A novel approach to synthetic biology could revolutionize how scientists improve plants for bioenergy and agriculture.
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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.
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.
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.
The cellular life inside a plant is as vibrant as the blossom. In each plant tissue—from root tip to leaf tip—there are hundreds of cell types that relay information about functional needs and environmental changes. Now, a new technology can capture this internal plant world at an unprecedented resolution, opening the door for understanding how plants respond to a changing climate and leading to more resilient crops.
In a discovery aimed at accelerating the development of process-advantaged crops for jet biofuels, scientists developed a capability to insert multiple genes into plants in a single step.
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