Heliosperma includes about 20 taxa which are divided into alpestre, macranthum and pusillum clades based on nuclear and plastid data. Based on microstructural qualitative and quantitative seed characters of H. macranthum, H. alpestre and of nine Balkan species, we found that the species assigned to the pusillum clade are highly variable and differ from H. alpestre and H. pusillum subsp. pusillum. Two low elevation species (H. retzdorffianum and H. nikolicii) were clearly separated from the H. pusillum group, which includes alpine taxa. Newly described characters of the seeds, e.g. two hilum chambers, two rows in crest and black colour could be treated as characteristic for lowland endemics. Microstructural differences in seed character of Heliosperma species seems to be mainly driven by ecological factors resulting from the elevation gradients. Pollen is undifferentiated between species, its viability (stainability) is high, chromosome number is 2n = 26, which differs from the number reported so far (2n = 24).

It remains an open question whether violets use universal mechanisms, such as the production of metallothioneins, phytochelatins, and organic acids and/or rely on specific mechanisms like the production of antimicrobial cyclic peptides (cyclotides) for heavy metal tolerance. To contribute to the understanding of the role of cyclotides, we used seed-derived plants from metallicolous (M) and non-metallicolous (NM) populations of Viola tricolor, a pseudometallophyte tolerant to Zn and Pb. Eight- to ten-week-old plants were treated with 1000 μM of Zn or Pb for 3 or 7 days and subsequently measured for cyclotides and heavy metal content using MALDI-MS and Atomic Absorption Spectrometry (AAS), respectively. Individuals from the M population accumulated a similar amount of Zn but occasionally more Pb in comparison with the NM population. Of the 18 different cyclotides included in the analysis, some showed statistically significant changes under the heavy metal treatment. In general, a decrease was observed in the M population, whereas an increase was observed in the NM population (except for the 3-day treatment with Zn). The day of treatment and dose of metal and their interaction played a crucial role in the explained variance for cyclotides produced by the M individuals but not for the NM plants. This unravels the importance of this antimicrobial compound in heavy metal tolerance and indicates that, in V. tricolor, cyclotides are involved in heavy metal tolerance, but specimens from two populations have developed different strategies and tolerance mechanisms involving cyclotides to mitigate heavy metal stress.

Cadmium (Cd) and lead (Pb) contamination may alter common buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum Moench cv. ‘Korona’) physiology and composition. The objective was to determine whether common buckwheat maintains physiological performance under controlled Cd and Pb exposure while assessing metal transfer to harvested achenes. A 12-day in vitro phytotoxicity assay based on seed germination and root elongation and a six-week pot experiment were conducted. Cd had a stronger impact on in vitro seed germination and root growth than Pb. Under the highest metal treatments, soil concentrations reached 14,733.98 µg g⁻¹ DW for Cd and 5621.60 µg g⁻¹ DW for Pb; concentrations in leaves and achenes were substantially lower, although Cd transfer to the achenes remained relevant to food safety. Adult plants showed no consistent treatment-related changes in leaf water content, photosynthetic pigments, or F_v/F_m. Biochemical analyses detected treatment effects in proline, H₂O₂, SOD, CAT, and total phenolics. The treatment with 1000 mg L⁻¹ of Cd showed the highest leaf SOD activity and mature-achene total phenolic content. The largest observed compositional difference was the high lysine content under 5000 mg L⁻¹ of Cd in leaves and mature achenes, but this coincided with substantial Cd contamination and therefore cannot be interpreted as biofortification or a nutritional benefit. Overall, responses were non-monotonic and organ-specific, indicating substantial physiological adjustment during short-term exposure while confirming Cd transfer to mature achenes as a food-safety concern.

Multi-omics integration, the joint analysis of two or more high-dimensional molecular data types collected on the same biological samples, is now a standard analytical approach across nutrigenomics, toxicogenomics, microbiome research, and disease genomics. Existing methods sit on a trade-off between expressiveness and interpretability: latent-variable methods such as MOFA and DIABLO yield compact, biologically interpretable signatures but assume a restrictive linear structure; tree ensembles such as Random Forests achieve strong predictive performance but resist mechanistic interpretation; deep neural networks combine the drawbacks of both, with large numbers of opaque weights and no built-in feature selection. I ask whether the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH), the conjecture that a randomly initialised dense network contains a sparse subnetwork that matches its accuracy when trained from the original initialisation, can help reconcile this trade-off in the multi-omics setting. I apply Iterative Magnitude Pruning with weight rewinding for 25 rounds (cumulative sparsity 99.6%) on a multi-input fused multi-layer perceptron across eight datasets spanning four biological domains (n=40 to n=1,492), with 5-fold outer cross-validation and inner-validation winning-ticket selection to avoid test-set leakage. On the largest task, TCGA Pan-Cancer (4-class tissue-of-origin, n=1,492), a 2,952-weight subnetwork (83% sparsity) reached 84% +/- 3% test accuracy compared with 86% +/-2 % for the dense network. Pruning improved test accuracy on two TCGA staging tasks (TCGA-LUAD: 51% ± 1% vs 45% ± 5%; TCGA-KIRC: 50% ± 4% vs 48% ± 7%). Networks compressed by 6× to 270× while retaining task-level signal on well-specified tasks. I suggest LTH as a domain-agnostic, prior-free option for sparse neural integration of multi-omics data, complementary to graph-based and pathway-constrained methods.