cadmium-free cropswith news reports of toxic cadmium-tainted rice in China a new study describes a protein that transports metals in certain plants
This function allows the plant to partition cadmium away from the edible portions of plants including seeds (grain.
â#oeone would hope that this transporter can be used to produce iron-fortified rice and other grain crops one dayâ#said Olena Vatamaniuk associate professor of crop
and soil sciences and the paperâ##s senior author. â#oeour work suggests that manipulation of the expression of OPT3 can provide promising avenues for targeted biofortification strategies directed at increasing iron density
Examples for such a combination of two genomes called allopolyploidy are found abundantly in both wild plants and crops like wheat rapeseed and cotton.
#Perennial corn crops? It could happen with new plant-breeding toolsince the first plant genome sequence was obtained for the plant Arabidopsis in 2000 scientists have sequenced gene everything from cannabis to castor bean.
Christopher Henry a computational biologist at the University of Chicago who had a leading role in creating the database called Plantseed said it is an important step toward the engineering of improved crops such as creating rice that grows more efficiently
Or creating perennial corn. Imagine if you didn't have to plant seeds for crops
#Grain legume crops sustainable, nutritiouspopular diets across the world typically focus on the right balance of essential components like protein fat and carbohydrates.
The researchers examined four types of grain legumes (pulses)--field peas lentils chickpeas and common bean. Although these legumes have up to twice the micronutrients as cereals according to Tom Warkentin professor of plant breeding at the University of Saskatchewan they are cultivated not on the same scale as cereals in most countries.
Therefore grain legume crops are overlooked often as potentially valuable sources of micronutrients. Diets that do not provide adequate amounts of micronutrients lead to a variety of diseases that affect most parts of the human body.
Warkentin says Iron deficiency is the most common followed by zinc carotenoids and folate. The study found that genetic characteristics (genotype) as well as environmental conditions--such as soil properties
and local climate--can affect the micronutrient content of grain legumes. The researchers measured micronutrient levels by a technique known as atomic absorption spectrometry.
Warkentin notes A 100-gram (3 Â-ounce) serving of any one of the four grain legume crops studied provided a substantial portion of the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of iron zinc selenium magnesium
The serving size was based on the dry weight of the grain legumes. He adds that lentils were the best source of iron
and consumption of grain legume crops should be encouraged by agriculturalists and dietitians around the world.
Since grain legume crops don't require nitrogen-based fertilizers which are derived from fossil fuels they are very sustainable.
Warkentin also says Grain legume crops are highly nutritious. In addition to the micronutrients described in this research they also contain 20-25%protein 45-50%slowly digestible starch soluble and insoluble fiber
Carbon credits for fertilizer management are now available to U S. corn farmers. This paper provides a framework for using this system around the world.
During the last 15 years expansion of agriculture in the state has helped Brazil become one of the world's top producers of soy corn cotton and other staple crops.
The researchers have discovered a pair of proteins made by flowering plants that are vital for the production of the sperm present within each pollen grain.
'--so that DUO1 and the DAZ1/DAZ2 genes work in tandem to control a gene network that ensures a pair of fertile sperm is made inside each pollen grain.
and walking through tasseling corn in the heat of summer is not a pleasant task Bowman said.
Whole wheat rotini and veggies and pasta sauce: Pasta is versatile and can easily be made in large quantities.
When you don't have time to leave something prepared cereal is always an easy alternative.
Keeping a box of lower-sugar cereal on hand can be helpful when teens are around.
--and many corn and soybean growers don't yet appreciate the threat University of Illinois researchers report.
and corn yields by 91 percent. Illinois a state with a $9 billion agricultural commodities market and 80 percent of its land area devoted to farming (mostly corn
and soybeans) could see significant losses associated with fighting --or failing to properly fight--this weed Hager said.
And if the weed gains a foothold in planted fields corn and soybean growers in Illinois should take a tip from Georgia cotton farmers
A porous material invented by the Rice lab of chemist James Tour sequesters carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas at ambient temperature with pressure provided by the wellhead
The Rice material a nanoporous solid of carbon with nitrogen or sulfur is inexpensive and simple to produce compared with the liquid amine-based scrubbers used now Tour said.
Rice graduate student Chih-Chau Hwang lead author of the paper first tried to combine amines with porous carbon.
Apache Corp. a Houston-based oil and gas exploration and production company funded the research at Rice
The paper's co-authors are undergraduate Josiah Tour research scientist Carter Kittrell and senior research scientist Lawrence Alemany all of Rice and Laura Espinal an associate at NIST.
Along with other staple foods such as corn rice and wheat the potato forms a substantial portion of the modern human diet.
#Blunting rice disease: Natural microbe inhibits rice blast fungusa fungus that kills an estimated 30 percent of the world's rice crop may finally have met its match thanks to a research discovery made by scientists at the University of Delaware
and the University of California at Davis. The research team led by Harsh Bais associate professor of plant
and soil sciences in UD's College of Agriculture and Natural resources has identified a naturally occurring microbe living right in the soil around rice plants--Pseudomonas chlororaphis EA105--that inhibits the devastating fungus known as rice blast.
What's more the beneficial soil microbe also induces a system-wide defense response in rice plants to battle the fungus.
In addition to rice a distinct population of the rice blast fungus also now threatens wheat production worldwide.
Rice blast is a relentless killer a force to be reckoned with especially as rice is a staple in the daily diet of more than half the world's population--that's over 3 billion people Bais notes.
According to Bais the rice blast fungus (Magnaporthe oryzae) attacks rice plants through spores resembling pressure plugs that penetrate the plant tissue.
Common symptoms of rice blast are shaped telltale diamond-lesions on the plant leaves. In order to do its work the spore must produce a structure called the appressorium a filament that adheres to the plant surface like an anchor.
and colleagues Spence Donofrio and Vidhyavathi Raman showed that Pseudomonas chlororaphis EA105 strongly inhibited the formation of the appressorium and that priming rice plants with EA105 prior to infection by rice blast decreased lesion
The next step in the research was to sample the rhizosphere the soil in the region around the roots of rice plants growing in the field to reveal the microbial community living there
In their study reported in BMC Plant Biology the researchers used gene sequencing techniques to identify 11 naturally occurring bacteria isolated from rice plants grown in the field in California.
These bacteria were tested then in the laboratory with Pseudomonas chlororaphis EA105 demonstrating the strongest impact on rice blast.
Rice blast quickly learns how to get around synthetics--most humanmade pesticides are effective only for about three years Bais says.
This summer he and his colleagues will conduct field trials using Pseudomonas chlororaphis EA105 on rice plants grown on the UD farm.
--if a variety of sweet corn was contaminated by pollen from a popcorn variety then the resulting hybrid offspring would produce seeds that were unusable for market purposes
#3, 000 rice genome sequences made publicly availablethe open-access open-data journal Gigascience (published by BGI
and Biomed Central) announces the publication of an article on the genome sequencing of 3000 rice strains
(which quadruples the current amount of publicly available rice sequence data) coincides with World Hunger Day to highlight one of the primary goals of this project--to develop resources that will aid in improving global food security especially in the poorest
This work is the completion of stage one of the 3000 Rice Genomes Project a collaborative effort made up of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)
While rice research has advanced greatly since the completion of the first high-quality rice genome sequence in 2005 there has been limited change in breeding practices that are important for producing improved and better adapted rice strains.
The 3000 Rice Genomes Project provides a major step forward for addressing these challenges by creating and releasing an extensive amount of genetic information that can ultimately be applied to intelligent breeding practices
which take advantage of the natural variation between different plant strains and information on the genetic mechanisms that underlie these traits to select strains for breeding that will be more successful in producing hybrid strains with characteristics that are suited highly for growing successfully in different environments.
Dr. Zhikang Li the Project Director at CAAS stated that the 3000 Rice Genomes Project is part of an ongoing effort to provide resources specifically for poverty-stricken farmers in Africa
and Asia aiming to reach at least 20 million rice farmers in 16 target countries (8 African and 8 Asian countries).
Rice is the staple food for most Asian people and has increasing consumption in Africa said Dr. Li.
As a scientist in rice genetics breeding and genomics it would be a dream to help to solve this problem.
According to IRRI director general Dr. Robert Zeigler access to 3000 genomes of rice sequence data will tremendously accelerate the ability of breeding programs to overcome key hurdles humankind faces
This collaborative project added Zeigler will add an immense amount of knowledge to rice genetics
and enable detailed analysis by the global research community to ultimately benefit the poorest farmers who grow rice under the most difficult conditions.
not only 13.4 terabytes of data they have collected also seeds from each strain (available in the International Rice Genebank Collection housed at IRRI).
and curation of each rice strain for agriculturally important traits which can then be linked to genetic markers in the now available genome sequences.
This information allows a breeder to make more intelligent choices in strain selection resulting in more accurate and rapid development of rice strains that are suited better to different agricultural environments in poor and environmentally stressed economies.
In total they analysed 367 kernels--for instance barley and wheat--and 362 wood samples obtained in eleven archaeological sites from Upper Mesopotamia
which includes present southeastern Turkey and northern Siria to the Near east. Studied kernels belong to present crops of wheat
and barley species that are similar to the archaeological remains found in the region. Progressive domesticationresearchers compared the size of kernel remains with present samples to determine the evolution of crop domestication.
The methodology used to date does not reproduce real size; it measures width and long of charred kernels explains Josep Lluã s Araus professor from the Department of Plan Biology of UB.
grain-based desserts savory snacks ready-to-eat cereals sweet snacks and candy processed meats soft drinks juice
These include the damaging pathogens that cause septoria leaf blotch on wheat barley leaf blotch apple scab and light leaf spot on oilseed rape.
Straw from crops such as wheat barley oats and oilseed rape is seen as a potential source of biomass for second generation biofuel production.
The Rice researchers behind a new study that explains the creation of nanodiamonds in treated coal also show that some microscopic diamonds only last seconds before fading back into less-structured forms of carbon under the impact of an electron beam.
The research by Rice chemist Ed Billups and his colleagues appears in the American Chemical Society's Journal of Physical chemistry Letters.
Billups turned to Rice theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his colleagues at the Technological Institute for Superhard and Novel Carbon Materials in Moscow to explain what the chemists saw.
Kvashnin is a former visiting student at Rice and a graduate student at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT.
Yakobson is Rice's Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Mechanical engineering and Materials Science a professor of chemistry and a member of the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology.
Billups is a professor of chemistry at Rice. The Robert A. Welch Foundation the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research supported the research.
Carbohydrate sources included high-fibre foods such as oats and barley and low-starch vegetables such as okra and eggplant.
Proteins came from gluten soy vegetables nuts and cereals. Predominant fat sources for the Eco-Atkins diet were nuts vegetable oils soy products and avocado.
Importance of adapting to climate changea new Stanford study finds that due to an average 3. 5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming expected by 2040 yields of wheat
and barley across Europe will drop more than 20 percent. New Stanford research reveals that farmers in Europe will see crop yields affected as global temperatures rise
For corn the anticipated loss is roughly 10 percent the research shows. Farmers of these crops have seen already yield growth slow down
According to the analysis corn has the highest adaptation potential. Moore and Lobell predict that corn farmers can reduce yield losses by as much as 87 percent through long-term adaptation.
As Moore pointed out three key areas of uncertainty make it difficult to predict the future of crop yields in Europe.
oils--canola soybean and corn--to the rising incidence of lung inflammation and possibly asthma.
The form of Vitamin e called gamma-tocopherol in the ubiquitous soybean corn and canola oils is associated with decreased lung function in humans the study reports.
and those that consume soybean corn and canola oil have the highest rate of asthma Cook-Mills said.
In the study camelina and safflower were grown in three-year rotations with winter wheat and summer fallow.
or safflower crops into a rotation with winter wheat and summer fallow increased the amount of dust at the end of tillage-based fallow
or when wheat is planted. â#oefarmers will need to protect the soil from wind erosion during the fallow phase after harvest of oilseed cropsâ#says Sharratt.
The typical crop rotation there is winter wheat-summer fallow. Thus one crop is grown usually every other year.
This stored moisture is seed critical for germination and emergence of winter wheat. The researchers measured dust particles or wind erosion using a portable wind tunnel.
#Weeds grow bigger among corn; Weeds influence gene expression, growth in cornthe axiom growing like a weed takes on new meaning in light of changes in gene expression that occur
and her research team are documenting how corn and weeds influence one another. Weeds grow like weeds
when they grow with corn says Clay. They grow bigger and taller in corn than by themselves.
And inversely corn grows less among weeds. Over the last 20 years Clay has been studying weed management in range
and cropping systems weed physiology and interactions among herbicides soil and crops. The weed scientist was the first woman to serve as president of the American Society of Agronomy.
Both articles were written in collaboration with David Horvath a research plant physiologist for the Agricultural research service at the U s. Department of agriculture in Fargo N d. Growing better among cornto figure out how corn
and a team of two research associates and a soils expert planted plots of velvetleaf alone corn with velvetleaf and corn kept weed-free.
when velvetleaf was grown by itself versus among corn plants. The velvetleaf alone was shorter and stouter Clay explains.
Another study compared the corn's growth and yield in response to weeds lack of nitrogen or shade.
When grown with weeds genes that control the major facets of the corn plant's metabolism were decreased
Having long-term impactwhen the researchers started taking weeds out of the corn at early points such as
when the corn had as few as two and four leaves they still saw differences in gene expression
when compared to corn without weeds. However Clay points out the amount of biomass--the stem
Next the researchers look at the effect of water stress on gene expression using corn planted on high and low ground.
The genes of the water-stressed corn on the top of the hill were regulated down in terms of phosphorus uptake Clay explains.
Essentially the water-stressed corn was getting older faster Clay says. The researchers now have a clearer idea of how that stress is affecting the plant she explains.
#Corn dwarfed by temperature dip suitable for growing in mines, caveslowering temperatures for two hours each day reduces the height of corn without affecting its seed yield a Purdue study shows a technique that could be used to grow crops in controlled-environment facilities in caves and former mines.
Raising the crops in isolated and enclosed environments would help prevent genetically modified pollen and seed from escaping into the ecosystem and crossing with wild plants.
Grains of corn could be engineered to produce proteins that could be extracted and processed into medicine pharmaceuticals
Mitchell described corn as a good candidate crop for the industry because of the plant's bounty of seeds and well-characterized genome
But raising corn--a towering crop that needs bright light and heat--in a dark cool underground mine presented a challenge to Mitchell and then-postdoctoral researchers Yang Yang and Gioia Massa.
and yellow and blue high-intensity discharge lamps in a former limestone mine in Marengo Indiana to test how corn would react to an environment in
To their surprise the hybrid corn responded by growing too well said Yang. We coddled the plants with such luxurious conditions that the corn was touching the lamps before it had tasseled even he said.
To reduce the corn's height the researchers borrowed a trick used by the greenhouse industry to dwarf Christmas poinsettias.
Using a growth chamber that mimicked the temperature conditions and carbon dioxide levels of the Marengo mine they dropped the temperature to 60 degrees Fahrenheit for the first two hours of each photoperiod the time in
which the corn received light. The temperature was restored to 80 degrees for 14 hours and then lowered to 65 degrees for eight hours of darkness.
One compound nitrate is a major component of inorganic fertilizers that has helped make the area encompassed by the Mississippi river network the biggest producer of corn soybeans wheat cattle
#Rice theory explains north-south China cultural differencesa new cultural psychology study has found that psychological differences between the people of northern and southern China mirror the differences between community-oriented East asia
because southern China has grown rice for thousands of years whereas the north has grown wheat. It's easy to think of China as a single culture
but we found that China has very distinct northern and southern psychological cultures and that southern China's history of rice farming can explain why people in southern China are more interdependent than people in the wheat-growing north said Thomas Talhelm a University of Virginia
Ph d. student in cultural psychology and the study's lead author. He calls it the rice theory.
The findings appear in the May 9 issue of the journal Science. Talhelm and his co-authors at universities in China
and Michigan propose that the methods of cooperative rice farming--common to southern China for generations--make the culture in that region interdependent
while people in the wheat-growing north are more individualistic a reflection of the independent form of farming practiced there over hundreds of years.
He notes that rice farming is extremely labor-intensive requiring about twice the number of hours from planting to harvest as does wheat.
And because most rice is grown on irrigated land requiring the sharing of water and the building of dikes and canals that constantly require maintenance rice farmers must work together to develop
and maintain an infrastructure upon which all depend. This Talhelm argues has led to the interdependent culture in the southern region.
Wheat on the other hand is grown on dry land relying on rain for moisture. Farmers are able to depend more on themselves leading to more of an independent mindset that permeates northern Chinese culture.
Talhelm developed his rice theory after living in China for four years. He first went to the country in 2007 as a high school English teacher in Guangzhou in the rice-growing south.
A year later he moved to Beijing in the north. On his first trip there he noticed that people were more outgoing and individualistic than in the south.
I soon learned that the Yangtze also roughly divides rice farming and wheat farming he said.
He dug into anthropologists'accounts of pre-modern rice and wheat villages and realized that they might account for the different mindsets carried forward from an agrarian past into modernity.
The idea is that rice provides economic incentives to cooperate and over many generations those cultures become more interdependent
whereas societies that do not have to depend on each other as much have the freedom of individualism Talhelm said.
He went about investigating this with his Chinese colleagues by conducting psychological studies of the thought styles of 1162 Han Chinese college students in the north and south and in counties at the borders of the rice-wheat divide.
They found through a series of tests that northern Chinese were indeed more individualistic and analytic-thinking--more similar to Westerners--while southerners were interdependent holistic-thinking
and fiercely loyal to friends as psychological testing has shown is common in other rice-growing East Asian nations such as Japan and Korea.
I think the rice theory provides some insight to why the rice-growing regions of East asia are less individualistic than the Western world
and this year received an Arts Humanities and Social sciences Research Fellowship from U. Va.'s Office of the Vice president for Research and the Graduate school of Arts & Sciences for an in depth study of people from the rice-wheat
These bugs have been documented to feed on many of our important agricultural crops including apples peaches grapes soybean peppers tomatoes corn and cotton.
Eight institutions from Australia Israel Japan and the United states contributed to the analysis. The researchers looked at multiple varieties of wheat rice field peas soybeans maize
Zinc and iron went down significantly in wheat rice field peas and soybeans. Wheat and rice also saw notable declines in protein content at higher CO2.
Across a diverse set of environments in a number of countries we see this decrease in quality Leakey said.
and sorghum and millet have said he. Our previous work here at Illinois has shown that their photosynthesis rates are stimulated not by being elevated at CO2.
The hydrogel created in the lab of Rice bioengineer Antonios Mikos is a liquid at room temperature
The new material detailed in the American Chemical Society journal Biomacromolecules takes the state of the art a few steps further Rice scientists said.
and matures said Mikos Rice's Louis Calder Professor of Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular engineering.
and then force out water said Rice graduate student and the paper's lead author Brendan Watson.
Watson and his colleagues at Rice's Bioscience Research Collaborative solved the problem by adding chemical cross-linkers to the gel's molecules.
but it's finally all come together said Watson who is pursuing both a Rice doctorate and a medical degree in a joint program with nearby Baylor College of Medicine.
and co-authors including Paul Engel chair of Rice's Department of chemistry and F. Kurtis Kasper a senior faculty fellow in bioengineering.
Fleisher has added now a corn crop model to GAMCAF is integrating a wheat model and hopes to add many more.
for example where in the ESR does potato grow best versus corn or soybean or broccoli?
The Guelph team analyzed data from earlier studies of domesticated cereal crop species and the American scientists also performed field tests.
whose seeds resist shattering such as corn whose kernels stay on the cob instead of falling off. Early agriculturalists also shortened flowering time for crops necessary in shorter growing seasons as in Canada.
The research which appears online this week in Molecular Systems Biology was conducted at the Texas Medical center in Houston by researchers from Rice the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Baylor College of Medicine.
and highly aggressive ovarian tumor cells particularly with respect to their production and use of the amino acid glutamine said lead researcher Deepak Nagrath of Rice.
The story for poorly aggressive cells was said quite different Nagrath assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and of bioengineering at Rice.
Nagrath director of Rice's Laboratory for Systems Biology of Human Diseases said the new metabolic analysis indicates that ovarian cancer may be susceptible to multidrug cocktails particularly
The three-year study included cell culture studies at Rice as well as a detailed analysis of gene expression profiles of more than 500 patients from the Cancer Genome Atlas and protein-expression profiles from about 200
Rice graduate student Lifeng Yang lead author of the study designed a preclinical experiment to test the feasibility of a multidrug approach.
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