#PHS gene prevents wheat from sprouting: Fewer crop losses anticipateda new study about the common problem of preharvest sprouting or PHS in wheat is nipping the crop-killing issue in the bud.
Researchers at Kansas State university and the U s. Department of agriculture-Agricultural research service or USDA-ARS found and cloned a gene in wheat named PHS that prevents the plant from preharvest sprouting.
Preharvest sprouting happens when significant rain causes the wheat grain to germinate before harvest and results in significant crop losses.
This is great news because preharvest sprouting is a very difficult trait for wheat breeders to handle through breeding alone said Bikram Gill university distinguished professor of plant pathology and director of the Wheat Genetics Resource Center.
With this study they will have a gene marker to expedite the breeding of wheat that will not have this problem.
Gill conducted the study with Guihau Bai a researcher with the Hard Winter Wheat Genetics Research Unit of the USDA-ARS adjunct professor of agronomy at Kansas State university and the study's lead author.
Also involved were Harold Trick professor of plant pathology; Shubing Liu research associate in agronomy; Sunish Sehgal senior scientist in plant pathology;
and Characterization of a Critical Regulator for Pre-Harvest Sprouting in Wheat appears in a recent issue of the scientific journal Genetics.
The finding will to be most beneficial to white wheat production which loses $1 billion annually to preharvest sprouting according to Gill.
He said consumers prefer white wheat to the predominant red wheat because white wheat lacks the more bitter flavor associated with red wheat.
Millers also prefer white wheat to red because it produces more flour when ground. The problem is that white wheat is very susceptible to preharvest sprouting.
There has been demand for white wheat in Kansas for more than 30 years Gill said. The very first year white wheat was grown in the state though there was rain in June
and then there was preharvest sprouting and a significant loss. The white wheat industry has recovered not
since and has been hesitant to try again. I think that this gene is a big step toward establishing a white wheat industry in Kansas. Gill said identifying the PHS gene creates a greater assurance before planting a crop that it will be resistant to preharvest sprouting once it grows a year later.
Wheat breeders can now bring a small tissue sample of a wheat plant into a lab
and test whether it has the preharvest sprouting resistance gene rather than finding out once the crop grows.
Much of the work to isolate the PHS gene came from Gill and his colleagues'efforts to fully sequence the genome--think genetic blueprint--of common wheat.
Wheat is the only major food plant not to have sequenced its genome. The genome of wheat is nearly three times the size of the human genome.
Researchers were able to study sequenced segments of the common wheat genome and look for a naturally occurring resistance gene.
Gill said without the sequenced segments finding the PHS gene would have been impossible. Story Source:
#Microbial team turns corn stalks and leaves into better biofuela fungus and E coli bacteria have joined forces to turn tough waste plant material into isobutanol a biofuel that matches gasoline's properties better than ethanol.
Lin's team used corn stalks and leaves but their ecosystem should also be able to process other agricultural byproducts and forestry waste.
and served up corn stalks and leaves. Colleagues at Michigan State university had treated pre the roughage to make it easier to digest.
They also converted a large proportion of the energy locked in the corn stalks and leaves to isobutanol--62 percent of the theoretical maximum.
Sugars derived from the grain of agricultural crops can be used to produce biofuel but these crops occupy fertile soils needed for food and feed production.
or various grass residues such as corn stover and sugarcane bagasse do not compete and can be a sustainable source for biofuel.
By measuring the vibrations between atoms using femtosecond-long laser pulses the Rice lab of chemist Junrong Zheng is able to discern the positions of atoms within molecules without the restrictions imposed by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging.
Zheng and his co-authors at Rice and Oak ridge National Laboratory analyzed variations of a model molecule 4#-methyl-2#nitroacetanilide (MNA) and compared the results with computer-generated and XRD models.
The Rice technique dubbed multiple-dimensional vibrational spectroscopy is able to capture the conformation of small molecules--for starters--with great accuracy Zheng said.
Hailong Chen a Welch postdoctoral research fellow at Rice is lead author of the paper;
Co-authors are Rice graduate students Yufan Zhang and Jiebo Li and Oak ridge researchers Hongjun Liu and De-en Jiang.
and wheat crops in South africa--the world's ninth largest maize producer and Sub-saharan africa's second largest source of wheat--would fare under climate change in the years 2046 to 2065.
while wheat output could increase by 6. 2 percent. Meanwhile the mechanistic model calculated that maize
and wheat yields might go up by 6 5 and 15.2 percent respectively. In addition the empirical model estimated that suitable land for growing wheat would drop by 10 percent
while the mechanistic model found that it would expand by 9 percent. The empirical model projected a 48 percent expansion in wheat-growing areas but the mechanistic reported only 20 percent growth.
In regions where the two models overlapped the empirical model showed declining yields while the mechanistic model showed increases.
These wheat models were less accurate but still indicative of the vastly different estimates empirical and mechanistic can produce the researchers wrote.
and wheat yields by 28 to 30 percent--according to empirical studies. Mechanistic models project a more modest 10 to 19 percent loss.
of which have been discovered over the past 30 years said Rice's Huey Huang the lead investigator of the study.
For example scientists have struggled to explain how different concentrations of melittin could yield such dramatically different effects said Huang Rice's Sam and Helen Worden Professor of Physics and Astronomy.
In the new study Huang and Rice graduate student Tzu-Lin Sun partnered with colleagues Ming-Tao Lee at the National Synchrotron Radiation Research center (NSRRC) in Hsinchu Taiwan
In the first type which was conducted at Rice the team used confocal microscopy to film giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVS) synthetic membrane-enclosed structures that are about the same size as a living cell.
Chow for the mice was a highly nutritious wheat-corn-soybean mix with vitamins and minerals.
For control mice corn starch was used as a carbohydrate in place of the added sugars. House Mice Behaving Naturallymice often live in homes with people
Fish meal was replaced with a food made of corn wheat and soy. Fish oil--expensive and scarce thanks in part to its popularity as a health supplement for people--was replaced with soybean
malt (isobutyraldehyde) apple (Î-damascenone) blue cheese (2-heptanone) and Î-ionone which smells floral to some people
#A glass of milk after eating sugary cereals may prevent cavitieswashing down sugary breakfast cereal with milk after eating reduces plaque acid levels
Dry ready-to-eat sugar-added cereals combine refined sugar and starch. When those carbohydrates are consumed bacteria in the dental plaque on tooth surfaces produce acids says Christine Wu professor of pediatric dentistry
The new study performed by Wu's former graduate student Shilpa Naval involved 20 adults eating 20 grams of dry Froot Loops cereal then drinking different beverages--whole milk 100
Pure water has a ph close to 7. Participants who drank milk after eating sugary cereal showed the highest ph rise from 5. 75 to 6. 48 at 30 minutes.
Eating sugar-added cereal with milk followed by drinking fruit juice is thus a highly cavity-causing combination Wu said.
and grain boundaries or interfaces Compression experiments on the nanostructures showed that the thinnest nanopillars remained almost cylindrical under low pressure
The nanopillars contain a high density of grain boundaries that promote the formation of dislocations. These dislocations through which a specific type of deformation develops propagate across an entire grain or from one grain to another inside the cores.
Close to the nanopillar surface the grains easily slide against each other to create atom-sized steps reducing material strength.
The new ant species are less than one-twelfth to one-twenty-fifth of an inch long--much smaller than a rice grain
which omega-3-deficient oils like corn and soy oil became prevalent and farm animals moved from eating grass to grain.
Since omega-3s are present in grass and algae much of today's grain-fed cattle contain less of these essential fatty acids.
The Pitt team administered a set of behavioral tasks to study the learning and memory decision making anxiety and hyperactivity of both adults and adolescents.
Avoid sugary cereals because they cause a sugar high then a crash. A balanced breakfast will fuel the body for a long period
and rice plants in their experiments observing the same results. Kepinski expects the same mechanism to be observed in larger plants and young tree seedlings.
and Cryb proteins have been engineered into food crops such as corn and rice to render them pest resistant.
As shown for the first time in this paper Cry5b can also be expressed in a species of bacterium Bacillus subtilis which is closely related to Bacillus thuringiensis and
and soil moisture have strong relationships to the yield of wheat and rice at harvest.
For example by looking at the temperature and soil moisture in June of a given year they were hoping to predict the success of a corn harvest in August and September.
The team studied four crops--corn soybeans wheat and rice--but the model proved most useful for wheat and rice.
Crop failures in regions of some major wheat and rice exporters such as Australia and Uruguay could be predicted several months in advance according to the study.
Farmers in the United states for example can grow about 10 times more corn per acre than farmers in Zimbabwe.
For particular crops in particular places it makes a huge difference especially with wheat Brown said.
For example if satellite data and climate models forecast a good season for rice before seeds are planted even farmers
In the paper researchers from Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) show two ways that solar steam can be used for sterilization--one setup to clean medical instruments
Sanitation and sterilization are enormous obstacles without reliable electricity said Rice photonics pioneer Naomi Halas the director of LANP
and lead researcher on the project with senior co-author and Rice professor Peter Nordlander. Solar steam's efficiency at converting sunlight directly into steam opens up new possibilities for off-grid sterilization that simply aren't available today.
Halas Rice's Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering professor of physics professor of chemistry and professor of biomedical engineering is one of the world's most-cited chemists.
Solar steam's efficiency comes from light-harvesting nanoparticles that were created at LANP by Rice graduate student Oara Neumann the lead author on the PNAS study.
The solar steam autoclave was designed by Rice undergraduates at Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen
Oden and Nordlander all of Rice. The research was supported by a Grand Challenges grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and by the Welch Foundation.
#Health risks from arsenic in rice exposedhigh levels of arsenic in rice have been shown to be associated with elevated genetic damage in humans a new study has found.
Over the last few years researchers have reported high concentrations of arsenic in several rice-growing regions around the world.
Now University of Manchester scientists working in collaboration with scientists at CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology in Kolkata have proven a link between rice containing high levels of arsenic and chromosomal damage as measured by micronuclei*in urothelial cells
in humans consuming rice as a staple. The researchers discovered that people in rural West Bengal eating rice as a staple with greater than 0. 2 mg/kg arsenic showed higher frequencies of micronuclei than those consuming rice with less than this concentration
of arsenic. The study published in Nature Publishing Group's Scientific Reports looked at the frequency of'micronuclei'--a telltale sign of chromosomal damage (that has been shown by others previously to be linked to cancer) by screening more than 400000 individual cells extracted from urine samples
They demonstrated that the trend of greater genetic damage with increasing arsenic in rice was observed for both men and women for tobacco-users and non-users and for those from three different locations within the study area.
The authors say their work raises considerable concerns about health impacts of consuming high arsenic rice as a staple particularly by people with relatively poor nutritional status--perhaps as many as a few hundred million people.
How directly relevant the results are to people in the UK with a generally lower consumption of rice
Although concerns about arsenic in rice have been raised for some time now to our knowledge this is the first time a link between consumption of arsenic-bearing rice
As such it vindicates increasing concerns expressed by the European Food safety Authority and others about the adequacy of regulation of arsenic in rice.
In the absence of contamination rice is stored an easily food that provides essential energy vitamins
and fibre to billions of people around the world but a small proportion of rice contains arsenic at concentrations at
We hope that our work will encourage efforts to introduce regulatory standards for arsenic in food and particularly in rice
Although high arsenic in rice is a potential threat to human health there should not be any panic about the consequences particularly as the health risks arise from long-term chronic exposure.
We can avoid high arsenic rice by taking proper mitigation strategies for rice cultivation; moreover one CSIR institute in India has identified already a number of Indian rice varieties
which accumulate lower concentrations of arsenic so we can easily address future human health risks with proper mitigation strategies Results of this study will not only help to understand the toxic effects caused by this human carcinogen
and regulatory authorities to design further extensive research to set improved regulatory values for arsenic in rice particularly for those billions of people who consume 10 to 50%rice in their daily diet.*
Rice scientists have spent decades designing components for the CMS and are now enjoying the chance to help analyze the results.
and that isn't news said Rice physicist Paul Padley a co-investigator on the CMS experiment
and a co-author of the new paper along with nine of his Rice colleagues. The news is that the Standard model has predicted that this B-sub-s meson will decay to two muons very very rarely and that is
Electronics invented at Rice help sort useful data about subparticles produced by the collisions from background noise.
Rice's contribution encompasses both the equipment used to spot the reactions and the analysis that led to the discovery.
Padley gave particular credit to Rice physics instructor Laria Redjimi. I worked on building the muon trigger
when updates to the collider--including CMS improvements provided by Rice--are complete in 2015.
As seen under a microscope the layers brought onions to mind said Rice chemist James Tour until a colleague suggested flat graphene could never be like an onion.
Under those conditions Tour Rice theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and their teams found that the entire edge of a fast-growing sheet of graphene becomes a nucleation site
Co-authors of the paper are Rice graduate students Yuanyue Liu Zhiwei Peng Changsheng Xiang Abdul-Rahman Raji and Errol Samuel;
Rice alumna Elvira Pembroke; and Professor Ting Yu of Nanyang Technological University. Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science at Rice.
Yakobson is the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Mechanical engineering and Materials Science and professor of chemistry.
Calculations were performed on the National Science Foundation-supported Davinci supercomputer at Rice the National Institute for Computational Sciences'Kraken and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center's Hopper.
and planted with wheat oats and peas. After growing wheat it remained largely unchanged and the microbes in it were mostly bacteria
However growing oat and pea in the same sample caused a huge shift towards protozoa and nematode worms.
Soil grown with peas was enriched highly for fungi. The soil around the roots was similar before
and after growing wheat but peas and oats reset of the diversity of microbes said Professor Poole.
After only four weeks of growth the soil surrounding wheat contained about 3%eukaryotes. This went up to 12-15%for oat and pea.
The change of balance is likely to be marked even more in the field where crops are grown for months rather than weeks.
The scientists also grew an oat variety unable to produce normal levels of avenacin a compound that protects roots from fungal pathogens.
#How rice twice became a crop and twice became a weed--and what it means for the futurethe evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once asked
One beautiful case of parallel evolution is the double domestication of rice in Africa as well as Asia
With the help of modern genetic technology and the resources of the International Rice Genebank which contains more than 112000 different types of rice evolutionary biologist Kenneth Olsen Phd associate professor of biology in Arts
and ask whether the same mutations underlay the emergence of the same traits in both cultivated and weedy rice.
because modern agriculture is radically changing the selection pressures acting on rice the most important food crop for most of the world's populations.
In some parts of the world farmers have given up trying to grow rice and just market the weedy stuff that's infested the fields as a health food he says.
You sometimes see red rice from the Camargue the delta region in southern France in stores he says.
Red rice is full of antioxidants which tend also to be plant defense chemicals Olsen says
Double domesticationworldwide most of the cultivated rice is Asian rice Oryza sativa which was bred from its wild progenitor Oryza rufipogon in southern Asia within the past 10000 years.
Whether the familiar indica and japonica subspecies of Asian rice also represent independent domestications is controversial.
Most of the rice grown in the U s. is japonica rice Olsen says which is genetically pretty different from indica rice the rice grown in a lot of the tropics.
In rice the syndrome includes loss of shattering (the seeds don't break off the central grain stalk before harvest) increase in seed size
One weedy strain resembles an Asian rice variety grown only in a small part of the Indian subcontient
and the other strain resembles a rice grown in the tropics. Because the weedy forms are closely related to rice varieties that were grown never in the U s. they probably arrived as contaminants in grain stocks from Asia instead of evolving directly from the tropical japonica crops grown here.
The question Olsen says is reverted whether crops to wild forms by reversing the genetic changes that resulted in their domestication
Even though both weedy strains arose in Asia he says weedy rice became a problem in Southeast asia only in the last few decades.
The reason is that rice seedlings were grown traditionally in paddies and then transplanted to the fields by hand.
But on industrialized farms rice is sprouted directly in the field so there's no opportunity to remove weeds.
In the U s. weedy rice is combatted increasingly by growing herbicide resistant crop strains Olsen says.
In recent years more than a third of U s. rice fields have been planted with herbicide-resistant rice.
Because both cultivated rice and weedy rice tend to self-fertilize there hasn't been a lot of gene flow going on in rice in general Olsen says.
It's going to change the overall composition of the weeds in U s. rice fields and presumably elsewhere in the world as well.
and green leafy vegetables fruits fortified breakfast cereals soy drinks nuts and milk products (for vegetarians who consume dairy).
#Maize trade disruption could have global ramificationsnew research on the global maize (corn) trade suggests that any disruptions to U s. exports could pose food security risks for many U s. trade partners due to the lack of trade among other producing
or the diversion of corn to non-food uses such as ethanol suggests that significant stresses in these areas could jeopardize food security.
and cereal crop demands increase the grain's pivotal importance in diets worldwide. It is used as a basic raw material in producing starch oil protein alcohol food sweeteners and as a dietary staple.
and nitrogen isotope analysis of 124 crop samples of barley wheat lentil and peas totalling around 2500 grains or seeds.
However these results suggest that the protein from cereal and pulse crops is much higher than previously thought
The cereal and pulse samples were taken from sites spread across Europe: in the UK they included Hambledon Hill in Dorset and Lismore Fields near Buxton in Derbyshire.
Detecting polarized light is said extremely useful Rice's Junichiro Kono professor of electrical and computer engineering and of physics and astronomy.
Rice's new photodetector is the latest development from a collaboration between Rice and Sandia under Sandia's National Institute for Nano Engineering program
The nanotube carpets used in the photodetectors are grown in the lab of Rice chemist Robert Hauge who pioneered a process for growing densely packed nanotubes on flat surfaces.
Study co-authors include Hauge Xuan Wang Kankan Cong and Qijia Jiang all of Rice; L onard Alexander Kane and John Goldsmith all of Sandia;
and S bastien Nanot formerly of Rice and now with the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona Spain.
Fructooligosaccharides are naturally found in chicory onions asparagus wheat tomatoes and other fruits vegetables and grains.
In the study he and his co-authors conducted this year 59 MBA students at the University of California Los angeles were asked during midterm exams which snack they would like from an array that included healthy snacks (fruit nonfat yogurt whole wheat crackers
nuts/soy chips) and unhealthy options (various candy bars flavored popcorn sugar cookies. They also were asked to rate how often during the week they choose that snack.
or ingredients especially those high in dietary fiber cereals and plant extracts nuts and seeds.
The parasitic fungus afflicts crops such as wheat and barley and is responsible for large harvest shortfalls every year.
Beat Keller and Thomas Wicker both plant biologists from the University of Zurich and their team have been analyzing the genetic material of wheat mildew varieties from Switzerland England
and Israel while the team headed by Paul Schulze-Lefert at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne studies the genetic material of barley mildew.
The results recently published in Nature Genetics and PNAS respectively unveil a long shared history of co-evolution between the host and the pest and the unexpected success of asexually produced mildew offspring.
Moreover the data provides fresh insights into the crop history of wheat and barley and their interaction with the mildew pathogen.
According to Schulze-Lefert wheat and barley mildew offspring from asexual reproduction are normally more successful than their sexually reproduced counterparts.
Sex still worthwhilebased on the gene analyses the scientists were also able to prove that mildew already lived parasitically on the ancestral form of wheat 10000 years ago before wheat were domesticated actually as crops.
None of the subsequent genetic changes in the crops due to breeding or spontaneous mutations was ever able to keep the mildew fungus away from wheat in the longer term.
Wheat and mildew are embroiled in a permanent evolutionary arms race. If wheat improves its defense mechanisms against the parasites the fungus has to be able to follow suit
or it has lost explains Wicker. That's only possible by recombining the genetic material; in other words sexual reproduction.
Evidently a sexual exchange and mixtures of the genetic material of different mildew varieties have occurred several times in the course of the millennia giving rise to new mildew varieties that were able to attack new sorts of wheat.
The scientists suspect that the grain trade in the ancient world was partly responsible for the emergence of new mildew varieties.
The team led by Rice chemist James Tour has built a 1-kilobit rewritable silicon oxide device with diodes that eliminate data-corrupting crosstalk.
The crossbar memories built by the Rice lab are flexible resist heat and radiation and show promise for stacking in three-dimensional arrays.
The device built by Rice postdoctoral researcher Gunuk Wang lead author of the new paper sandwiches the active silicon oxide between layers of palladium.
and encoded ASCII letters spelling out RICE OWLS into the bits. Setting adjacent bits to the on state--usually a condition that leads to voltage leaks and data corruption in a 1r crossbar structure--had no effect on the information he said.
Co-authors of the paper are Rice graduate student Adam Lauchner; postdoctoral researcher Jian Lin; Douglas Natelson a professor of physics and astronomy and of electrical and computer engineering and Krishna Palem the Ken and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computer science and Electrical and Computer Engineering and a professor of statistics.
Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science at Rice.
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