A team of 12 students from the Department of Biotechnology and Food Engineering at Israel’s the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology has developed a bee-free honey produced by the bacterium Bacillus subtilis, which “learns” to make honey following reprogramming in a lab. For the project they named BeeFree, the …
Many of us think about pollen only when allergy season is upon us. However, for soil scientists pollen can be an invaluable tool. By tracking fossil pollen in soil, scientists can look back in time to better understand past land use and climate dynamics. For example, when European settlers cleared …
Scientists from Rutgers University and around the world have discovered an antibiotic produced by a soil bacterium from a Mexican tropical forest that may help lead to a “plant probiotic,” more robust plants and other antibiotics. Probiotics, which provide friendlier bacteria and health benefits for humans, can also be beneficial …
Use of saline water to irrigate crops would bolster food security for many arid countries; however, this has not been possible due to the detrimental effects of salt on plants. Scientists have shown that saline irrigation of tomato is possible with the help of a beneficial desert root fungus. This …
Scientists from Brigham Young University (USA) have successfully inoculated alfalfa with salt tolerant bacteria, a breakthrough in the fight to reverse falling crop yields caused by increasingly salty farmlands around the world. The research team used bacteria found in the roots of salt tolerant plants to successfully inoculate alfalfa plants against overly salty soil. …
Protecting crops from pests and pathogens without using toxic pesticides has been a longtime goal of farmers. Researchers at Boyce Thompson Institute have found that compounds from an unlikely source—microscopic soil roundworms—could achieve this aim. As described in research published in the Journal of Phytopathology, these compounds helped protect major …
A global team including scientists from The University of Western Australia has assembled the first genome of the field pea, which provides insight into how the legume evolved and will help aid future improvements of the crop. The study, published in Nature Genetics, has important implications for global nutrition and …
New research from Washington University in St. Louis reveals the molecular machinery behind the high-intensity sweetness of the stevia plant. The results could be used to engineer new non-caloric products without the aftertaste that many associate with sweetener marketed as Stevia. Although the genes and proteins in the biochemical pathway …
An international team of researchers from Spain, Switzerland, Denmark, and Italy has sequenced the first complete almond genome. The sequence represents almost 95 percent of the genes, or nearly 28,000 genes and roughly 246 million base pairs. The sequencing project sought to find the genetic differences between bitter and sweet …
Arsenic-contaminated soil and groundwater pose risks to millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Cleaning up the toxic metal is a laborious and expensive process, with some remediations of arsenic reaching into the hundreds of millions of dollars. A fern—Pteris vittata, also known as the Chinese brake …
