Cannabis sativa L. is a versatile crop attracting increasing attention for food, fibre, and medical uses. As a dioecious species, males and females are visually indistinguishable during early growth. For seed or cannabinoid production, a higher number of female plants is economically advantageous. Currently, sex determination is labour intensive and costly. In this issue, Matros et al. used rapid and non-destructive hyperspectral measurement, an emerging means of assessing plant physiological status, to reliably differentiate males and females.

Cover image: Photographic image of a dioecious Cannabis sativa L. plant showing a male plant of the cultivar HAN FN H at the time point of sex annotation (05/03/2020, nine weeks after sowing into the field).

Two rice genotypes were subjected to a moderate water deficit applied during the reproductive phase. Multi-level transcriptomic, metabolomic, physiological, and morphological analyses were performed to investigate the complex traits involved in their response to drought. A holistic analysis of these data allowed us to identify, for each genotype, underlying mechanisms participating in growth regulation under water stress.

We have investigated the possibility of utilizing the leaf spectral phenotype of nine distinct cultivars of Cannabis sativa L. for several differentiation tasks by means of machine learning algorithms. Our approach was proven valuable for the non-invasive assessment of the cultivar and nutritional status as well as for sex prediction very early during plant development under field conditions. We believe that this approach will improve the regulatory security and productivity across all cannabis production systems and discuss the possible monitoring of such traits in other crops.

We demonstrated that Halomonas ventosae JPT10 promoted the salt tolerance of both dicots and monocots. JPT10 could improve the antioxidant capability of foxtail millet and the levels of abscisic acid, indole-3-acetic acid, salicylic acid, and their derivatives but reduce the levels of 12-oxo-phytodienoic acid (OPDA), jasmonate (JA), and JA-isoleucine (JA-Ile).

Our results highlight the importance of selecting perennial ryegrass for agronomic water-use efficiency (WUEa) at the whole-plant level over its proxy measures for forage breeding purposes. The result was generated by key drought-tolerant trait associations linked to WUEa and reinforced by its higher genetic potential and repeatability compared with those of surrogate measures under the conditions tested.