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\"Few guide books are as honest as Make Your Movie. The film industry is one of the hardest to break into and it's important to anticipate the major setbacks that can manifest. The book offers ways to cope with creative and financial difficulties as well as how to adequately put your work out there.\" -International Business Times \"Regardless if one wants to make it in the industry or not, Make Your Movie is a book that every filmmaker should read. Make Your Movie is bound to help you make a great film, hone your skill set or even get you a job. Focal Press makes some really great text books on filmmaking, but Barbara Doyle’s Make Your Movie is like an encyclopedia, enclosed in a small book. Highly Recommended!\" -Film Monthly, www.filmmonthly.com

Hemp ( Cannabis sativa L.) is a multipurpose crop with many important uses including medicine, fibre, food and biocomposites. This plant is currently gaining prominence and acceptance for its valuable applications. Hemp is grown as a cash crop for its novel cannabinoids which are estimated to be a multibillion-dollar downstream market. Hemp cultivation can play a major role in carbon sequestration with good CO 2 to biomass conversion in low input systems and can also improve soil health and promote phytoremediation. The recent advent of genome editing tools to produce non-transgenic genome-edited crops with no trace of foreign genetic material has the potential to overcome regulatory hurdles faced by genetically modified crops. The use of Artificial Intelligence - mediated trait discovery platforms are revolutionizing the agricultural industry to produce desirable crops with unprecedented accuracy and speed. However, genome editing tools to improve the beneficial properties of hemp have not yet been deployed. Recent availability of high-quality Cannabis genome sequences from several strains (cannabidiol and tetrahydrocannabinol balanced and CBD/THC rich strains) have paved the way for improving the production of valuable bioactive molecules for the welfare of humankind and the environment. In this context, the article focuses on exploiting advanced genome editing tools to produce non-transgenic hemp to improve the most industrially desirable traits. The challenges, opportunities and interdisciplinary approaches that can be adopted from existing technologies in other plant species are highlighted.

Strawberry is a high-value commercial crop and a model for the economically important Rosaceae family. Strawberry is vulnerable to attack by many pathogens that can affect different parts of the plant, including the shoot, root, flowers, and berries. To restrict pathogen growth, strawberry produce a repertoire of secondary metabolites that have an important role in defense against diseases. Terpenes, allergen-like pathogenesis-related proteins, and flavonoids are three of the most important metabolites involved in strawberry defense. Genes involved in the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites are induced upon pathogen attack in strawberry, suggesting their transcriptional activation leads to a higher accumulation of the final compounds. The production of secondary metabolites is also influenced by the beneficial microbes associated with the plant and its environmental factors. Given the importance of the secondary metabolite pathways in strawberry defense, we provide a comprehensive overview of their literature and their role in the defense responses of strawberry. We focus on terpenoids, allergens, and flavonoids, and discuss their involvement in the strawberry microbiome in the context of defense responses. We discuss how the biosynthetic genes of these metabolites could be potential targets for gene editing through CRISPR-Cas9 techniques for strawberry crop improvement.

Oomycetes are pathogens of plants and animals, which cause billions of dollars of global losses to the agriculture, aquaculture and forestry sectors each year. These organisms superficially resemble fungi, with an archetype being Phytophthora infestans, the cause of late blight of tomatoes and potatoes. Comparison of the physiology of oomycetes with that of other organisms, such as plants and animals, may provide new routes to selectively combat these pathogens. In most eukaryotes, myo-inositol 1,4,5 trisphosphate is a key second messenger that links extracellular stimuli to increases in cytoplasmic Ca2+, to regulate cellular activities. In the work presented in this study, investigation of the molecular components of myo-inositol 1,4,5 trisphosphate signaling in oomycetes has unveiled similarities and differences with that in other eukaryotes. Most striking is that several oomycete species lack detectable phosphoinositide-selective phospholipase C homologues, the enzyme family that generates this second messenger, but still possess relatives of myo-inositol 1,4,5 trisphosphate-gated Ca2+-channels.

The pathogen Phytophthora infestans is responsible for catastrophic crop damage on a global scale which totals billions of euros annually. The discovery of new inhibitors of this organism is of paramount agricultural importance and of critical relevance to food security. Current strategies for crop treatment are inadequate with the emergence of resistant strains and problematic toxicity. Natural products such as cinnamaldehyde have been reported to have fungicidal properties and are the seed for many new discovery research programmes. We report a probe of the cinnamaldehyde framework to investigate the aldehyde subunit and its role in a subset of aromatic aldehydes in order to identify new lead compounds to act against P. infestans. An ellipticine derivative which incorporates an aldehyde (9-formyl-6-methyl ellipticine, 34) has been identified with exceptional activity versus P. infestans with limited toxicity and potential for use as a fungicide.

The pathogen Phytophthora infestans is responsible for worldwide catastrophic crop damage and discovery of new inhibitors of this organism is of paramount agricultural and industrial importance. Current strategies for crop treatment are inadequate with limitations of efficacy and market alternatives. Ellipticines have recently been reported to have fungicidal properties and have been assessed against P. infestans growth with promising results. We hereby report a probe of the ellipticine framework to investigate the alkyl subunit and screen a set ellipticines and derivatives to identify new lead compounds to act against P. infestans. A series of ellipticinium salt derivatives have been identified with exceptional growth inhibitory activity and apparent lack of toxicity towards a human cell-line surpassing the effect of known and marketed fungicides. This report identifies the potential of this natural product derivative as a novel fungicide.

In eukaryotes, two sources of Ca2+ are accessed to allow rapid changes in the cytosolic levels of this second messenger: the extracellular medium and intracellular Ca2+ stores, such as the endoplasmic reticulum. One class of channel that permits Ca2+ entry is the transient receptor potential (TRP) superfamily, including the polycystic kidney disease (PKD) proteins, or polycystins. Channels that release Ca2+ from intracellular stores include the inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate/ryanodine receptor (ITPR/RyR) superfamily. Here, we characterise a family of proteins that are only encoded by oomycete genomes, that we have named PKDRR, since they share domains with both PKD and RyR channels. We provide evidence that these proteins belong to the TRP superfamily and are distinct from the ITPR/RyR superfamily in terms of their evolutionary relationships, protein domain architectures and predicted ion channel structures. We also demonstrate that a hypothetical PKDRR protein from Phytophthora infestans is produced by this organism, is located in the cell-surface membrane and forms multimeric protein complexes. Efforts to functionally characterise this protein in a heterologous expression system were unsuccessful but support a cell-surface localisation. These PKDRR proteins represent potential targets for the development of new “fungicides”, since they are of a distinctive structure that is only found in oomycetes and not in any other cellular organisms.

 This book is for anyone interested in the business of breaking into the movies. Learn who the key players are when it comes to getting a movie made and how to navigate the politics of filmmaking from start to finish, from first pitch to filling movie seats.