Phytophthora root and stem rot is the most destructive soybean soil-borne disease worldwide and can be managed using soybean cultivars with genes conferring resistance to <i>Phytophthora sojae</i>. Here we show that soybean <i>Rps11</i> is an ~27-kb nucleotide-binding site leucine-rich repeat (NLR) gene that confers broad-spectrum resistance to the pathogen. This giant gene is located in a genomic region containing 12 unusually large NLR genes of a single origin and was formed by rounds of intergenic/intragenic unequal recombination that involves the promoter regions and the LRR regions. Comparison of the genomic region in the Rps11 donor line with its corresponding regions in 29 diverse soybean genomes revealed drastic regional diversification including NLR copy number variation ranging from 5 to 23, and absence of allelic copy of <i>Rps11</i> in all 29 genomes. This study highlights innovative evolution and complexity of an NLR cluster and enables precise selection of <i>Rps11</i> for cultivar improvement.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a major public health problem worldwide. Despite improvements in the diagnostic process and advancement in the treatment methods, the prognosis remains poor. To improve survival rates, it is important to identify people with the predisposition for CRC and to detect the potentially curable early stage of the disease. Furthermore, identifying those who would have an adverse clinical outcome associated with a particular chemotherapy would help to avoid redundant chemotherapy burden in patients and contribute to enhanced therapeutic efficacy, while minimizing treatment-related toxicity. The aim of the Thesis was to search for novel promising diagnostic, prognostic and predictive DNA-based biomarkers of sporadic form of CRC. As each patient is genetically unique, these biomarkers would aid clinicians in better diagnosis and/or in the selection of an optimal type of therapy for an individual CRC patient based on their molecular profile. In order to explore this issue, we investigated several candidate genes in healthy individuals as well as in newly diagnosed cancer patients. The major outcomes of this PhD study, which were fully reported in seven publications included in the present Thesis, are 1) The observation of several candidate single nucleotide polymorphisms in microRNA...