New lines of tomatoes are being made available for research, and they carry the pluck of a desert-dwelling distant cousin that could make future crops better able to thrive in heat and drought.
Researchers have sequenced the whitebark pine genome, presenting new opportunities to help the threatened, high-altitude tree endure environmental challenges.
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.
E. Charles Brummer has been honored for bettering alfalfa science and cultivation by the North American Alfalfa Improvement Conference. Brummer, a professor in the Department of Plant Sciences, is the director of the UC Davis Plant Breeding Center and involved in researching a wide range of crops for forage, grain and fiber.
As common crop diseases such as downy mildew, Fusarium and corky root evolve, Richard Michelmore and members of his lab look for the genetic basis of new variations and for genes in lettuce that can resist them. They hope to breed those qualities into existing cultivars that already stand up to multiple diseases.
America’s grand challenge to develop sustainable, plant-based jet fuel offers a model for young scientists showing the value of collaboration across disciplines and institutions, a leading biofuels scientist said at the recent UC Davis Plant Sciences Symposium.
The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research, or FFAR, has awarded a Seeding Solutions grant to the University of California, Davis to study how the microbial community hosted by the Sierra Mixe corn variety provides atmospheric nitrogen to the plant. Seeding Solutions grants are awarded annually in six different challenge groups recognized by the FFAR, with this one falling under “Next Generation Crops.” The grant was matched by Benson Hill for a total investment of $1,855,162
