On January 18, 2018, Advocate General (AG) Michal Bobek of the Court of Justice of the EU (ECJ) published his advisory legal opinion addressing whether and how organisms resulting from several conventional and newer breeding techniques should be regulated under the EU’s genetically modified organism (GMO) law. In his analysis, …
Parthenocarpy in horticultural crops is an important trait of considerable importance for various industries related to agriculture as well as food quality. A team of scientists led by Risa Ueta of the Tokushima University in Japan developed a strategy for breeding of parthenocarpy in tomato based on the CRISPR/Cas9 genome …
Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), USA have harnessed the still untapped power of genome editing to improve agricultural crops. Using tomato as an example, they have mobilized CRISPR/Cas9 technology to rapidly generate variants of the plant that display a broad continuum of three separate, agriculturally important traits: fruit …
Development of hybrids between indica and japonica usually leads to male-sterile plants, making it difficult to use the heterosis effect for breeding. The locus Sa consists of two adjacent SaF and SaM genes that interact with each other and lead to pollen abortion in plants bearing the japonica allele in …
In a recent study published in the Plant Biotechnology Journal, a team of Chinese researchers with Pengcheng Wang as a leading author from the Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, Hubei, China, presented a successful attempt to simultaneously edit several loci in the genome of cotton. For this purpose, the scientists have …
Double-cropped soybean (Glycine max) is often associated with restricted vegetative growth before flowering. This problem could be overcome by delaying the flowering of the plants. Recently a team of Chinese scientists from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences with Yupeng Cai as a leading researcher published a paper in Plant …
Citrus canker caused by the bacterium Xanthomonas citri subsp. citri (Xcc) causes significant damages to the citrus fruit industry on a global scale. A team of Chinese scientists with Xiuping Zou as corresponding author and Aihong Peng and Shanchun Chen as leading authors from the Citrus Research Institute at the …
University of Copenhagen and Bayer CropScience have successfully developed a new oilseed crop that is much more resistant to heat, drought and diseases than oilseed rape. The breakthrough was published in the journal Nature Biotechnology. The mustard plant is similar to oilseed rape in many ways. It looks like a …
It is known that cereals with high amylose and resistant starch content possess potential health beneficial properties. Important enzyme responsible for the branching of starch is the enzyme SBE (starch branching enzyme). A research team from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) with Dr. Yongwei Sun as the leading …
