A scraggly grapevine collected in 1906 and stored at the UC Davis Center for Plant Diversity Herbarium has yielded clues to when Pierce's disease arrived in California and how the bacterium that causes it has evolved since then. Scientists hope to use that information to prevent and, eventually, treat the deadly blight, which has spread to wine-growing regions around the world.
During his 20-year tenure as founding director of the UC Davis Genome Center, Richard Michelmore, recruited more than 20 faculty members, led the center to prominence as a hub of technology-driven biology and made national headlines by implementing an innovative, community-scale, saliva-based COVID test. Quite the legacy for someone who never wanted the job in the first place.
Grey Monroe has received a CAREER Award for the Faculty Early Career Development Program from the National Science Foundation. Monroe is an assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences.
Researchers have sequenced the whitebark pine genome, presenting new opportunities to help the threatened, high-altitude tree endure environmental challenges.
Scientists in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences have landed $2.1 million in federal grants to develop varieties of green beans, chile peppers and alfalfa that can offer farmers greater quality, lower production costs and better yield amid the growing heat and drought already happening with climate change.
The grants from the United States Department of Agriculture come through the National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative.
Dwarfing genes in cereal crops made the Green Revolution of the 1960s possible, but they have limitations. Scientists at UC Davis have discovered a gene that can overcome some of those limitations in wheat by controlling plant height, while boosting yield in fields where water is less plentiful. Their discovery was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Taylor Lab will receive continued funding as part of a ground-breaking project to wean the United States’ aviation industry off petroleum-based fuel and help put the brakes on climate change. The U.S. Department of Energy announced the UC Davis project as part of a $590 million package over the next five years. The Taylor Lab’s goal: grow poplar trees that can be turned into sustainable, cost-effective jet fuel.
An international team of scientists found that the right number of copies of a specific group of genes can stimulate longer root growth, enabling wheat plants to pull water from deeper supplies. The resulting plants have more biomass and produce higher grain yield, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.
Gail Taylor and her team at the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences are looking for the genetic keys to making America’s favorite leafy green stay fresher, longer, in the fridge.
Taylor and members of the Taylor Lab have found regions on the lettuce genome related to the tiny details of how lettuce leaves are built – structure that can make a leaf more or less hospitable to bacteria. They’ve also found genetic regions related to the plant’s ability to resist bacteria from getting in at all.
The University of California’s first Industrial Hemp Field Day presented work by the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences to help farmers manage common problems and improve their yields. Researchers discussed their latest findings to better manage hemp production, touching on diseases, weeds, insects, pesticide resistance, biological controls and regulatory processes. Field demonstrations included ongoing trials on nitrogen and water use.
An estimated 80 to 100 growers turned out for the Sept. 22 event, showing the demand for scientific guidance for legal hemp cultivation.
