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. …
Researchers have developed a rain-resistant wheat variety using the CRISPR-Cas9 system. This breakthrough could lead to the development of better-quality flour. The study was published in Cell Reports. Since wheat is native to arid zones, it is vulnerable to humidity. When it rains for a long period before harvest, the …
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 …
The market for biologically-derived proteins is said to reach US$300 billion in the future. Currently, industrial enzymes and other proteins are made in large, expensive fermenting reactors, but using plants to produce them could reduce production costs by three times. Researchers at Cornell University and the University of Illinois have …
Compositional analysis of genetically engineered crops determines significant changes in nutrient composition as compared to its conventional counterpart. A article published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry presents the results of the compositional analysis of paddy rice, straw, and bran of biofortified rice (Golden Rice or GR2E) compared …
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 …
Psychologists and biologists from the University of Rochester, the University of Amsterdam, and Cardiff University conducted a study to answer the question “Would consumers eat genetically modified food if they understand the science behind it?” The result of their study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology says that the …
If there’s one thing potato plants don’t like, it’s heat. If the temperature is too high, potato plants form significantly lower numbers of tubers, or sometimes none at all. Biochemists at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have now discovered the reason why. If the temperature rises, a so-called “small RNA” blocks the …
