A mechanism used by a fungal pathogen to promote spread of the devastating cereal crop disease, blast, has been revealed in fine detail.
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The central biocatalyst in photosynthesis, Rubisco, is the most abundant enzyme on earth. By reconstructing billion-year-old enzymes, a team of Max Planck Researchers has deciphered one of the key adaptations of early photosynthesis. Their results not only provide insights into the evolution of modern photosynthesis but also offer new impulses for improving it.
A research team has measured the dynamic leakiness of CO2 from C4 plants. Previous studies had measured the leakiness under steady-state conditions, but this group took the measurements to prove that leakiness can and should be measured as a dynamic parameter.
Biologists have revealed how plants suppress the formation of stomata, the microscopic pores on their surface, to limit water loss during drought conditions.
Flower and seed coat colour are important agronomic traits in chickpea that influence consumer preference. Based on their cultivation globally, this legume crop is categorized as “desi” or “kabuli”. Seeds of desi-type chickpeas are generally dark brown and angular with a rough seed coat, while the kabuli type produces light-brown coloured and rounded seeds with smooth seed coats. Recently, a group of scientists in India successfully developed a new genetically engineered selection marker-free stable chickpea line.
Biologists often use green fluorescent protein (GFP) to see what happens inside cells. GFP, which scientists first isolated in jellyfish, is a protein that changes light from one color into another. Attaching it to other proteins allows researchers to find out if cells produce those proteins and where within cells to find them. This in turn shows how cells deliver and use genes.
Plant leaves can cope with much higher salt concentrations than roots. The underlying mechanism may help to develop more salt-tolerant crops. When there is a lack of water, heat or intensive irrigation, the level of common salt (sodium chloride) in the soil increases. However, most crops are sensitive to salt. They react to the increasing soil salinity by greatly reducing their growth. This leads to a reduction in the harvest.
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.
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.
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.
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