Crops often face harsh growing environments. Instead of using energy for growth, factors such as disease, extreme temperatures, and salty soils force plants to use it to respond to the resulting stress. This is known as the “growth-stress response trade-off".…
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Farmers are becoming more involved than ever in the work of developing new, sustainable crop varieties, with a recent Alliance study showing how a “citizen science” approach for on-farm experimentation called tricot, generated agricultural data via local organizations in Central…
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Foxtail millet, Setaria italica, is one of the oldest and more resilient crops worldwide. Compared to rice and wheat, millet has excellent climate resilience and requires less fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation than mainstream cereals. In addition, millet-based foods are nutritionally superior…
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Flower and seed coat colour are important agronomic traits in chickpea that influence consumer preference. Based on their cultivation globally, this legume crop is categorized as “desi” or “kabuli”. Seeds of desi-type chickpeas are generally dark brown and angular with…
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Genebanks play an important role in the long-term conservation of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture. Out of 1,800 genebank collections worldwide, more than 600 are in Europe. This vast array of crop diversity can be exploited to make…
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Pre-treatment with ethanol activates molecular processes that could allow crops to tolerate a warming world. A dose of ethanol, better known as common alcohol, can enable plants to withstand heat stress that might otherwise kill them, biologists have found. This…
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A research group has developed a rapid breeding strategy to generate tomato lines with different colored fruits from red-fruited materials by CRISPR/Cas9-mediated multiplex gene editing.
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An international team of researchers has discovered exactly how peas have evolved and revealed the traits breeders can leverage to make them even better.
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As days grow colder and shorter, and many of us find ourselves entrenched in winter, you wouldn’t be mistaken for feeling a noticeable reduction in activity around you. However, in certain crops such as winter wheat and barley, this cold…
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Innovative experiments using temperature-controlled field plots have helped to explain the link between early winter temperatures and yield in some of our most marketable arable crops.
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