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 …
A team of researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) Okanagan Campus has sequenced the genome of lavender. Lavender has many uses, from essential oils to fragrances, personal hygiene, and pharmaceutical industries. This is the reason why scientists want to get to the root of lavender’s secrets. Lavender is …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
