August 2018

A 16-post collection

'Green'-Feed: Industrial Microbes Could Feed Cattle & Chicken

Deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, nitrogen pollution -- today's agricultural feed cultivation for cattle, pigs and chicken comes with tremendous impacts for the environment and climate. Cultivating feed in industrial facilities instead of on croplands might help to alleviate the critical implications in the agricultural food supply chain. Protein-rich »

Purdue Study Finds Key to Plant Growth Mechanism

A study from Purdue University led by Daniel Szymanski has mapped a complex series of pathways that control the shape of plant cells. The research team used the model plant Arabidopsis to map the complex pathways that control plant cell shape. The findings may be a key to improving the »

Sugarcane Genome Has Finally Been Sequenced

An international team coordinated by the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD) has released the genome sequence of sugarcane. The sugarcane's genome is so complex that conventional sequencing techniques were proven useless. It comprises between 10 and 12 copies of each chromosome, when the human genome has just »

Rice with Fewer Stomata: Better Suited for Climate Change

Rice plants engineered to have fewer stomata -- tiny openings used for gas exchange -- are more tolerant to drought and resilient to future climate change, a new study has revealed. Scientists from the University of Sheffield have discovered that engineering a high-yielding rice cultivar to have reduced stomatal density, »

Gene Pyramiding with Use of Innovative Technique at Molecular Level

Developing elite breeding lines and varieties often requires plant breeders to combine desirable traits from multiple parental lines, particularly in the case of disease resistance. The process of combining traits, known as gene pyramiding, can be accelerated by using molecular markers to identify and keep plants that contain the desired »