Isochoric freezing is a pressure freezing technique that could be used to retain the beneficial effects of food storage at temperatures below their freezing point without ice damage. In this study, potato cylinders were frozen in an isochoric system and examined using full factorial combinations of three processing procedures (immersed in water, vacuum-packed and immersed in ascorbic acid solution), four freezing temperatures/pressures (-3 °C/37 MPa, -6 °C/71 MPa, -9 °C/101 MPa and -15 °C/156 MPa) and two average compression rates (less than 0.02 and more than 0.16 MPa/s). The effects of process variables on critical quality attributes of frozen potatoes after thawing were investigated, including mass change, volume change, water holding capacity, color and texture. Processing procedure and freezing temperature/pressure were found to be highly significant factors, whereas the significance of the compression rate was lower. For the processing procedures, immersion in an isotonic solution of 5% ascorbic acid best preserved quality attributes. At the highest pressure level of 156 MPa and low compression rate of 0.02 MPa/s, potato samples immersed in ascorbic acid retained their color, 98.5% mass and 84% elasticity modulus value. These samples also showed a 1% increase in volume and 13% increase in maximum stress due to pressure-induced hardening.

Due to a large and growing collection of genomic and experimental resources, Brachypodium distachyon has emerged as a powerful experimental model for the grasses. To add to these resources we sequenced 21 165 T-DNA lines, 15 569 of which were produced in this study. This increased the number of unique insertion sites in the T-DNA collection by 21 078, bringing the overall total to 26 112. Thirty-seven per cent (9754) of these insertion sites are within genes (including untranslated regions and introns) and 28% (7217) are within 500 bp of a gene. Approximately 31% of the genes in the v.2.1 annotation have been tagged in this population. To demonstrate the utility of this collection, we phenotypically characterized six T-DNA lines with insertions in genes previously shown in other systems to be involved in cellulose biosynthesis, hemicellulose biosynthesis, secondary cell wall development, DNA damage repair, wax biosynthesis and chloroplast synthesis. In all cases, the phenotypes observed supported previous studies, demonstrating the utility of this collection for plant functional genomics. The Brachypodium T-DNA collection can be accessed at http://jgi.doe.gov/our-science/science-programs/plant-genomics/brachypodium/brachypodium-t-dna-collection/.