Guam is home to “Cycas micronesica”, an arborescent cycad species that is facing threats from several invasive insect pests. The once widespread tree has been decimated from the forests on Guam and the nearby island of Rota, leading the International Union for Conservation of Nature to list the gymnosperm tree species as endangered.
Findings pave the way for developing environmentally friendly fungicides. Fungal diseases cause substantial losses of agricultural harvests each year. The fungus Botrytis cinerea causing gray mold disease is a major problem for farmers growing strawberries, grapes, raspberries, tomatoes and lettuce. To mitigate the problem, they often resort to applying chemical fungicides which can lose their effectiveness over time.
Crop hybrid technologies have contributed to the significant yield improvement worldwide in the past decades. However, designing and maintaining a hybrid production line has always been complex and laborious. Now, researchers have developed a new system combining CRISPR-mediated genome editing with other approaches that could produce better seeds compared with conventional hybrid methods and shorten the production timeline by 5 to 10 years.
New research shows, in a world first, a recreation of the evolution of flowering plants through time – a complete angiosperm ‘time-tree’.
A new study has analyzed one environment-sensitive genic male sterile (EGMS) line that exhibited fertility transition under specified environmental conditions.
After several years of experimentation, scientists have engineered thale cress, or Arabidopsis thaliana, to behave like a succulent, improving water-use efficiency, salinity tolerance and reducing the effects of drought. The tissue succulence engineering method devised for this small flowering plant can be used in other plants to improve drought and salinity tolerance with the goal of moving this approach into food and bioenergy crops.
Many small regulatory elements, including miRNAs, miRNA binding sites, and cis-acting elements, comprise only 5~24 nucleotides and play important roles in regulating gene expression, transcription and translation, and protein structure, and thus are promising targets for gene function studies and crop improvement.
Scientists have helped find a way to control different plant processes – such as when they grow – using nothing but coloured light.
A research team’s model to explain photosynthesis lays out the next challenging phase of research on how green plants transform light energy into chemical energy
Alpine regions on the Tibetan Plateau are sensitive to climate change, however, little is known about their long-term hydroclimate variability due to short instrumental records. A research team established a 537-year standard shrub-ring chronology by cross-dating living and dead Wilson juniper shrubs sampled nearby the Nam Co Lake, on the south-central Tibetan Plateau.
