Alternaria blight caused by fungal pathogen devastates Brassica crops such as cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, and mustard seed. Highly infectious, this fungus can infect the host plant at all stages of growth. Currently Alternaria blight is managed by chemical fungicides, but recently efforts have been made to utilize breeding and modern biotechnological approaches to develop blight-resistant crop varieties.
Dissolved carbon in soil can quench plants’ ability to communicate with soil microbes, allowing plants to fine-tune their relationships with symbionts. Experiments show how synthetic biology tools can help understand environmental controls on agricultural productivity.
Plant breeders are always striving to develop new varieties that satisfy growers, producers and consumers. To do this, breeders use genetic markers to bring desirable traits from wild species into their cultivated cousins. Transferring those markers across species has been difficult at best, but a team of grapevine breeders, geneticists and bioinformatic specialists has come up with a powerful new method.
Experts’ interest in utilizing gene editing for the breeding crops has seen revolutionary growth. Meanwhile, people’s awareness for food safety has also been increasing.
According to a study, participants who had expert knowledge of molecular biology perceived emerging technologies to offer the lowest risk and highest benefits or value for food application, while lay public showed the highest risk and lowest benefit.
For long, it was assumed that cell death occurs mainly during animal organ growth but not in plant organs. A research group demonstrated now that the death of certain cells in the root facilitated the growth of lateral roots. These new findings hint at organ growth of plants and animals might not be so different as thought.
Researchers have discovered a new gene that improves the yield and fertilizer use efficiency of rice.
To successfully combat a crop-threatening disease, it may be more important to educate growers about the effectiveness of control strategies than to emphasize the risk posed by the disease, according to new research.
New research identifies a protein that controls plant growth — good news for an era in which crops can get crushed by climate change.
Researchers have found a way to improve the resilience of oilseed rape and reduce the estimated £100m annual loss to phoma stem canker, one of the most important winter diseases of oilseed rape in the UK.
Mycorrhizal fungi occur naturally in soil and are commercially available as soil inoculants, but new research suggests not all soybean genotypes respond the same way to their mycorrhizal relationships.
