The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) completed a thorough assessment of the potential risks of genetically engineered bent grass developed by Scotts and Monsanto. Results of their assessments showed that the new variety is unlikely to pose a plant risk to agricultural crops or other plants in the U.S. Thus, APHIS announced the deregulation of the GE bent grass.

Researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and University of California, Davis in the United States, and the John Innes Centre in the United Kingdom have developed a much-needed genetic resource that will help accelerate the study of gene functions in wheat. The resource, a collection of bread and pasta wheat seeds with more than 10 million sequenced and carefully catalogued genetic mutations, is freely available to wheat breeders and researchers.

New drought across swathes of southern Ethiopia may jeopardize the East African nation's restoration of food security after the worst agricultural seasons in decades unless urgent efforts are made to shore up vulnerable households in rural areas, FAO warned today.

To introduce and give updates on the latest achievements of biotechnology, the Agricultural Science Institute for Southern Coastal Central of Vietnam and Agricultural Genetics Institute jointly organized a seminar on Agricultural Biotechnology and Its Potential Application in Vietnam on December 2, 2016 at Hoang Yen Hotel, Quy Nhon City, Binh Dinh province, Vietnam.

Prices of major food commodities declined for the fifth year in a row in 2016, averaging 161.6 points for the year as a whole, some 1.5 percent below their 2015 levels. Bumper harvests and prospects for staple cereals offset upward pressure on FAO's Food Price Index from tropical commodities such as sugar and palm oil, where production was impacted by El Nino.

A symposium on 20 Years of Commercialization of GM Crops and the Status of GM Crops in Vietnam was organized by Biotechnology Center of Ho Chi Minh City. According to the presentations, it was recorded that 1,180 hectares of land were planted with GM maize in 2015. The average productivity of GM maize reached to 44.8 tons/hecta, while the total yield was ~5.3 millions tons.

Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and NRGene, in collaboration with a global team of researchers have announced the accurate assembly of the W22 maize reference genome. According to the team, the second version of W22 has reached a scaffold N50 of 35.5 MB with less than 2% unfilled sequence gaps.

Researchers at North Carolina State University (NC State) have presented evidence on the movement and evolution of Phytophthora infestans, the pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine in the 1840s, which set down roots in the United States before attacking Europe.

The article by Yu et al. (1) in a recent issue of PNAS unveils potential salivary biomarkers for the early detection of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). Despite the groundbreaking findings demonstrated, the authors assert that the ongoing strategy for detecting OSCC (oral visual inspection and biopsy) is ineffective, because it has globally yielded high specificity but varied sensitivity. Here, we briefly discuss the above-mentioned affirmation, taking into account the landscape of OSCC screening approaches.

- With 14 million people food insecure in strife-torn Yemen, the European Union (EU) has committed 12 million euros in support of FAO's efforts to tackle rising hunger. EU funds will be used to provide a better understanding of the magnitude of the current situation and avert a deepening crisis, while providing immediate agricultural support to more than 150 000 people to help them rapidly improve food production and nutrition.