The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is collaborating with partners in the Healthy Crops Research Consortium to enable rapid development of rice varieties, in order to be a step ahead of the evolution of rice diseases that can heavily affect yield and smallholder farmer income. Two recent publications in the journal Nature Biotechnology describe, for the first time, an integrated strategy to eradicate diseases that reduce global rice production.

The member states of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) has made the decision to develop a permanent framework and mechanism for the Seeds Without Borders initiative during their Regional Consultative Meeting during 3-5 September 2019 in Kathmandu, Nepal.
 

Global food prices rose in October for the first time in five months, as international quotations for sugar and key cereals increased significantly, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The FAO Food Price Index, averaged 172.7 points in October, some 1.7 percent higher than the previous month and 6.0 percent higher than during October 2018.

FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu met today with Mohammad Mahmood Abubakar, Federal Minister of Environment of Nigeria, on the sidelines of the 31st Meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol, held at FAO headquarters in Rome. During their first meeting, the Director-General and the Federal Minister discussed the importance of creating synergies and ensuring close collaboration of Ministries of Agriculture and Environment to address the climate change challenge.

Dr. Craig Cormick, Australia's leading science communicator has published his new book, The Science of Communicating Science, together with Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI) and Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The book aims to help solve a major problem that many scientists face at some point in their career: how do I communicate my work to society?

Think pumpkins are for Halloween only? Think again. For many people around the world, pumpkins are source of nutrition. Now, scientists at Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) in the US and the National Engineering Research Center for Vegetables in Beijing, China have sequenced the genomes of two important pumpkin species, Cucurbita maxima and Cucurbita moschata to understand their desirable traits.

Scientists at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service (USDA ARS) have doubled the amount of grains that a sorghum plant can yield. Led by Dr. Doreen Ware, CSHL Adjunct Professor and research scientist at USDA and colleague Dr. Zhanguo Xin, the research team identified novel genetic variations in sorghum's MSD2 gene, increasing the grain yield by 200 percent.

One of the most powerful molecular motors discovered, to date, belongs to a phage, a type of virus that infects bacteria (1). The motor serves to package stiff, double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) into a preassembled, proteinaceous polyhedral container called the procapsid. The DNA is about 50 times longer than the size of the capsid and gets packaged and compressed by the motor at near-crystalline densities.

An international group of more than 200 scientists have now published the gene sequences of more than 1,100 green plants providing insights into everything from algae and ferns to farm crops and forest trees. The study, One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes and Phylogenomics of Green Plants, published in Nature reveals the history of how and when plants gained the ability to grow tall and make seeds, flowers and fruits,

Experts from Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University developed a new gene editing approach by putting together two of the most vital proteins in molecular biology, CRISPR-Cas9 and a reverse transcriptase, into one system. The new system called prime editing is capable of editing mammalian cells in a precise, efficient, and highly versatile fashion. The study was published in Nature.