An international research consortium is developing disease-resistant rice varieties. In the scientific journal eLife, the authors now report on the discovery of a recent bacterial outbreak in Tanzania – and describe how they modified an African rice variety to make it resistant to the pathogen.
In a new study researchers have developed new approaches to compare and investigate the ability of plants in the genus Amorphophallus to produce their own heat, exploring the highly varied temperature patterns and their evolutionary significance.
Scientists have trained AI to unlock data from millions of plant specimens kept in herbaria around the world, to study and combat the impacts of climate change on flora.
A tiny mutation in the genetic material of barley ensures that those plants develop faster and thus flower earlier than established barley varieties. At the same time, plant yields remain the same. According to the researchers, this is advantageous as the plants could potentially adapt better to the effects of climate change and continue to produce stable harvests.
Adding silicon to soil could help protect canola from clubroot. Treatment may also help crops weather drought and extreme heat, researchers find.
Hybrids — common in agriculture as well as in nature — have chromosomes from two or more parent species. In some cases, including strawberries, goldfish and several other species, these disparate parental chromosomes become doubled, a condition known as allopolyploidy. A recent article outlines a way to trace these genomes back to the polypoid hybrid’s parent species.
Worldwide, farmers are being challenged with a variety of issues, including growing populations, a changing climate and soil degradation, among many others. To combat these challenges, researchers are looking for solutions and have begun to focus their work on the viability of sustainable agriculture practices, like cover crops.
There are flowering plants that have the ability to self-pollinate, meaning that they can fertilise themselves without a partner. However, selfing also has clear negative consequences for the plants – first and foremost the loss of genetic variability and biological fitness of the species. Thus, many flowering plants have mechanisms in place to prevent selfing, for example by recognising and rejecting their own pollen.
Researchers have discovered that the green color of soybean pods is due to chlorophyll, which plays a crucial role in the plant’s photosynthetic process. The study found that pod and seed photosynthesis contribute significantly to soybean yield, challenging conventional notions about the importance of leaves. This finding offers new insights for optimizing plant productivity and increasing food production.
Paleobotanists have made an important breakthrough in understanding the origin and geographic distribution of cycads. By combining genetic data with leaf morphological data from both fossil and living species for the first time, the researchers created a phylogenetic tree of these fascinating and endangered plants.
