Researchers at Canada’s Western University and Suncor have teamed up to produce serological test kits for COVID-19. They are developing algae as a production factory to make the necessary proteins to identify COVID-19 antibodies in people who were previously infected with the disease. Large-scale development of serological tests is limited …
An international research team led by scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has produced the first comprehensive map of the proteome of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. The team has mapped around 18,000 of all the proteins found in the plant. Proteins are the main molecular players in …
A research team at the University of Toronto in Canada has successfully tested a new strategy to identify genetic resources in the ongoing battle against plant pathogens such as bacteria, fungi, and viruses, which infect and destroy food crops worldwide. The team led by David Guttman and Darrell Desveaux wanted to know how plants …
Scientists from the University of Würzburg, Germany and partners are exploring on the capability of modified plants to store more carbon dioxide, which can possibly slow down climate change. Their findings are published in Trends in Biotechnology. Excessive carbon dioxide released through the soil and vegetation respiration that is not absorbed by plants through photosynthesis fuels global …
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? …
