Researchers report that they can efficiently produce antifungal proteins in plants based on a modified tobacco mosaic virus. The results of this research, which could have a major impact in the agri-food industry, have been published in the Plant Biotechnology Journal. The fungi that cause diseases in plants, animals and …
Researchers have been using biolistics in delivering the genome editing complex in wheat due to difficulties in Agrobacterium-mediated genetic transformation in the species. However, scientists from Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences in China and colleagues overcome this limitation by successfully targeting three wheat genes using CRISPR-Cas9 delivered via Agrobacterium-mediated genetic …
A database that features the vast amount of research and development on biotech crops being conducted by public sector institutions and research centers around the world is now available. The database produced by CropLife International features the crops being developed in different countries, including the traits for each crop. The …
Researchers from Pennsylvania State University have fooled soybean plants into thinking they were under attack by temporarily silencing the expression of a critical gene. After selectively cross breeding those plants with the original stock, the progeny “remember” the stress-induced responses and become more vigorous, resilient, and productive. This epigenetic reprogramming …
Pineapple is the second most important fruit crop next to banana. Besides its economic benefits, it is also a model species for Crassulacean acid metabolism pathway of photosynthesis in plants. An available genetic transformation method is required to further improve and study this plant. However, Agrobacterium-mediated transformation in pineapple suffer …
The yield, quality, and market value of potato, the third most important crop in the world, is threatened by salinity and drought tolerance. Thus, researchers from National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Argentina developed a transgenic potato using the ABF4 gene in potato to improve the tuber yield and …
For the first time ever, an international team of scientists from Brazil, the United States, and Germany has created a new crop from a wild plant within a single generation using the modern genome editing process CRISPR-Cas9. The team used Solanum pimpinellifolium as the parent plant species, a wild tomato …
An international research team has found they can increase corn productivity by targeting the enzyme in charge of capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. This research is published in Nature Plants. “We developed a transgenic maize designed to produce more Rubisco, the main enzyme involved in photosynthesis, and the result is …
Potato’s tetraploid genome requires a more powerful genome editing system. Scientist Hiroaki Kusano of Tokyo University of Science and colleagues apply the translational enhancer dMac3 to the Cas9 expression vector to increase the amount of Cas9 proteins produced inside potato cells. dMac3 is a 161-bp region of the OsMac3 mRNA, …
Today’s kiwifruit contains about as much vitamin C as an orange. Its genome revealed that this extra boost in vitamin C is the result of the fruit’s ancestors’ spontaneously duplicating their DNA in two separate evolutionary events approximately 50-57 million and 18-20 million years ago. The kiwifruit (Actinidia chinensis) genome …
