abstract. Crop pests significantly reduce crop yield and threaten global food security. Conventional pest control relies heavily on insecticides, leading t

Transposable element (TE) annotation is crucial for understanding genetics, genomics and evolution, yet current methods struggle to identify TEs in graph-based pangenomes. We developed a framework Pan...

Abstract. Climate change presents significant challenges to agricultural suitability and food security, largely due to the limited adaptability of domestic

Traits that affect organismal fitness are often very genetically variable. This genetic variation is vital for populations to adapt to their environments, but it is also surprising given that nature (after all) ″selects″ the best genotypes at the expense of those that fall short. Explaining the extensive genetic variation of fitness-related traits is thus a longstanding puzzle in evolutionary biology, with cascading implications for ecology, conservation, and human health. Balancing selection—an umbrella term for scenarios of natural selection that maintain genetic variation—is a century-old explanation to resolve this paradox that has gained recent momentum from genome-scale methods for detecting it. Yet evaluating whether balancing selection can, in fact, resolve the paradox is challenging, given the logistical constraints of distinguishing balancing selection from alternative hypotheses and the daunting collection of theoretical models that formally underpin this debate. Here, we track the development of balancing selection theory over the last century and provide an accessible review of this rich collection of models. We first outline the range of biological scenarios that can generate balancing selection. We then examine how fundamental features of genetic systems—including non-random mating between individuals, differences in ploidy, genetic drift, and different genetic architectures of traits—have been progressively incorporated into the theory. We end by linking these theoretical predictions to ongoing empirical efforts to understand the evolutionary processes that explain genetic variation. ### Competing Interest Statement We declare no competing interests. Please note that this manuscript includes aspects of narrative review, but also new and confirmatory results that can be found in the Supplemental materials.

Effects of reproductive systems on crop genomic variation and breeding remain unclear. Here, the authors report that reproductive types impact genomic landscapes and grapevine breeding based on compar...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Short summary: By resequencing 314 diploid wild and landrace potato accessions, our study reports the domestication, differentiation and introgression of this important crop. Further analysis unveiled...

By constructing a graph-based grapevine pangenome reference (Grapepan v.1.0) and incorporating structural variations and phenotypic maps, the study investigates the genetic basis of agronomic traits, ...

A phased pangenome of potato constructed from 60 wild and cultivated haplotypes shows that substantial hybridization occurred during domestication and enables identification of many putative deleterious variants, providing a basis for the design of improved inbred lines.

Complete human recombination maps are presented that enable exploration of both cross-over and non-cross-over events during meiosis, with the potential to provide insight into the causes of aneuploidies and pregnancy loss.