Scientists from the University of Glasgow have discovered a safe and novel method that can safeguard important crops from the widespread bacterial disease caused by Pseudomonas syringae (Ps). Ps infects a wide range of crop species worldwide including tomato, kiwifruit, pepper, olive, soybeans, and fruit trees. Plant diseases result to massive economic losses, …
Researchers at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire have discovered a gene that controls the regulation of iron uptake in plants. The newly-discovered gene, known as Upstream Regulator of IRT1 (URI), controls when genes should be expressed in plant roots to begin iron uptake. According to the team, URI controls as …
A team of 12 students from the Department of Biotechnology and Food Engineering at Israel’s the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology has developed a bee-free honey produced by the bacterium Bacillus subtilis, which “learns” to make honey following reprogramming in a lab. For the project they named BeeFree, the …
Many of us think about pollen only when allergy season is upon us. However, for soil scientists pollen can be an invaluable tool. By tracking fossil pollen in soil, scientists can look back in time to better understand past land use and climate dynamics. For example, when European settlers cleared …
Arsenic-contaminated soil and groundwater pose risks to millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Cleaning up the toxic metal is a laborious and expensive process, with some remediations of arsenic reaching into the hundreds of millions of dollars. A fern—Pteris vittata, also known as the Chinese brake …
It’s been known for centuries that plants produce a diverse array of medically-valuable chemicals in their roots. The benefits for human health are clear, but it’s been less apparent how and why plants expend 20 percent of their energy building these exotic chemicals. Is it for defence? Is it waste? …
Тwo laboratories, leaders in different scientific fields – Prof. Dr Roumiana Tsenkova (Kobe University, Japan) performing in-vivo non-destructive near infrared (NIR) spectral monitoring of living systems and Prof. Dr Dimitar Djilianov (Agrobioinsitute, Sofia, Bulgaria) working on resurrection plants, especially H. rhodopensis joined their efforts to uncover the mechanisms of extreme …
The Earth is now greener than it was two decades ago, according to the satellites of US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Data from NASA satellites revealed that China and India are the leading countries in terms of increased greening on lands. This is attributed to the ambitious tree …
An article published recently in the Open-Access journal GigaScience provides data that effectively triples the number of plant species with available genome data. This mammoth amount of work comes on the back of the growing efforts of the scientific community to sequence more plant genomes to aid in understanding their …
Researchers from the Salk Institute for biological studies, USA used the latest DNA sequencing technologies to study exactly what happens at a molecular level when new genes are inserted into plants. Scientists usually rely on Agrobacterium tumefaciens when they want to put a new gene into a plant. Decades ago, …
