This spring's wheat is the hardest hit. To many, such as Gong Peng, an ecologist at the University of California in Berkeley, California and the Beijing-based Institute of Remote Sensing Applications
whether France and Greece should be ordered to lift their national bans on cultivation of a genetically modified maize (corn) known as MON801,
As a result, the average grain production per unit area of farmed land doubled between 1977 and 2005.
the wheat-rice system in a region near the Tai Lake in eastern China and the wheat-maize system in the North China Plain in the northeast of the country.
wheat and maize farmlands in the North China Plain lose 19%and 25%of applied nitrogen, respectively,
'By contrast, in the Tai Lake region, 36%of fertilizer nitrogen is lost from rice fields and 44%from wheat fields through a process called denitrification, in
In the United states, farmers use 100 kilograms per hectare on wheat farmland. But China's figure is compared also high to other developing countries with intensive farming practices:
two independent groups of researchers report that the technique can also be used to engineer herbicide-resistant corn and tobacco1,
Despite intense opposition from the US corn (maize) ethanol industry, the rule takes into account agricultural expansion abroad caused by rising grain prices as food crops are diverted for biofuels.
This'indirect'effect boosts the estimated emissions for various categories of corn ethanol by 50
His work suggests that corn ethanol could double emissions compared with gasoline over 30 years.
Even though it's a best-case scenario for corn ethanol, the impact is still significant,
Corn ethanol basically has no benefit, and it causes hunger. Brazilian sugarcane ethanol despite having an even higher indirect effect
It might be a high-yielding rice, or it might be wheat that's resistant to rust,
it might be cassava that's able to tolerate change in temperature, and climate change.
They found that the bioelectric route came out ahead of both corn ethanol and advanced cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass.
We expected that electricity would look better than corn ethanol, but it was surprising to see that this was also the case for the more advanced second-generation ethanols,
Instead, they may have to switch to sorghum and millet, which are more tolerant to heat.
Some plants, such as grape vines, can be propagated asexually using cuttings but not crops such as corn or wheat.
including potatoes and wheat making the information freely available to researchers, plant breeders and farmers.
Nature Newsfarmers in the Ethiopian village of Adi Ha have been busy sowing fresh crops of grain in recent weeks,
In Adi Ha, farmers can pay a onetime fee of US$5 to $30 to cover their crops of the grain teff,
Agashe tested Tribolium castaneum, the ubiquitous flour beetle, by offering the beetles wheat flour their ancestral diet and maize (corn) flour,
Wheat and maize have different ratios of these carbon isotopes. After only two weeks, Agashe found, the beetles'diet shifted to almost 30%maize flour.
and tracked adult and larval numbers to assess immediate as well as long-term success. There was only a 4%increase in corn use over six generations, reports Agashe.
The importance of the genetic diversity to the successful use of corn is really interesting
in some populations, the taste for corn precedes the ability to utilize it efficiently. Over longer time frames, Agashe says,
Missouri, intends to launch a line of maize (corn) that contains eight different genes that make the crop resistant to herbicides and to attack by insects.
The US Energy Information Administration predicts that ethanol derived from corn alone might reach annual production levels of 39 billion litres by 2030.
Mcdonald and his colleagues calculate that this would require more than 9 million extra hectares of land to be planted with corn (maize), an area about the size of the state of Indiana.
For instance, a farmer who grows one type of crop on his land might simply switch to growing corn for biofuels.
The resistant rice of the future: Nature Newsjapanese research teams have pinpointed the genes in hardy varieties of rice that help the plants to outgrow rising paddy-field waters
and fend off fungal infections. Having these genes in more vulnerable rice varieties could save billions of dollars and feed millions more people.
The two papers are very welcome at a time of increasingly difficult challenges to rice growing, says Michael jackson, a plant physiologist at the University of Bristol, UK.
In the first study, published in Nature1 on 19 august, Motoyuki Ashikari, at Nagoya University in Japan,
Japan, has found a gene that helps some types of rice fight off fungal infection and successfully isolated it from a linked stretch of DNA responsible for the terrible flavour of the wild varieties.
which affects more than 25%of global rice-producing land. Most rice plants (Oryza sativa) die if completely submerged for more than a few days.
But some rice varieties can survive the conditions by rapidly shooting up in height. These plants are typically far less productive
however, so researchers have sought the genes responsible for flood tolerance in the hope of introducing them into high-yielding rice varieties.
In 2006, a team led by David Mackill at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines discovered similar flood-tolerance genes a genetic cluster called Submergence 1 that allowed plants to survive for more than two weeks
by entering a dormant state when completely submerged3 (see'Rice made to breathe underwater').'Ashikari's team examined three genomic regions that they had found helped rice to grow.
In the region that added the greatest growth boost, they mapped a pair of genes dubbed SNORKEL1
and SNORKEL2 that together can trigger growth of up to 8 metres in the face of rising water levels (see video).
and Snorkel genes can now be crossed into common rice varieties to protect crops exposed to different flooding scenarios.
Some wild rice species possess Snorkel genes, whereas only domesticated breeds contain the Submergence genes, he says.
Rice blast disease destroys around 10-30%of global rice crops enough food to feed about 60 million people each year.
Some rice plants are resistant to the pernicious fungus responsible the disease, but the rice from these plants often has undesirable qualities,
such as lower stickiness and poor flavour, so they have not been introduced into widely consumed rice varieties.
Some researchers have speculated that blast-immunity genes might directly confer terrible taste, but Fukuoka and his colleagues have shown that resistance
and showed that plants with two rare deletions had around 10 times fewer blast lesions than wild-type rice,
indicating that Pi21 itself does not harm the rice's taste. Both research teams are breeding more-durable rice varieties.
No genetic engineering is required, says Ashikari, because all of these genes can be transferred by crossing. Once these new cultivars are made,
however, they still need to be tested both in the paddy and on the plate. We need to see how these behave in field situations
and how they can be used in a rice breeding programme, says Mackill.
Forest definition comes under fire: Nature Newsthe health of the world's forests and their capacity to lock away carbon could be jeopardized by logging
China cuts methane emissions from rice fields: Nature Newssimple changes to farming practices in China have slashed the amount of methane released from rice fields,
researchers say. Paddy fields account for around 20%of human-related emissions of methane a potent greenhouse gas.
Farmers normally flood rice fields throughout the growing season, meaning that methane is produced by microbes underwater as they help to decay any flooded organic matter.
By studying experimental rice plots and real farmland, Chris Butenhoff and Aslam Khalil, physicists from Portland State university in Portland, Oregon, together with Xiong Zhenqin, an ecologist at Nanjing Agricultural
The team found that draining paddy fields in the middle of the rice-growing season a practice that most Chinese farmers have adopted
since the 1980s because it increases rice yields and saves water stopped most of the methane release from the field.
Estimating regional methane emissions from paddies is notoriously tricky because of the lack of good models
the researchers found that paddies released more methane when rice straws from the previous growing season were added to flooded fields as a source of organic fertilizer a common rice-farming practice and when soil temperature increased.
Based on these findings, the researchers came up with a computer model to calculate methane emission from rice fields that also incorporated other information
such as the location and size of the cultivated area and the length of the rice-growing season.
By combining detailed inventories of agriculture practice throughout China with satellite data indicating the presence of straws in rice fields,
the team was able to estimate that paddies across China release 5. 1 million tonnes of methane a year nearly a 70%reduction from the 1980 levels previously estimated1 by Changsheng Li, a biogeochemist at the University of New hampshire
in Durham. This is largely due to the shift towards the practice of mid-season drainage in the 1980s
Only 1%of Chinese farmers drained their paddies halfway during the rice-growing season in 1980,
the researchers calculated that paddies worldwide release about 50 million tonnes of methane. Notably, India is responsible for nearly a third of the estimated global methane emissions this may be due to the high temperatures in that country's rice-growing regions,
the large cultivation areas and the practice of continuously flooding paddies, says Butenhoff. With global temperatures rising as a result of climate change, the emission of methane which traps about 25 times more of the Sun's heat than carbon dioxide will play a greater part in the global carbon budget than it does now
says Butenhoff. Based on the temperature-increase projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he and his colleagues estimate that methane emission from paddies in China could go up by a further 2. 5 million tonnes by 2100.
This is a massive amount, he says. We can't even get an estimate for India
Given that most farmers outside China continuously flood their rice fields, the researchers say that simply shifting towards the practice of mid-season drainage could significantly reduce global paddy-derived methane emissions.
At the moment most of the methane-monitoring network lies outside the areas where rice is grown. We need more local information,
including methane flux, to get a better global estimate of methane emission from paddies, says Butenhoff.
The study has important implications for climate change and mitigation efforts, says Mccord. Methane is an attractive greenhouse gas to target for emission reduction,
but the lack of an accurate estimate of the baseline level challenges the use of paddy emissions in carbon trading,
The reaction is oxygen hitting the carbon grain and sputtering carbon off says Bergin. And this can happen at around 500 kelvin,
which attracts nematodes that kill western corn rootworm an insect whose larvae are major maize pests in North america.
Some of the biggest effects could be irrigated felt on wheat and rice yields, the study finds.
If left unchecked, climate change will reduce wheat yields from irrigated fields by 20-35%by 2050 compared with the potential yields for these crops under a no-climate-change scenario.
In a worst-case scenario, the models show that farmers in this region could see a nearly 50%drop in wheat production by 2050 compared with potential production with no climate change.
and on world prices for livestock products and major grain, don't take into account gains in crop yields
grasses and municipal waste was touted as superior to maize (corn) ethanol because it produces fewer greenhouse-gas emissions
and aims to produce 2. 5 billion additional litres of ethanol annually from non-food-grain sources by 2010.
which a team led by Arjen Hoekstra at the University of Twente in The netherlands suggested that jatropha needs more water than other bioenergy crops, such as maize (corn),
the jatropha they planted reached harvest at the same time as the rice crops. Farmers neglect their jatropha seeds
because they have to harvest their rice, he says. In India, where much of the jatropha hype originated,
Environmental groups are protesting after the Mexican government's 15 october approval of the first permits to plant experimental genetically modified (GM) maize (corn.
The report forecasts that wheat yields from irrigated fields might fall by a third or more by 2050, compared to a no-climate-change scenario,
and that farmers in southern Asia might see their wheat production almost halve. See go. nature. com/VYZOWL for more.
or protect natural maize (corn) varieties from transgenes, say prominent scientists concerned about the experimental planting of genetically modified crops.
The genome of maize (corn) a staple crop first introduced by Native americans to the European settlers centuries ago has finally been sequenced.
What we have here is a crucial part of the instruction manual for how you breed a better corn plant
researchers then tackled other corn varieties for comparison. Luis Herrera-Estrella and his colleagues at the Research and Advanced Studies Center of the National Polytechnic institute (CINVESTAV) in Irapuato, Mexico, sequenced a maize variety from the Mexican highlands called Palomero.
This ancient strain, ideal for making popcorn, diverged from B73 about 9, 000 years ago around the time that maize was domesticated first from the grass teosinte.
You can contain three Arabidopsis genomes or one rice genome in the size difference between those two maize genomes, notes Virginia Walbot,
or hybridize, different inbred lines to produce the superior corn varieties that we tend to eat.
The higher quality of hybrids can also be chalked up to different corn varieties harbouring non-overlapping
The resource can also be used to produce heartier corn varieties by systematically scanning the genome for genes that underlie key traits,
better and tastier corn, says Schnable. This genome will allow us to develop tools to make their jobs a little easier.
Apart from the initial destruction of a few tree crops like cocoa, coffee and plantain, Achaea did not pose any threat to food crops like rice,
The first confirmed use of grains in the human diet comes from charred barley and wheat from Israel dating to about 23,000 years ago1,
so the latest findings could push that date back another 80,000 years. Mercader first discovered the Ngalue cave
But Mercader believes early human grain consumption is possible even if he has demonstrated not yet fully it.
and is made from crop plants such as maize (corn) and sugarcane, putting vehicles in competition with hungry mouths.
or early 2012 at a total cost of under $0. 53 per litre roughly on a par with that of'corn'ethanol produced from sugar-rich maize cobs.
with some soils reaching a ph of 5. 07 (nearly neutral soils of ph 6-7 are optimal for cereals,
such as rice and grain, and other cash crops). By contrast, soil left to its own devices would take at least 100 years to acidify by this amount.
such as rice that is insect-resistant (Bt rice) or enriched with Vitamin a and micronutrients. Our national labs have all the genes for rice improvement,
we do need not Monsanto, says Govindarajan Padmanabhan, a biochemist and former director of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.
rice and potato that took 15 years to develop and a lot of money, adds Ananda Kumar,
'Indeed, Chinese farmers had been growing Bt rice for five years before receiving official government approval just four months ago,
Business watch New biofuel standards have cleared the way for a continued expansion of maize (corn) ethanol production in the United states. The US Environmental protection agency (EPA) ruled on 3 february that ethanol made from maize decreases
in plants such as sugar cane and maize (corn), which use a different type of photosynthesis, 110 out of 10,000 atoms are carbon-13.
for example, research on how to increase the productivity of stress-tolerant rice in Asia, and to identify the management
Proposals to focus research on maize (corn), rice and wheat would be broadened to include other crops such as beans and cassava.
including maize (corn) and rice, researchers can increasingly study crop species directly, rather than relying on a model plant.
Monsanto's MON 810 maize (corn), which is engineered to be resistant to the European corn-borer caterpillar,
since 1996 so crops such as corn and potato can produce the crystal proteins, protecting themselves from insects without any pesticides.
maize (corn) and cotton grown in the United states or about half the nation's cropland.
Virulent wheat fungus invades South africa: Nature Newstwo new forms of a devastating wheat fungus, known as Ug99 stem rust,
have shown up in South africa, a study has found. The two South african forms are able to overcome the effects of two resistance genes in wheat that normally prevent stem rust from taking hold.
The genes cause plant cells around the infection site to die, stopping the fungus from further infecting the plant.
They are two of the most important genes in wheat because they are selected for in crop-breeding programmes across the world.
The presence of new forms of Ug99 in South africa makes wheat crops in areas including the Middle east
says Zacharias Pretorius, a wheat pathologist at the University of the Free state in Bloemfontein, South africa,
The concern is that other wheat-growing countries will become vulnerable to infection. Eventually it will reach North america
farmers across the world will need to replace up to 90%of the current wheat varieties with new,
It attacks the stems of wheat plants by destroying vascular tissue so that plants can no longer stand upright.
for example, farmers in the Narok region of Kenya lost up to 80%of their wheat crop due to Ug99 in 2007.
These strains pose an even greater threat to wheat than other types of Ug99 because they are more virulent
and the wheat plants have fewer defences against infection, says Pretorius. Pretorius and his team analysed the genomes of the new stem rust variants
making it able to overcome the Sr24 wheat gene that usually confers resistance to the pathogen.
The fungus and its variants are now able to overcome at least 32 of around 50 resistance genes, according to Ravi Singh, a plant geneticist and pathologist at the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre.
The project is also investigating why rice, the only cereal that is not damaged by the rust,
They are also hesitant about buying its forthcoming Smartstax maize (corn), which incorporates eight genes conferring herbicide tolerance and insect protection.
The insects are also emerging as a threat to crops such as green beans, cereals, vegetables and various fruits.
Research Wheat fungus: Two new forms of a devastating wheat fungus known as Ug99 stem rust have arisen in South africa.
Researchers at the University of the Free state in Bloemfontein found that the new variants can overcome the effects of two resistance genes in wheat that normally prevent stem rust from taking hold.
There is concern that winds will help the fungus to migrate further, threatening crops in areas including the Middle east and south Asia.
They then correlated this with data on how changes in climate had affected maize (corn) and wheat productivity in different Mexican states during the same time.
%cut yields of some crops, including maize (corn) and wheat, by 5-15%;%and increase the area burned by wildfires in the western United states by 200-400%.
This RNA is produced from a gene called polished rice, so-named because the embryos of flies with a mutation in the polished rice gene lack the hairs that characteristically decorate the surface of the fruitfly embryo
(which resembles a grain of rice to the naked eye). The team found that the polished rice peptides trigger the truncation of a protein called Shavenbaby,
which regulates the development of the hairs. This shorter form of the Shavenbaby protein activates the expression of genes needed for hair growth.
Short peptides could be lurking virtually anywhere in the genome, says Desplan. Sequence analysis suggests that DNA regions capable of encoding tiny peptides exist in front of many protein-coding genes,
Meanwhile, Gerstein notes that the polished rice peptides could also have implications for how we view pseudogenes,
To boost grain production, for example, China has a double-cropping system of growing wheat in winter and maize in summer.
But because there is very little precipitation on the North China Plain in winter, this draws deeply on groundwater supplies.
The country could import grain and synchronize crop production with the climate by ending the cultivation of winter wheat and growing maize for more of the year,
she says. If we continue the current path of economic development, we will hit the wall very soon.
Farmland will likely not be ready for rice planting later this year, adds Etienne Labande, deputy chief of the Preparedness and Response Branch at the UN World Food Programme,
Millions of families may have lost their personal grain stores in the flood water and chaos. Â
the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs added that the floods would have a catastrophic effect on agricultural livelihoods, with extensive damage to standing crops 墉 such as maize (corn),
cotton and rice 墉 and stored planting seeds, including the major staple food crop wheat.
The summer monsoon was exacerbated this year by an unusual jet-stream pattern in the upper atmosphere;
an agricultural scientist often referred to as the father of India's green revolution for his role in developing high-yield varieties of wheat.
who presented the RNA transcriptomes (the whole set of RNA molecules present) of 700-850-year-old maize (corn) seeds at a conference there last week.
whose team has sequenced small regulatory RNAS from ancient Egyptian barley seeds. Increasingly, biologists are discovering that the differences between organisms are due not to mutations that change the sequence of protein-coding genes
If there is steady development in the quality of the grain, that suggests they understood what they were doing as farmers.
Oliver Smith and their colleagues examined small regulatory RNA molecules in 500-year-old barley seeds from Egypt.
is that the seeds also contain a gene mutation that normally produces six-row barley. He hopes that small RNAS
His team next plans to compare these RNAS with those found in modern barley and to try to identify which transcripts
Having finished a three-year stint as science adviser to US secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton this July,
I had formed a relationship with Condi Rice she hired me but I was never part of the inner circle with Hillary.
Rice came out of an academic background. She was attuned probably more to how scientists work. In India, in China,
Flour residues recovered from 30,000-year-old grinding stones found in Italy, Russia and the Czech republic point to widespread processing and consumption of plant grain,
Unlike Neolithic humans, who domesticated and cultivated grains such as wheat and barley, these hunter-gatherers relied on wild vegetation.
For example, once ground and cooked, the cattail grains contain nearly as much energy as domesticated cereals,
assessed the effects of planting maize (corn) genetically modified to produce Bt toxin, which kills the European corn borer (Ostrinia nubilalis).
This work provides strong evidence for the reduced pest burden for non-Bt corn caused by the Bt corn, based on a reduction in overall pest-population size
Some farmers were very sceptical of entomologists telling them they needed to maintain non-Bt corn
in breakfast cereals imported from South africa, says Wilberforce Tushemereirwe, who heads the country's National Banana Research Programme.
While digging in the southeastern area of Tel Megiddo, Boaretto's Phd student Michael Toffolo unearthed a pottery storage jar full of grains of wheat.
For instance, wheat grains and pieces of charcoal are used often to date pottery shards found in the same spot.
Rice research The world's leading rice-research institutions are joining forces to improve rice yields
A 5-year, US$600-million initiative, the Global Rice Science Partnership, was launched officially on 10 november at the third International Rice Congress in Hanoi.
It is led by the International Rice Research Institute, based in Los Ba ae'Â os, the Philippines,
Rice research goes global: Nature Newsthe world's leading rice research institutions are joining forces to improve rice yields
and breed improved varieties. The aim is to help to secure future affordable food supplies for the world's poorest people.
The 5-year US$600-million global partnership is being led by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI),
The initiative known as the Global Rice Science Partnership (GRISP) is being launched today at the third International Rice Congress in Hanoi
and will be the biggest global science partnership on rice. We are bringing together several independent research entities that were all going in their own direction to identify major global problems
Rice is the most important food crop of the developing world and is the staple food of more than half of the world's population.
the average global growth rate in rice yields has slowed to less than 1%per year since 2000. As the climate changes and temperatures rise, productivity is likely to drop further.
By contrast, yield rates for maize (corn), a developed-world crop with considerable commercial interest, are growing by more than 2%per year.
The IRRI estimates that demand for rice will outstrip supply within the next few decades unless the crop's productivity is improved.
we will need to produce a lot more rice in the coming years to feed the world's population with less land, less water and less labour,
GRISP will study the genetic diversity of rice, by sequencing and analysing more than 1, 000 rice strains to identify genes for desirable traits such as improved yield and climate tolerance.
The partnership which also includes The french research organization CIRAD, based in Paris, and the Japan International Research center for Agricultural Sciences in Ibaraki, will seek to improve rice nutrition and quality.
In addition, researchers will look at how to reduce the environmental impact of rice farming, including reducing methane emissions created during its production,
and water use. Working with industry and farmers, the partnership will translate its discoveries into products and services,
The project aims to boost rice supplies to levels that will offset the anticipated 6. 5%increase in rice prices expected by 2020.
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