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Tag: "crop" at biology news

Metal homeostasis research in plants will lead to nutrient-rich food and higher yielding crops

...h as Iron and Zinc commonly limit plant growth and crop yields. Dartmouth Professor Mary Lou Guerinot is c...w in soils now considered marginal and to increase crop biomass in soils now in cultivation. Guerinot presented her findings 2 p.m. today (Wednesday, August...

Bacteria give up secrets in war waged on plants

...red its speckled head in tomatoes, causing serious crop loss. Scientist Sheng Yang He describes using P. syringae in the laboratory plant Arabidopsis to get a better understanding of how bacteria set up camp and destroy the plant's ability to fight infection in the July 14 issue of Science Magazine. He is...

New flood-tolerant rice offers relief for world's poorest farmers

...world. Approximately one-fourth of the global rice crop is grown inrain-fed, lowland plots that are prone ... of the rice crop. While rice is the only cereal crop that can withstand submergence atall, most rice varieties will die if fully submerged for too long.W...

Genetic snooze button governs timing of spring flowers

...ample, into flowering, a process that can ruin the crop by redirecting nutrients from the valuable root to the production of seeds and flowers. And although Amasino and his group have demystified some of the molecular underpinning of the familiar process of flowering, the biochemist emphasizes that much...

What's nature worth? New computer models tell all

...ature--through climate regulation, soil formation, crop pollination, flood protection, and so on--supports human welfare, and estimates its value in economic terms. Now, Costanza and his colleagues at UVM's Gund Institute for Ecological Economics have launched a project to solve a central problem that t...

Tropical forest CO2 emissions tied to nutrient increases

...al forests, a result of fossil-fuel combustion and crop fertilization activities, said Townsend. "Human activity has changed the availability of nitrogen all over the world, especially in the last 50 years," he said. "This study was surprising because of the large effect both of these nutrients had on the...

Researchers develop flood-tolerant California rice

...al disaster in many regions of the world, reducing crop productivity. While rice, the primary food for more than 3 billion people, thrives in standing water, it dies if it is completely submerged for more than four days. Water covering the rice plant reduces the plant's oxygen and carbon dioxide supplies,...

Bt cotton in China fails to reap profit after seven years

...her pests are now attacking the GM cotton. The GM crop is known as Bt cotton, shorthand for the Bacillus thuringiensis gene inserted into the seeds to produce toxins. But these toxins are lethal only to leaf-eating bollworms. After seven years, populations of other insects - such as mirids - have increas...

Food-crop yields in future greenhouse-gas conditions lower than expected

...ished in the June 30 issue of the journal Science, crop yields are running at about 50 percent below concl...id Stephen P. Long, a U. of I. plant biologist and crop scientist. FACE technology, such as the SoyFACE project at Illinois, allows researchers to grow cro...

A more powerful and efficient engine for rice: the C3-C4 challenge

...out is really supercharging the engine," said IRRI crop ecologist John Sheehy, convener of a workshop on C4 Rice ?Supercharging the Rice Engine, held at the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) on 17-21 July. "The photosynthetic process is the engine of growth for the rice plant,...

Bacteria beat the heat

...matic reactions in different applications, enhance crop production in areas subject to extreme temperature changes or create new resources for biofuel production that will not only provide more biomass per acre, but absorb more of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, as well."...

Value of services performed by insects tops $57 billion in US

...ly impact the economy." "In fact in many places - crop pollination, for example - the cracks in the infrastructure are already showing," says Vaughn. Using published data, Losey and Vaughan compared the values of each service at current levels of function to theoretical levels if these serves were absen...

Discovery may speed forest biotechnology

...types of breeding that has been common with annual crop plants, and this may open the door to important advances in intensive forestry and fruit tree improvement. Information of this type, researchers say, may also help scientists better predict how some types of trees and tree populations will respond t...

New crop of technology reveals plant health

...ogy and people to continuously assess the state of crop health. Using sensors, transmitters and specialist software, the system monitors the state of the crop on a plant-by-plant basis, in near real-time. PLANTS adhered to a broader vision where the virtual...

New organic substrate

... produce an organic substrate for use in intensive crop growth in containers. Moreover, this substrate has...he soil, as if it were manure being applied to the crop field. Defibreing the wood To obtain the substrate the same machinery is used for defibreing w...

Gene thwarts some pathogens, gives access to others, could save crops

...." The answers eventually could lead to increased crop yield and decreased produce loss due to Botrytis a...by Botrytis destroys about 10 percent of the grape crop annually and about 25 percent to 30 percent of tomato and strawberry crops in some seasons. It also ...

Molecule by molecule, new assay shows real-time gene activity

...rganism's long-term genetic repository, yields its crop of proteins. These random, or stochastic, bursts of protein expression are described in detail in a separate paper Xie and colleagues present this week in Nature. "Although central to life processes, the expression of many important genes takes plac...

Alternatives to the use of nitrate as a fertiliser

...ironment, does not produce the same growth in most crop plants as that when nitrate is used as a fertilise... to ammonium. However, the tolerance shown by some crop species such as the pea is of great interest due to the studies of the physiological, metabolic and ...

New possibilities to fight pests with biological means

...le gene, it might be useful for the development of crop plants with a better resistance to pests (PNAS, Early Edition, January 16-20, 2006). At least 15 species of plants are known to release scents after insect damage, thus attracting the enemies of their enemies. Scientists term this mechanism "indire...

Virginia Tech helping to develop higher quality, disease-resistant wheat varieties

... wheat varieties," said Carl Griffey, professor of crop and soil environmental sciences at Virginia Tech a...e resistant to powdery mildew, which causes annual crop loss of 10 to 30 percent in the Mid-Atlantic region. Researchers also will be identifying genes that...

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