Chicory is a beautiful plant with blue flowers, but the interesting part is in the ground: the chicory taproots are a source of inulin, a natural sweetener that is used in bread and dairy products and as dietary fibre for healthy intestinal function. Researchers have now used a new breeding techniques to develop a chicory variety that no longer contains bitter compounds.
Recently, a group of scientists, successfully developed a new high-yielding transgenic desi chickpea variety. For that, they used the chickpea cytokinin oxidase/dehydrogenase gene expressed under the chickpea WRKY31 gene promoter.
Plant breeders around the globe have worked for decades to create peanut varieties that can fight off fungal diseases, and several have been successful. Now DNA detectives show how important peanut seed exchange is to food security.
New research sheds fresh light on plant chloroplasts, and the proteins inside them. The regulation of chloroplast proteins is important for plant development and stress acclimation and is increasingly significant as plants – including our staple crops, wheat, rice, barley – are having to respond to our changing environments.
Today’s cities don’t have walls for protection like ancient ones, but they are separate from less urban and rural land. Most goods that city-dwellers purchase are brought in from rural farms and manufacturers. There is an active community of urban gardeners and landscape architects who are trying to bring more of the “country” back into the city. And for good reason. Urban landscapes combining trees and crops – urban agroforestry – can offer ecological, cultural, economic benefits and more.
Pollinators – such as bees, butterflies and birds – are essential for agricultural production. However, natural pollination can also fail or be insufficient, which can lead to lower yields and poorer quality. This means alternative solutions are needed. Hand pollination, in which pollen is applied manually or mechanically to the flower, can supplement or replace pollination by animals.
It is commonly assumed that any important scientific knowledge would be available in English, and so scientific knowledge used in international studies is predominantly sourced from English-language documents. But is this assumption correct? According to new research the answer is no, and science written in languages other than English may hold untapped information crucial to the conservation of global biodiversity.
New study provides new target for increasing oil content of plant tissues for potential applications in bioenergy, chemical engineering, and nutrition.
Plants regulate their growth and development using hormones, including a group called strigolactones that prevent excessive budding and branching. For the first time, scientists have synthesized strigolactones from microbes.
A new method for quantifying plant evolution reveals that after the onset of early seed plants, complexity halted for 250 million years until the diversification of flowering plants about 100 million years ago.
