A group of scientists developed a potato that emits light at the earliest stages of stress. The breakthrough can help give warning and provide enough time for farmers to address the crop's problems before it is lost to abiotic stress.The scientists chose to modify the Irish potato (Solanum tuberosum) by establishing a whole-plant redox imaging that makes the potato express the chloroplast-targeted redox-sensitive green fluorescence protein 2 (roGFP2).

Scientists and experts from the John Innes Centre (JIC) urge governments around the world to come together and fund a new international research platform, to reduce the impact of major wheat pathogens, and improve global food security. The JIC is calling for an internationally coordinated approach to deliver a new ‘R-Gene Atlas', which would help identify new genetic solutions conferring disease resistance for crops, which could be bred into commercial wheat varieties.

A team of scientists from Japan, Europe, and the USA has identified a pathway leading to accelerated flowering of plants in low-nitrogen soils. The scientists, led by Associate Professor Takeo Sato of Hokkaido University's Graduate School of Life Science, have revealed the molecular mechanism responsible for the acceleration of flowering in Arabidopsis under low nitrogen conditions.

ISAAA and partners present the webinar International Trade in Crops with New Breeding Technologies: The Australian Perspective to provide an insight into the future landscape of trade involving gene-edited crops, particularly in relation to countries involved in the international trade of agricultural products. It will be held on June 11, 2021, at 2 PM Manila / 4 PM Sydney via Zoom.

On June 1, 2021, Bioceres Crop Solutions has announced that it has successfully completed the regulatory review process and received approval for its HB4 drought and herbicide tolerant soybeans from the Canadian Health Agency and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. With approximately 2.5 million hectares farmed every year and yields often below three tons per hectare, Canada's soybean production regions are well suited for HB4 value generation.

Two of the world’s great agricultural challenges require bold new approaches and could share a solution. Nitrogen (N) pollution, affecting water, air, and the climate, presents one massive challenge. Ninety percent of increased reactive N originates as synthetic fertilizer applied to agricultural fields or N fixed in them (1). Because crops take up only 42 to 47% of the total applied N, more than half is lost to the environment in some way (2, 3).

 The Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), QU Dongyu, today shared his views on FAO’s roadmap for agri-food systems’ transformation as he met with the Rome-based Africa Regional Group, and stressed the need for a systematic and participatory approach to make agri-food systems more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable.

Cell-type-specific markers are considered as relevant tools to identify developmental processes in cell differentiation during plant reproduction. CAS scientists characterized Vegetative Cell Specific 1 (VCS1) of rice, which is expressed particularly in late pollen and was projected to encode a small protein of 205 amino acid residues.  Reporter fusion protein expression indicated that VCS1 was exclusively targeted to the vegetative nucleus of pollen.

A landmark research survey on grain yield potential and climate resilience has identified genomic regions associated with yield potential and stress-resilience in bread wheat. Scientists from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) based on 100 datasets and 105,000 grain yield observations from 55,568 wheat breeding lines developed by CIMMYT.

Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have unraveled how plants respond to different light intensities and temperatures that could help create a better adaptation of crops to climate change.The researchers have characterized and compared the biochemical levels of the phytochrome family of Arabidopsis, maize, and potatoes.