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High sunlight can raise plant growth rates but can potentially cause cellular damage. The likelihood of deleterious effects is lowered by a sophisticated set of photoprotective mechanisms, one of the most important being the controlled dissipation of energy from chlorophyll within photosystem II (PSII) measured as non-photochemical quenching (NPQ). Although ubiquitous, the role of NPQ in plant productivity remains uncertain because it momentarily reduces the quantum efficiency of photosynthesis. Here we used plants overexpressing the gene encoding a central regulator of NPQ, the protein PsbS, within a major crop species (rice)  to assess the effect of photoprotection at the whole canopy scale. We accounted for canopy light interception, to our knowledge for the first time in this context. We show that in comparison to wild-type plants, psbS overexpressors increased canopy radiation use efficiency and grain yield in fluctuating light, demonstrating that photoprotective mechanisms should be altered to improve rice crop productivity. Stella Hubbart et al. show that over-expression of the photoprotective protein gene psbS leads to enhanced canopy-level radiation use efficiency and grain yield in rice. The results demonstrate that alterations to photoprotection and light-harvesting processes could be used to improve yield in rice crops.

Photosynthesis is the light-driven process fundamental to life. Although widely studied, this process is still not well understood and there is a need to address the gap in the photosynthetic response of crop canopies towards the fluctuating light environment. Wheat and rice are the top two important cereal crops feeding the global population. The manipulation of a Photosystem II subunit S photoprotective gene, PsbS, in these crops would allow further understanding of how they respond to the canopy light environment in terms of non-photochemical quenching (NPQ). Spring wheat (cv 'Fielder') was transformed successfully to overexpress rice PsbS (Os01g64960). However, they failed to maintain the phenotype to T2 generation and no wheat plant homozygous for rice PsbS was obtained for further studies. Wheat canopy NPQ studies were made on a subset of genetically diverse (PSTails) wheat population. NPQ capacity and variations were greater at the bottom of the wheat canopy. In the screening of large wheat populations, a new parameter NPQ(T) proved useful as NPQ(T) midday measurements correlated negatively to total radiation use efficiency and biomass, and to some extent, correlated positively to grain yield. NPQ and its protective ability were studied at a rice canopy scale using established rice (cv 'Kaybonnet') PsbS overexpressor and RNAi lines. PsbS levels in rice can be overexpressed to benefit the crop canopies by reducing the risk of photoinactivation. Consistent with the results from wheat canopy study, the bottom of rice canopies also showed higher NPQ capacity and phototolerance. PsbS is known to play a photoprotective role but was recently suggested to control stomatal pore opening in tobacco (Głowacka et al., 2018). An experiment carried out under controlled environment showed that PsbS is not involved in stomatal regulation. However, there was some evidence that under a mild water deficit, rice overexpressing PsbS have slightly improved water use efficiency. Another study using nitrogen-fixing bacteria in rice (cv 'Valencia) showed that under no nitrogen treatment, there was some indication of improved photosynthesis (not significant). It was the first time that a 100% colonization of rice seedlings with Gd was observed.

Asian populations are currently underrepresented in human genetics research. Here we present whole-genome sequencing data of 4,810 Singaporeans from three diverse ethnic groups: 2,780 Chinese, 903 Malays, and 1,127 Indians. Despite a medium depth of 13.7X, we achieved essentially perfect (>99.8%) sensitivity and accuracy for detecting common variants and good sensitivity (>89%) for detecting extremely rare variants with <0.1% allele frequency. We found 89.2 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and 9.1 million small insertions and deletions (INDELs), more than half of which have not been cataloged in dbSNP. In particular, we found 126 common deleterious mutations (MAF>0.01) that were absent in the existing public databases, highlighting the importance of local population reference for genetic diagnosis. We describe fine-scale genetic structure of Singapore populations and their relationship to worldwide populations from the 1000 Genomes Project. In addition to revealing noticeable amounts of admixture among three Singapore populations and a Malay-related novel ancestry component that has not been captured by the 1000 Genomes Project, our analysis also identified some fine-scale features of genetic structure consistent with two waves of prehistoric migration from south China to Southeast Asia. Finally, we demonstrate that our data can substantially improve genotype imputation not only for Singapore populations, but also for populations across Asia and Oceania. These results highlight the genetic diversity in Singapore and the potential impacts of our data as a resource to empower human genetics discovery in a broad geographic region.