Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory discovered how a sugar-signalling molecule helps control oil production in plant cells. The results, published in The Plant Celljournal could provide new strategies to engineer plants to produce large amounts of oil for biofuels and other oil-based products.

For the first time ever, an international team of scientists from Brazil, the United States, and Germany has created a new crop from a wild plant within a single generation using the modern genome editing process CRISPR-Cas9. The team used Solanum pimpinellifolium as the parent plant species, a wild tomato relative from South America, and the progenitor of modern cultivated tomato. The wild plant's fruits are as small as the size of peas and the yield is low, but are more aromatic and contains more lycopene than modern tomatoes.

Today's kiwifruit contains about as much vitamin C as an orange. Its genome revealed that this extra boost in vitamin C is the result of the fruit's ancestors' spontaneously duplicating their DNA in two separate evolutionary events approximately 50-57 million and 18-20 million years ago.

Bacterial blight is a serious disease of rice that easily spreads to large areas, causing around 30 percent loss in yield, affecting incomes for smallholder farmers in Asia. Scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) led a study that looked into genes that will help bacterial blight disease in rice.

An international team of scientists has for the first time studied the genetics that underlie grain zinc concentrations in wheat. Analyzing zinc concentrations in the grain of 330 bread wheat lines across diverse environments in India and Mexico, the research team uncovered 39 new molecular markers associated with the trait, as well as two wheat genome segments that carry important genes for zinc uptake, translocation, and storage in wheat.

The Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2017 (ISAAA Brief 53) was presented to over 70 members of the academe and students at the Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU), Mymensingh, Bangladesh on September 9, 2018.  Dr. Rhodora R. Aldemita, ISAAA Global Knowledge Center on Crop Biotechnology Director, and Mr. Bhagirath Choudhary of ISAAA-South Asia Biotech Center (SABC) presented the highlights of the report.

India's cotton sub-sector actors led by Dr. P. G. Patil, Director of the Central Institute for Research on Cotton Technology (CIRCOT), showcased how Bt cotton can drive industrialization of a country with enormous social-economic benefits to citizens. Every part of the cotton crop is used to produce lint, cotton seed oil, cotton cake, paper, or briquettes.

Biofortification, whether through conventional breeding or advanced biotechnology techniques such as genetic engineering, has been recognized as a complementary intervention for overcoming malnutrition. The continued prevalence of hidden hunger globally provides a compelling argument for a closer look at the use of advanced biotechnology techniques to improve nutritional value,

FAO welcomes a new World Bank initiative to promote action against famines and is eager to contribute its own considerable tools and resources to make it a success, Director-General José Graziano da Silva said late Sunday. He spoke at an event held during the United Nations General Assembly on partnerships to address severe food insecurity around the world, and focused on the World Bank’s proposed Famine Action Mechanism (FAM).

Dreaded diseases such as meningitis, pneumonia, and deadly diarrhea have been a struggle to treat because the gram-negative bacteria that cause them have double cell walls with an outer membrane that is particularly difficult for drugs to penetrate and resistance to such compounds is soaring.