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 …
Researchers from the South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI) have created a new oat variety with high yield and increased beta glucan content. The new Kowari variety is of a dwarf-type, with an increased content of beta-glucan compared to other varieties. Beta glucans are natural sugar compounds that help …
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 …
Growing organic rice has the potential to become a market niche providing good purchase prices for the farmers, but growing organic rice requires much more than just sowing the seeds and letting the plants grow until harvest time. Scientists from Texas A & M AgriLife Research and Extension Center-Beaumont are …
According to the Agriculture Directorate of the European Commission, sunflower production in Bulgaria is expected to reach a 24-year peak of 2.08 million tons in 2017. The forecast sunflower seed output in Bulgaria in 2017 is 15.7% higher year-on-year, which is the highest growth rate among EU Member States, the …
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 …
The completion of the chickpea genome sequencing a few years ago opened new horizons for the scientists to both further study the function of the identified genes and for respective crop improvement based on the obtained knowledge. According to Bunyamin Tar’an, associate professor and chickpea breeder at the University of …
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 …
