Blue roses do not exist naturally, so florists put cut roses in dye to achieve blue-hued flowers. Also, in a painstaking 20-year effort, biotechnologists made a “blue rose” through a combination of genetic engineering and selective breeding. However, the rose is more mauve-colored than blue. Thanks to modern biotechnology, blue …
With scarce nutrients and weak gravity, growing potatoes on the moon or on other planets seems unimaginable. But the plant hormone strigolactone could make it possible, plant biologists from the University of Zurich have shown. The hormone supports the symbiosis between fungi and plant roots, thus encouraging plants’ growth—even under …
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 …
Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and… groundcherries? A little-known fruit about the size of a marble could become agriculture’s next big berry crop. To prepare the groundcherry (Physalis pruinosa) for mainstream farming, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Zachary Lippman, Joyce Van Eck at the Boyce Thompson Institute, and colleagues combined genomics …
Scientists from State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY ESF) state their plans on asking approval from U.S. regulators about breeding transgenic chestnut trees with non-engineered trees to restore the species. These transgenic trees are highly regulated in the U.S. and would be the first …
A plant that takes metal from the ground all by itself: a natural way to mine or to clean the soil. Ph.D. student Roderick Bouman described a new plant species from Sabah, Borneo, which can be used to extract nickel. In an open access article in Botanical studies, he and …
Information about the organization and evolution of plastomes is crucial to improve crop plants and to resolve the phylogeny of photosynthetic organisms. In a recent study published in PLoS ONE researchers of the Finnish Museum of Natural History, University of Helsinki, sequenced the chloroplast genome of a weed called bittersweet …
Highly complex interactions among roots, fungi and bacteria underlie the ability of some trees to clean polluted land, according to a novel study by bioinformatics and plant-biology experts from McGill University and Université de Montréal. Fast-growing trees, such as willows, are known to tolerate and even rejuvenate soil contaminated with …
Imaginature Ltd is a company specialized in cut-flower development. Recently, the company has applied for approval from the National Biosafety Authority (NBA) in Kenya for open field trials related to growing GM Gypsophila in the country. Usually the flowers of Gypsophila or also known as “Baby’s Breath” are white in …
International consortium led by a team from Wageningen University and Research – Netherlands, sequenced the genome of the resurrecting plant Xerophyta viscosa, which is capable to survive long periods of extreme drought conditions. Resurrecting plants are a group of species representatives of different genera which are distinguished by their ability …
