Farmers in New South Wales (NSW), Australia can now access all the approved GM crops in the country as of July 1, 2021, which marks the expiry of the 18-year GM crop moratorium implemented in NSW. CropLife Australia CEO Matthew Cossey expressed his appreciation for the end of the moratorium, which opens more opportunities for farmers to avail of GM crop innovations approved by the Federal Gene Technology Regulator. "Farmers should be the ones to make their own choices about what crops to grow that best fit their farming environment and business model.

Researchers from the University of Göttingen in Germany and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada examined how citizens in five countries react to different applications of genome editing in agriculture, which applications are accepted, and how the risks and benefits of the new breeding technologies are assessed.

Researchers from India and Canada documented the trends linked to genetically modified (GM) foods, policies, and consumer acceptance after analyzing hundreds of publications in the past 20 years. Their analyses led to the conclusion that consumer perception is affected by factors such as government decisions, how benefits are communicated, and the media.

FAO Director-General, QU Dongyu, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Andorra, Maria Ubach Font, had a meeting today to exchange views on areas of ongoing and future cooperation between FAO and Andorra.The Director-General thanked Minister Ubach Font for being a longstanding and active member of the UN Mountain Partnership.

In order to enhance the annual rate of genetic gains in crop improvement programs, the Accelerated Crop Improvement initiative was recently unveiled at ICRISAT. It is expected that, with this, the efficiency of the crop improvement programs for crops grown in drylands will receive a boost.

A fundamental challenge in biology is explaining the evolution of novel phenotypes such as the origins of eusocial behavior. Eusociality—defined by overlapping generations, reproductive division of labor, and cooperative brood care (1)—has evolved at least 17 times in arthropods (2): widespread in the social Hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps) and observed in other orders (aphids, ambrosia beetles, termites, thrips, and snapping shrimp; Fig. 1).

Science, technology and innovation are essential to accelerate the transformation of agri-food systems and combat hunger and malnutrition, the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), QU Dongyu, said today.The Director-General was speaking at the opening of the Science Days, a virtual conference organized by the Scientific Group of the UN Food Systems Summit and facilitated and hosted by FAO (8-9 July).

Researchers in Korea conducted a study to determine the environmental safety of a drought tolerant rice variety in terms of selected agricultural traits and gene flow. They concluded that genetically modified (GM) rice can be used as a means to address the food problem caused by climate change. The researchers focused on GM rice varieties HV8 and HV23 which carry the CaMsrB2 gene insertion. The gene functions as a defense regulator against oxidative stress in rice.

Wild wheat species are proven sources of resistance that can be transferred to commercial varieties. Combining multiple R genes is a widely accepted gene stewardship strategy to help enhance the resistance as the simultaneous defeat of two or more effective R genes is less likely than the defeat of either gene alone.The introgression of stem rust resistance gene Sr26 derived from tall wheatgrass into common wheat is one of the most successful examples of utilization of resistance resources from wheat wild relatives.

The researchers combined the gene editing tool, TALENs (Transcription activator-like effector nucleases), with an extra "chloroplast-targeting" signal and called it ptpTALECDs. The goal of the study is to create uniform, inheritable modifications to only specific parts of chloroplast DNA. The pairs of large TALENs protein and the chloroplast-targeting component must be expressed simultaneously as a single unit from the nuclear DNA in designing ptpTALECDs DNA sequence. The sequence is then inserted into the Arabidopsis plant and bred with non-modified plants.