Called corn by most people in North america modern variants of the Zea mays plant are among the indispensable food crops that feed billions of the planet's people.
The researchers looked at corn in which each fertilized seed contained two siblings--an embryo and a corresponding bit of tissue known as endosperm that feeds the embryo as the seed grows said CU-Boulder Professor Pamela Diggle.
In corn reproduction male flowers at the top of the plants distribute pollen grains two at a time through individual tubes to tiny cobs on the stalks covered by strands known as silks in a process known as double fertilization.
Each embryo results in just a single kernel of corn said Diggle. The team took advantage of an extremely rare phenomenon in plants called hetero-fertilization in
which two different fathers sire individual corn kernels said Diggle currently a visiting professor at Harvard.
The manipulation of corn plant genes that has been going on for millennia--resulting in the production of multicolored Indian corn cobs of various colors like red purple blue
Wu who cultivated the corn and harvested more than 100 ears over a three-year period removed mapped
Endosperm--in the form of corn rice wheat and other crops--is critical to humans providing about 70 percent of calories we consume annually worldwide.
and agriculture--mainly rice cultivation--the coastal swamp areas have been transformed into polders (3). To this end dikes have been built reducing the 1km mangrove strip to just a few dozen metres wide.
Yakobson and his Rice colleagues have made progress toward 2-D boron through theoretical work that suggests the most practical ways to make the material
The Rice team's results appear this week in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.
Rice graduate student Yuanyue Liu and research scientist Evgeni Penev are co-authors of the paper. Yakobson's lab first reported in a Nano Letters paper last year that unlike graphene 2-D boron rolled into a nanotube would always be metallic.
There are many groups at Rice and elsewhere working on 2-D boron he said. To appreciate this work you have to stand back
another new paper from Rice on a hybrid graphene-hexagonal boron nitride shows the need for a 2-D semiconductor to complement the material's conducting
Yakobson is Rice's Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Mechanical engineering and Materials Science and professor of chemistry.
Computations were performed on the National Science Foundation-funded Data analysis and Visualization Cyberinfrastructure at Rice along with resources at the National Institute for Computational Sciences and the DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.
#Corn cobs eyed for bioenergy productioncorn crop residues are often left on harvested fields to protect soil quality
if postharvest corn cob residues were removed from fields. This work led by Agricultural research service (ARS) soil scientist Brian Wienhold supports the USDA priority of developing new sources of bioenergy.
and sediment loss from no-till corn fields where postharvest crop residues were removed either or retained.
In feedlots by contrast cattle eat mostly corn and grains which the methane-producing bacteria cannot use as effectively.
The JBEI/INL collaboration mixed switchgrass lodgepole pine corn stover and eucalyptus in flour and pellets and within 24 hours of saccharification were able to obtain sugar yields of up to 90-percent
#Genome sequence of 90 chickpea lines decodedin a scientific breakthrough that promises improved grain yields and quality greater drought tolerance and disease resistance and enhanced genetic diversity
Chickpea is the second largest cultivated grain food legume in the world grown in about 11.5 million hectares mostly by resource poor farmers in the semiarid tropics.
Under the CGIAR Research Program (CRP) on Grain Legumes led by ICRISAT along with other CGIAR Consortium members and program as well as national partners genome sequencing will play a crucial role in speeding up the development of improved varieties for smallholder farmer crops such as chickpea.
Rice introduced a technique to stitch the identically structured materials together nearly three years ago.
Since then the idea has received a lot of attention from researchers interested in the prospect of building 2-D atomic-layer circuits said Rice materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan.
This week's contribution by Rice offers manufacturers the possibility of shrinking electronic devices into even smaller packages.
While Rice's technical capabilities limited features to a resolution of about 100 nanometers the only real limits are defined those by modern lithographic techniques according to the researchers.
It should be possible to make fully functional devices with circuits 30 even 20 nanometers wide all in two dimensions said Rice researcher Jun Lou a co-author of the new paper.
The earlier work at Rice showed that merging graphene and h-BN via chemical vapor deposition (CVD) created sheets with pools of the two that afforded some control of the material's electronic properties.
Combs bars concentric rings and even microscopic Rice Owls were laid down through a lithographic process.
Lead author Zheng Liu a Rice research scientist and his colleagues first laid down a sheet of h-BN.
Traditional cattle feed mixtures of corn grains alfalfa hay and grass silage result in dairy products with low concentrations of omega-3 and other polyunsaturated fats according to Gerd Bobe the lead scientist
and more effective toxicity tests for airborne chemicals scientists from Rice university and the Rice spinoff company Nano3d Biosciences have used magnetic levitation to grow some of the most realistic lung tissue ever produced in a laboratory.
and department chair of physics and astronomy at Rice. This is the first time anyone has arranged these four cell types in the same way that they are found in lung tissue.
Killian and fellow scientists from Rice and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center co-founded Nano3d Biosciences in 2009 after creating a technology that uses magnetism to levitate
Growing realistic lung tissues in vitro is a particular challenge said study co-author Jane Grande-Allen professor of bioengineering at Rice.
when Rice bioengineering graduate student Hubert Tseng joined the research team as an intern. Tseng was already a student in Grande-Allen's lab one of Rice's leading laboratories for tissue-engineering research.
Hubert's and Jane's expertise in tissue engineering was invaluable for tackling this problem Souza said.
Another collaboration that paid off big was a partnership with a group of undergraduate students at Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen.
Study co-authors include Robert Raphael professor of bioengineering at Rice and cofounder of Nano3d Biosciences;
C3 a less efficient ancient method found in most plants including wheat and rice; and C4 a more efficient adaptation employed by grasses maize sorghum
If C4 photosynthesis is transferred successfully to C3 plants through genetic engineering farmers could grow wheat and rice in hotter dryer environments with less fertilizer while possibly increasing yields by half the researchers said.
C3 photosynthesis originated at a time in Earth's history when the atmosphere had a high proportion of carbon dioxide.
and many other vegetables and gamma tocopherol which is relatively abundant in vegetable fats such as soybean corn and canola oils and margarine.
#Rice-cell cocktail tough on cancer cells, nice to normal cellsjuice from rice cells can knock out two kinds of human cancer cells as well
Biologist Ramakrishna Wusirika and his team made their anticancer cocktail with blobs of rice stem-cells called calli
which they cultured in their lab using seeds of the garden-variety rice plant Oryza sativa.
and kidney cancer cells in the lab. After 96 hours of exposure to a 20-to-1 rice callus solution 95 percent of the kidney cancer cells were killed
Wusirika thinks the rice callus culture may be attacking cancer with the same sort of plant chemicals that make vegetables so healthy to eat.
Next Wusirika would like to try the rice callus solution on prostate lung and breast cancer cells the most common types of cancer in the US.
He also wants to determine which of the compounds released by the rice callus have cancer-killing properties
#Photovoltaics beat biofuels at converting suns energy to miles drivenin 2005 President George w bush and American corn farmers saw corn ethanol as a promising fossil fuel substitute that would reduce both
Since then life cycle assessments (LCAS) have shown that corn ethanol has modest if any effect on reducing CO2 emissions and may actually increase them
In 2010 fuel ethanol consumed 40 percent of U s. corn production and 2012 prices are at record highs.
Since the U s. also accounts for 40 percent of the world's corn U s. ethanol production has affected corn prices around the planet.
a) the traditional method of converting corn or other plants to ethanol; b) converting energy crops into electricity for BEVS rather than producing ethanol;
and his colleagues examined five prominent sun-to-wheels energy conversion pathways--ethanol from corn
or switchgrass for internal combustion vehicles electricity from corn or switchgrass for BEVS and PV electricity for BEVS--for every county in the contiguous United states. Focusing the LCA on three key impacts--direct land use
and greenhouse gas impacts of different crops including corn poplar alfalfa and old field vegetation.
One grain has an interesting gleam and bud-like shape that have brought it Internet buzz as a Martian flower.
The different grain sizes tell us about different transport conditions. JPL a division of Caltech manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
--and certain types of food already linked to protective or damaging effects on healththese included meat fish fruits and vegetables pulses cereals bread and pasta rice butter margarine nuts
#New insight into graphene grain boundariesusing graphene--either as an alternative to or most likely as a complementary material with--silicon offers the promise of much faster future electronics along with several other advantages over the commonly used semiconductor.
However when those orientations become misaligned during the growth process defects called grain boundaries (GBS) form.
Beckman Institute researchers Joe Lyding and Eric Pop and their research groups have given now new insight into the electronics behavior of graphene with grain boundaries that could guide fabrication methods toward lessening
Grain boundaries form during graphene growth by CVD and while there is much worldwide effort to minimize the occurrence of grain boundaries they are a fact of life for now.
For electronics you would want to be able to make it on a wafer scale. Boundary free graphene is a key goal.
In the interim we have to live with the grain boundaries so understanding them is
That's a grain boundary where the lattice doesn't match. The research involved Pop's group led by Beckman Fellow Josh Wood growing the graphene at the Micro
when the electrons'itinerary takes them to a grain boundary it is said like Lyding hitting a hill.
Basically a grain boundary is a resistor in series with a conductor. That's always bad.
and the wavelength of an electron impinges on the electron's movement at the grain boundary leading to variations in their scattering.
More scattering means that it is making it more difficult for an electron to move from one grain to the next he said.
The researchers work is aimed not just at understanding but also at controlling grain boundaries. One of their findings--that GBS are replicated aperiodic other work
I think if you have to live with grain boundaries you would like to be able to control exactly
which include a tendency to take milk with cereal and coffee and to eat chocolate
Yet dietary records of Canadian infants show that at 12 months they are receiving only 11 per cent of their recommended daily allowance of Vitamin d through food such as oily fish fortified dairy products and cereals.
The health-conscious pattern was characterized by relatively higher intakes of pasta noodles rice whole fruit poultry nuts fish and vegetables and lower intakes of fried vegetables processed meats
The American Heart Association supports eating berries as part of an overall balanced diet that also includes other fruits vegetables and whole-grain products.
and his team predicted the digestibility of lysine in 21 samples of corn DDGS based on several different methods of analysis:
and was authored co with Beob Gyun Kim and Dong Yong Kil both former members of the Stein Monogastric Nutrition Laboratory at Illinois and Yanhong Zhang of the National Corn to Ethanol
The Illinois Corn Marketing Board and the feed company Agrifirm from The netherlands provided funding for this research.
#Foods identified as whole grain not always healthycurrent standards for classifying foods as whole grain are inconsistent
One of the most widely used industry standards the Whole Grain Stamp actually identified grain products that were higher in both sugars and calories than products without the Stamp.
The researchers urge adoption of a consistent evidence-based standard for labeling whole grain foods to help consumers
This is the first study to empirically evaluate the healthfulness of whole grain foods based on five commonly used industry and government definitions.
The health benefits of switching from refined to whole grain foods are established well including lower risk of cardiovascular disease weight gain
Based on this evidence the U s. Department of agriculture's (USDA) 2010 Dietary Guidelines recommend that Americans consume at least three servings of whole grain products daily
and the new U s. national school lunch standards require that at least half of all grains be whole grain-rich.
However no single standard exists for defining any product as a whole grain. Mozaffarian and her colleagues assessed five different industry and government guidelines for whole grain products:
From two major U s. grocers the researchers identified a total of 545 grain products in eight categories:
breads bagels English muffins cereals crackers cereal bars granola bars and chips. They collected nutrition content ingredient lists and the presence or absence of the Whole Grain Stamp on product packages from all of these products.
They found that grain products with the Whole Grain Stamp one of the most widely-used front-of-package symbols were higher in fiber
and lower in trans fats but also contained significantly more sugar and calories compared to products without the Stamp.
The three USDA recommended criteria also had mixed performance for identifying healthier grain products. Overall the American Heart Association's standard (a ratio of total carbohydrate to fiber of 0: 1) proved to be the best indicator of overall healthfulness.
Products meeting this ratio were higher in fiber and lower in trans fats sugar and sodium without higher calories than products that did not meet the ratio.
and guidance for consumers and organizations in their attempts to select whole grain products said senior author Steven Gortmaker professor of the practice of health sociology.
Scientists from Rice the Dutch firm Teijin Aramid the U s. Air force and Israel's Technion Institute this week unveiled a new carbon nanotube (CNT) fiber that looks
We finally have a nanotube fiber with properties that don't exist in any other material said lead researcher Matteo Pasquali professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and chemistry at Rice.
The research team includes academic government and industrial scientists from Rice; Teijin Aramid's headquarters in Arnhem The netherlands;
Shortly after arriving at Rice in 2000 Pasquali began studying CNT wet-spinning methods with the late Richard Smalley a nanotechnology pioneer and the namesake of Rice's Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology.
and funded a project with Rice and the company's fiber-spinning experts have collaborated with Rice scientists throughout the project.
The Teijin scientific and technical help led to immediate improvements in strength and conductivity Pasquali said.
Study co-author Junichiro Kono a Rice professor of electrical and computer engineering said The research showed that the electrical conductivity of the fibers could be tuned
#Lower nitrogen losses with perennial biofuel cropsperennial biofuel crops such as miscanthus whose high yields have led them to be considered an eventual alternative to corn in producing ethanol are shown now to have another beneficial characteristic--the ability
and mixed prairie species to typical corn-corn-soybean rotations each of the perennial crops were highly efficient at reducing nitrogen losses with miscanthus having the greatest yield.
Intensive corn production with large fertilizer inputs leads to large losses of nitrogen into the environment both through gas emissions of nitrous oxide and leaching of nitrate to surface waters through tile drainage systems
and mixed prairie species were compared against a typical corn-corn-soybean rotation. Harvested biomass and nitrogen nitrous oxide emissions
Overall nitrogen levels were higher for the corn and soybean treatment as well as switchgrass but were lower for prairie and miscanthus.
(and nitrogen) each winter with no fertilizer nitrogen additions to replace it as occurred in corn
Rodent studies for genetically modified organism (GMO) safety have recently been in the news. Seralini et al. showed untoward effects in rats fed GM corn
A group led by geologist Rajdeep Dasgupta put very small samples of peridotite under very large pressures in a Rice laboratory to determine that rock can
The Rice team focused on mantle beneath the ocean because that's where the crust is created
but could not demonstrate the existence of deeper silicate magma said Dasgupta an assistant professor of Earth science at Rice.
In Dasgupta's high-pressure lab at Rice volcanic rocks are windows to the planet's interior.
Co-authors of the paper are Rice graduate student Ananya Mallik and postdoctoral researcher Kyusei Tsuno; Research Professor Anthony Withers and Marc Hirschmann the George and Orpha Gibson Chair of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of Minnesota and Greg Hirth a professor of geological sciences
A collaborative effort by the Rice lab of chemist James Tour and the Moscow lab of chemist Stepan Kalmykov determined that microscopic atom-thick flakes of graphene oxide bind quickly to natural and human-made radionuclides
The lab tested graphene oxide synthesized at Rice with simulated nuclear wastes containing uranium plutonium
Romanchuk Slesarev Kalmykov and Tour are co-authors of the paper with Dmitry Kosynkin a former postdoctoral researcher at Rice now with Saudi Aramco.
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.
The Office of Naval Research Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative M-I SWACO and the Air force Office of Scientific research funded work at Rice.
The project's results include lignin-tolerant enzymes and enzyme cocktails for processing spruce straw corn cob and wheat bran.
The raw materials studied in the project were spruce straw corn cob and wheat bran used as animal Feed in Finland the proportion of forest biomass
and conifer biomass in particular is significant. Lignocellulosic biomass consists of cellulose hemicellulose and lignin. Agricultural harvest waste contains large amounts of lignocellulosic biomass
#Taking infestation with a grain of salt: Salinity plays role in insect grazingtwenty years ago biologists Kathy Boyer
and quality of cereal and bioenergy cropsa team of scientists led by Thomas Brutnell Ph d. director of the Enterprise Rent-a-car Institute for Renewable Fuels at the Donald Danforth Plant science Center have developed a new
way of identifying genes that are important for photosynthesis in maize and in rice. Their research helps to prioritize candidate genes that can be used for crop improvement
and C3 photosynthesis in developing leaves of maize and rice on October 12 2014 in Nature Biotechnology also made public a mathematical model enabling access to datasets comparing C4 photosynthesis traits
in plants like maize to C3 photosynthesis in plants like rice. C4 crops including maize sorghum switchgrass
and carbon dioxide limitations better than C3 crops such as rice wheat barley and oats due to their ability to efficiently make use of carbon dioxide
The researchers Gary Whittaker Cornell professor of virology and Jean Millet a postdoctoral associate in Whittaker's lab suggest that blocking furin at a specific point in the host cell entry process could lead to a treatment
This is the first characterization of a natural coronavirus with a spike protein containing two furin cleavage sites said Millet the paper's first author.
This study shows how flexible coronaviruses are in terms of cleavage activation strategies said Millet. They are extremely adaptable.
whether corn and perennial grassland fields in southern Wisconsin could provide both biomass for bioenergy production and bountiful bird habitat.
While previous studies suggest corn is a more profitable biofuel crop than grasses and other types of vegetation the new findings indicate grassland fields may represent an acceptable tradeoff between creating biomass for bioenergy and providing habitat for grassland birds.
#Automated imaging system looks underground to help improve cropsplant scientists are working to improve important food crops such as rice maize
#Effects of growing rice in low water, high salt conditionstwo papers in the Pertanika Journal of Tropical Agricultural Science investigates the effects of low water input and high salt levels on rice growth.
Rice is a staple food across Asia with both people and economies reliant on its successful harvest.
One paper finds that low water input does not affect rice growth as much as the levels of nutrients in soil can
although rice is stressed seriously by high salt levels in soil this can be countered by the application of locally produced compost.
Approximately 576 million tonnes of rice are produced globally each year with about 90%produced and consumed in Asia. 75%of the world's rice is grown in irrigated lowlands
and with water for agriculture becoming increasingly scarce the question of the effect of low water levels on rice growth is becoming more critical.
Jahan M. S. and colleagues at the Faculty of agriculture at Universiti Putra Malaysia set out to determine the effect on both rice production
and the chemical properties of the soil in which rice grows. They found that iron content in soil slowly increases as rice is growing
but even more so after water is drained off. Manganese on the other hand increased sharply after flooding but decreased after that.
They found that water levels did not affect the growth of rice as much as expected. Their results provide recommendations for water management as saturation throughout the cultivation process does not seem to be as important as is believed.
Low water input rice production could be implemented and fresh water saved for other sectors. In a second paper in the same issue Muhammad Ibrahim and colleagues from Pakistanâ##s University college of Agriculture and Government College University as well as the South Koreaâ##s National Academy of Agricultural
Science looked at salt levels in soil and the effect on rice growth. They took twenty day old rice plants
and transplanted them into clay pots filled with either normal or saline soil. They found that the saline soil had a significant effect on the growth of the rice
but when they applied compost the results improved. Further work is needed to optimise the compost mixture
and resulting growth but their work provides hope for many poor rice farmers as compost can be made locally
#Natural gene selection can produce orange corn rich in Provitamin a for Africa, U s. Purdue researchers have identified a set of genes that can be used to naturally boost the Provitamin a content of corn kernels a finding that could help combat Vitamin a deficiency in developing countries and macular degeneration in the elderly.
Professor of agronomy Torbert Rocheford and fellow researchers found gene variations that can be selected to change nutritionally poor white corn into biofortified orange corn with high levels of Provitamin a carotenoids--substances
that the human body can convert into Vitamin a. Vitamin a plays key roles in eye health and the immune system as well as in the synthesis of certain hormones.
or yellow corn to orange corn that is rich in carotenoids--and we can do so using natural plant breeding methods not transgenics said Rocheford the Patterson Endowed Chair of Translational Genomics for Crop Improvement.
The problem most severely affects children in Sub-saharan africa an area in which white corn which has minimal amounts of Provitamin a carotenoids is a dietary mainstay.
and the U s. Identifying the genes that determine carotenoid levels in corn kernels will help plant breeders develop novel biofortifed corn varieties for Africa
and the U s. The dark orange color of these corn varieties also makes them more culturally acceptable to consumers in African countries where yellow corn is fed generally only to animals Rocheford said.
Previous research by Rocheford and his colleagues identified two genes that contribute to Provitamin a carotenoid levels in corn kernels
and assess the potential usefulness of genes associated with carotenoid levels in corn. They evaluated data sets from about 200 genetically diverse lines of corn at varying scopes of investigation--from the entire corn genome to stretches of DNA surrounding small sets of genes.
They uncovered four genes that had not previously been linked to carotenoid levels in corn kernels.
Though many genes likely contribute to carotenoid levels in corn we're pretty confident that our previous and current research has identified now several genes that are the major players Rocheford said.
Their study found that a combination of visually selecting corn with darker orange kernels and using a number of these favorable genes could be an effective way to rapidly convert white and yellow corn varieties to orange corn with higher levels of Provitamin a and total carotenoids.
We now have the genetic information needed to begin developing a major public-private sector collaboration with the goal of providing orange corn with high levels of Provitamin a to farmers throughout Sub-saharan africa he said.
The study also showed that using a more targeted approach to predicting the usefulness of a small set of genes was as effective as evaluating the whole corn genome said Brenda Owens doctoral candidate and first author of the study.
Having this smaller list of genes to select for means that we can make the improvement of carotenoid levels in corn a simpler faster process for plant breeders she said.
Their research--in collaboration with Harvestplus and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center also known as CIMMYT--has yielded varieties of orange corn with markedly higher amounts of Provitamin a carotenoids.
But further efforts to produce even higher levels will be necessary to offset degradation of nutrients after harvest
and reduce the amount of corn African consumers would need to eat to attain enough Provitamin a Rocheford said.
Varieties of orange corn are currently being grown in Zambia Zimbabwe Nigeria and Ghana. An open-pollinated variety of orange corn could be available for organic and local grower operations in the U s. by 2016 he said.
The paper was published online in Genetics. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Purdue University.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference e
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011