Today, 1 April 2021, the FAO Director-General, QU Dongyu, had a virtual meeting, with Dr Jim Godfrey, Chair Board of Trustees of International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and Dr Jean Balié, Director-General, (IRRI). The Director-General welcomed the IRRI’s new Director General and expressed his appreciation for FAO and IRRI’s long-standing partnership and work on the ground.

A team of German and Chinese researchers has shown, for the first time, where and how plants detect potassium deficiency in their roots, and which signaling pathways coordinate the adaptation of root growth and potassium absorption to uphold potassium supply. The absorption and transportation of potassium at the level of individual cells have been well characterized, but it was unknown how plants detect potassium availability in the soil.

According to the Department's spokesperson, the registered Bt cotton varieties include IUB-13, MNH-886, BS-15, Niab-878, and FH-14. Farmers in specific districts were advised to plant other registered Bt cotton based on the instructions of local agriculture experts. The farmers were reminded to plant non-Bt varieties on 10 percent of their fields as a refuge for pests and prevent the development of resistance against Bt varieties. The spokesperson also discouraged the planting of unregistered varieties, which can reduce production.

A study conducted by researchers from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India has looked into the possibility of boosting the nutrient content of the popular legume chickpea by crossing it with its hardy and weedy wild relatives. The researchers from ICRISAT and the Crop Trust's Crop Wild Relatives Project (CWR Project) studied the seed protein and mineral concentrations in wild chickpeas that belong to the genus Cicer.

Medicago, the Quebec City-based biopharmaceutical company, and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) have announced the start of Phase 3 clinical testing of Medicago's plant-derived COVID-19 vaccine candidate in combination with GSK's pandemic adjuvant, as part of the ongoing Phase 2/3 study. Medicago received approval from Canadian and US regulatory authorities to proceed with the enrollment of healthy adults in the Phase 3 portion of the trial based on positive interim Phase 2 results.

The scientists screened nine Cas12a orthologs that have not been used in plants before. They identified six variants that possessed high editing activity in rice. Among the six variants, Mb2Cas12a has the most efficient editing capability and tolerance to low temperature. The new variant enables editing with more relaxed PAM requirements in rice and produced twice genome coverage compared to SpCas9. The multiplexed system has the ability to target as many as 16 sites in the genome of rice to enhance its yield and disease resistance.

Over the last few decades, social scientists have experienced the causal revolution, the replication crisis, and, now in just a matter of months, another epoch: the era of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) research. According to Google Scholar, roughly 3.55 million COVID-19–related articles have appeared to date. That amounts to about 9,726 articles per day, or, roughly, one article every 9 seconds. Many of these articles are in the social sciences—that is, concerned not directly with medical outcomes but rather with COVID-19’s impact on social, behavioral, and economic outcomes.

Acute hunger is set to soar in over 20 countries in the coming months without urgent and scaled-up assistance, warn the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) in a new report issued today.  Yemen, South Sudan and northern Nigeria top the list and face catastrophic levels of acute hunger, with families in pockets of South Sudan and Yemen already in the grip of or at risk of starvation and death according to the Hunger Hotspots report.

More than 80,000 farmers, seed and grain producers, agro dealers and processors in Mali were reached through radio and TV messaging during 2020. This complemented 145 demonstrations of new varieties of sorghum, pearl millet, groundnut and cowpea for 3,300 producers. Even during times of a pandemic, assistance to farmers must continue, as was aptly shown in the first year of the UE-APSAN-Mali project. Modernization of breeding programs using RapidGen and capacity building of young scientists were other important components of the work.

Deforestation rates are significantly lower in Indigenous and Tribal territories where governments have formally recognized collective land rights, according to a new report launched today. Jointly published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Fund for the Development of Indigenous Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean (FILAC), Forest Governance by Indigenous and Tribal Peoples also shows that improving the tenure security of these territories is an efficient and cost-effective way to reduce carbon emissions.