Researchers from the International Rice Research Institute and Oklahoma State University reported a gene (B5) that could provide cotton plants with broad-spectrum resistance to bacterial blight. Their findings are published in Phytopathology. Bacterial blight is a destructive disease that impacts cotton plants. A few effective ways to combat bacterial blight »
Researchers from the University of Freiburg, Germany, and partners developed a method called T-CAST to identify and mitigate off-target effects of TALENs. The details of the technique is published in Frontiers in Genome Editing. T-CAST is based on a technique called CAST-Seq, which can be used to sequence all of »
In sub-Saharan Africa, 80% of agricultural production is from smallholder farmers, who face constraints on increasing farm productivity resulting in a large yield gap. Extensive rain-fed agriculture (90% of all cropland) under unpredictable and erratic rainfall pattern is a leading cause of the low productivity and food insecurity in Africa, »
Researchers from the Institute of Plant Sciences (IPS) at the University of Bern have shown that specialized metabolites secreted by maize roots affect the quality of soil and in some fields, this effect increases the yields of wheat planted after maize in the same soil by more than 4%. It »
New research conducted by scientists at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and Cornell University successfully produced fertile hybrid offspring in soybeans using a biotechnology approach. The study published in the Plant Biotechnology Journal revealed that obligate outcrossing with the Barnase/Barstar lines can amplify hybrid seed sets and enable »
Scientists from McGill University are looking for ways to improve the resilience and nutritional quality of potatoes. The research team led by Professor Martina Strömvik has created a potato super pangenome to identify genetic traits that can help produce the next super potato. Strömvik and her team assembled the genome »
Recent advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, particularly deep learning with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), offer promising solutions. To explore the scope of this new technology, researchers from Japan conducted a study focusing on rice. They used ground-based digital images taken at harvesting stage of the crop, combined with »
Monitoring dairy calves with precision technologies based on the "internet of things," or IoT, leads to the earlier diagnosis of calf-killing bovine respiratory disease, according to a new study. The novel approach -- a result of crosscutting collaboration by a team of researchers from Penn State, University of »
Scientists from the University of Leipzig and the University of Vilnius created a new method that can track the gene scissors of CRISPR-Cas with the finest resolution in real time. This technique can also be utilized in various CRISPR-Cas complexes or biomolecules. During gene recognition, the DNA of the target »
Scientists finally uncovered the mechanism behind the mutation in tomato that causes the plant's inability to sense gravity. But more interestingly, the mutated tomatoes, known as adpressa, were also found to be completely resistant to the disease known as blossom-end rot (BER). The scientific team led by experts from the »
Plants form alliances with microbes in the soil in which they grow. Legumes, for example, benefit from a symbiotic relationship with microbes that inhabit nodules in their roots and "fix" nitrogen in the atmosphere to make it available to promote the legumes' growth. But are microbes always beneficial »
