Institute of Plant Biology and Biotechnology

Plant Responses to Heavy Metal Stress: Molecular Mechanisms, Transcriptomic Regulation, and Multi-Omics Integration in Crop Improvement

Heavy-metal contamination poses a serious threat to plant growth, productivity, and resilience, as it causes complex changes in cellular homeostasis, redox balance, element transport, and metabolism. This review summarizes current understanding of the molecular mechanisms by whic...

GWAS-Derived Marker–Trait Associations and KASP Marker Development for Barley Breeding in Kazakhstan: Achievements, Limitations, and Future Prospects

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) link germplasm diversity to molecular markers for crop improvement. This review synthesizes nine barley GWAS articles and two articles on the development or validation of GWAS-derived Kompetitive Allele-Specific PCR (KASP) assays relevant to...

Genome-Wide SNP Characterisation of Three Kazakh Sheep Breeds: Kazakh Fat-Tailed Coarse-Wool, Degeres, and Etti Merino

Kazakhstan’s sheep portfolio underpins much of the country’s mutton and wool production, yet several of its principal breeds remain genomically uncharacterised. The aim of this study was to characterise the genomic diversity, population structure, and global phylogenetic placemen...

Molecular breeding for resistance against powdery mildew in tomato: an overview

Powdery mildew is a group of plant diseases caused by fungi of the Erysiphaceae family and threatening virtually all important crop plants. The main causative agents of powdery mildew in tomato are the fungi Leveilula taurica and Erysiphe neolycopersici . The genetic basis of tom...

Vascular Plant Flora of the Koktau Mountains (Kalba Ridge): Diversity, Phytogeographical Relationships, and Conservation Significance in the Kazakhstan Altai

The Koktau Mountains, located within the Kalba Highlands of Eastern Kazakhstan, represent an important yet insufficiently studied center of plant diversity in the Kazakhstan Altai. Field surveys conducted between 2018 and 2025 yielded more than 2700 herbarium specimens and were c...

Machine Learning-Guided Stress Atlases Reveal Co-Expression Rewiring and Divergent Cellular Deployment of Abiotic Stress Programs in Rice and Wheat

Abiotic stress limits cereal productivity, yet whether conserved stress-responsive genes retain similar transcriptional network organization and cellular deployment across cereal species remains unknown. Here, we developed a machine learning-guided comparative framework to integr...

Exploratory SSR-Based Assessment of Genetic Diversity and Differentiation Among Four Wild Almond Populations in Kazakhstan

Wild almond relatives are valuable reservoirs of allelic variation for crop improvement and conservation, yet Kazakhstan’s wild-almond genetic resources remain poorly characterised. We conducted an exploratory SSR assessment of 80 putative individuals from four taxon-locality gro...