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 our crops more nutritious, productive and resilient to pests, diseases and environmental changes, only if we have information about it.
How lightning travels from the sky to the ground inspired the concept behind a new algorithmic approach to digitally separate individual trees from their forests in automatic forest mapping.
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 could offer a low-cost way to make crops more resilient to the effects of climate change.
Until now, the only way to learn about these traits from herbarium collections has required destroying bits of the precious specimens. But now researchers have developed a fast, nondestructive way of estimating the functional traits of herbarium specimens. The research, offers ecologists a powerful new tool for using biological collections to understand how plant communities change over time, providing insights into how we might best keep ecosystems healthy in the future.
A study shows that urban forests tend to group similar tree species together and rely heavily on introduced species, which may decrease resilience and reduce their benefits for people and animals.
Scientists have estimated the conservation status of nearly 1,900 palm species using artificial intelligence, and found more than 1,000 may be at risk of extinction.
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.
An international team of researchers has discovered exactly how peas have evolved and revealed the traits breeders can leverage to make them even better.
Doing research outside of the lab is important to career advancement in scientific fields like ecology, geology and paleontology, but it comes with a host of unique challenges. That’s why a team developed a guide for making fieldwork safer and more equitable, especially for researchers from marginalized groups.
Researchers have studied how certain bacteria perform photosynthesis using low-energy light, which could be engineered into crops to boost production. By studying the way two bacteria perform the difficult chemistry of photosynthesis, a team has discovered the trade-offs they make when using lower-energy light. This could inform plant genetic engineering that aims to make crop and biomass production more efficient.
