Peppers are a versatile, flavorful, and widely popular crop, used not only as a healthy food source but also for their medicinal properties. In a new study, an international team of researchers has sequenced the genomes of key cultivated and wild pepper species, offering unprecedented insights into pepper evolution, domestication, and genetic diversity.
The success of cacao cultivation depends to a large extent on functioning pollination. If there is a lack of pollinators, for example, this leads to lower yields – and thus to financial problems for farmers. A study has now investigated how the yield and quality of organic cacao can be increased – through a more efficient plantation design that’s taking ecological aspects into account. During research in Peru, the researchers identified pollination techniques that improved pollination success and produced higher quality fruit.
Rising sea levels due to climate change and artificial irrigation cause soil salinity to increase. This has a negative impact on agriculture, including viticulture. The plants die, yields decrease. Researchers have therefore studied a wild grapevine of higher salt tolerance. Their goal is to identify the genetic factors that make the grapevine resilient. They can then be inserted into commercial varieties, thus securing viticulture.
Researchers discovered a form of social immunity in wheat and rice. Disease susceptibility in wheat and rice is modulated not only by genetic resistance traits, but also by interactions with neighbouring plants of the same species. The findings, show that inter-plant cooperation can reduce disease susceptibility by nearly 90 percent in certain cases, as much as is conferred by a plant’s own resistance genes. The findings create new possibilities for improving plant resistance to disease and reducing the use of pesticides.
Biologists have found evidence for evolutionary “syndromes”—sets of traits that occur together—that help to explain how tomatoes first evolved their distinctive blend of color, sweetness, acidity and aroma. The research, not only shines a light on how fruits evolve in the wild, but will also be valuable to crop-improvement efforts aimed at breeding more nutritious and appealing varieties of fruits.
Farmers usually plant so-called cover crops after harvesting their main crop in the Fall. This prevents erosion of the soil and nutrient leaching. The roots of these crops also stabilize the structure of the soil. It had been assumed up to now that a mixture of different cover crops would result in particularly intensive rooting. However, a recent study found only limited evidence that this is the case. Instead, mixed cover crops grow thinner roots than when just one single type of cover crop is planted. This result was unexpected. It documents how little is currently understood about the interactions between plant roots.
Researchers have investigated how the behavior of an individual wheat plant under limiting light conditions influences the performance of the whole community. They assessed morphological and biomass phenotypes of single plants grown in mixtures under sunlight and a simulated canopy shade, and the relevance of these phenotypes for the monoculture community in the field.
The global demand for rice is projected to rise significantly by 2050, necessitating sustainable intensification of existing croplands. Now, researchers have made significant progress by developing deep-learning algorithms that can rapidly estimate rice yield through the analysis of thousands of photographs. The model exhibited high precision across diverse conditions and cultivars, surpassing previous methods, while effectively detecting yield differences between cultivars and also with different water management practices.
As climate change continues to pose severe challenges to ensuring sustainable food supplies around the world, scientists are looking for ways to improve the resilience and nutritional quality of potatoes. The team have created a potato super pangenome to identify genetic traits that can help produce the next super spud.
Maize roots secrete certain chemicals that affect the quality of soil. In some fields, this effect increases yields of wheat planted subsequent to maize in the same soil by more than 4%. While the findings from several field experiments show that these effects are highly variable, in the long term they may yet help to make the cultivation of grains more sustainable, without the need for additional fertilizers or pesticides.
