The Agriculture Minister of France Julien Denormandie said in an interview that France sees crops developed using gene editing techniques as different to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and opposes a European Union court decision placing them under strict GMO regulations. In 2018, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that mutagenesis, among so-called new breeding techniques (NBT) based on targeted editing of genes, falls under rules applying to GMOs that incorporate DNA from a different species.

The Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (GFFA) will be organized from 18 to 22 January 2021, with the title of “How to feed the world in times of pandemics and Climate change”, by The Federy of Food and Agriculture, Berline, Europe. The programme is followed as:

Budding agricultural researchers are being trained in crop modeling to take on pressing and ever-present challenges of land, climate and food security. In a recent training program at ICRISAT-Mali, eight students learned to model agrosystems with DSSAT software, taking into account smallholder farming constraints. Crop modeling is a process that describes different stages of crop growth and development depending on weather, climate and soil conditions adapted to the environmental context,

The FAO Director-General QU Dongyu today held a meeting with all senior managers of the UN agency, including FAO representatives (FAORs) to about 130 countries, to present the Organization’s priorities for 2021. Opening the fourth meeting of its kind, with almost 200 participants, Qu highlighted that all the strategic decisions, transformative actions and priorities that he had introduced since his arrival at FAO followed a clear, coherent and transparent philosophy of change. He added that his Manifesto contains concrete action plans that are based on numerous consultations with Members and experts.

In December 2019, Cyclone Pawan hit Ali Mahamud Rubaax’s village of Dharkeynley in Beletweyne, central Somalia. The storm’s rain caused the river levels to reach their maximum, breaking their banks and overflowing into the village and surrounding areas leaving most of the town under water. About 182 000 people from this district were displaced. Some drowned. Others had gone missing.

An Israeli startup called eggXYt embarked on a groundbreaking project that uses gene editing to address the male chick culling problem in the poultry and egg industries. According to Yehuda Elram, co-founder and CEO of eggXYt, billions of male chicks are slaughtered every year because male layers (the breed of chicken used for eggs) can't lay eggs and their meat is too scrawny.

Transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), a plant breeding innovation, have been successfully used to develop premium quality high-oleic soybean oil, bacterial blight resistant rice, and potato chips with reduced acrylamide. Transcription activator-like effectors (TALEs) are proteins made and used by plant pathogenic bacteria to control plant genes during infection. TALENs are protein combinations composed of two parts: one part is the TALE that targets the protein to a specific DNA sequence and the second part is a nuclease (N) that cuts DNA.

Scientists from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have found a gene that plays an important role in helping rice adapt to low soil nitrogen. Nitrogen fertilizer has an indispensable role in increasing crop yields, but on the other hand, it creates a severe threat to ecosystems. For this reason, breeding new crop varieties with high nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) is a high priority for both agricultural production and environmental protection.

Barkissa Fofana believes that microbiology is key to making degraded land green and productive again, and she is carrying out research to prove it. “Something has to be done to tackle the environmental problems caused by climate change, desertification and population growth,” says Barkissa from an Acacia field just outside the city of Djibo in Burkina Faso’s northern Sahel region.
 

Cytoplasmic lipid droplets (LDs) store energy in the form of esterified fatty acids. Mobilization of those fatty acids can occur through cytosolic lipases that traffic to droplets, through lipophagy, or likely through LD contact sites with other organelles. Lipophagy, the degradation of LDs by lysosomes, has two forms: macrolipophagy, involving formation of autophagosomes, trapping LDs, that then fuse with lysosomes; and microlipophagy,