Research could lead to major improvements in crop production. The new study shows a new way to help study and ramp up photosynthesis. The breakthrough is based on revisiting an original, billion-year-old strategy in plants. It looks specifically at rubisco activity – a crucial part of the process according to authors.
Plant geneticists seeking to understand the history of the plants we eat can decode the genomes of ancient crops from rare, well-preserved samples. However, this approach leaves significant gaps in the timelines of where and when many modern-day fruits, vegetables, and cereal crops evolved, and paints an incomplete picture of what they looked like. A Science & Society article details a unique approach to filling these gaps using art–and calls on museum goers and art aficionados to help find paintings that could have useful depictions.
Vertical farms with their soil-free, computer-controlled environments may sound like sci-fi, but there is a growing environmental and economic case for them, according to new research laying out radical ways of putting food on our plates.
Microplastics, tiny plastic particles less than 5 millimeters in length, can now be found throughout the ocean and other aquatic ecosystems, and even in our seafood and salt. As microplastics have become ubiquitous, scientists have become concerned about their transfer from the environment to the food chain and their potential impact on human health.
Grapevine is infected by more than 90 viruses, with new viral species discovered yearly as a result of the newer technology introduced by High-Throughput Sequencing (HTS). Within the last decade, HTS is used for virome identification (the assemblage of viral genomes), which in turn helps plant pathologists with future research.
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.
