You might not have heard -- or tasted -- the groundcherry, but this could soon change. The Van Eck Laboratory headed by Joyce Van Eck at Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) has presented their research on this crop which could make groundcherries a common household name thanks to the genome editing tool CRISPR.

Around 160 participants composed of farmers, members, and officials of selected municipalities in Camarines Sur, and representatives from the academe and non-government organizations were informed on the science of biotechnology, food and environmental safety of genetically modified (GM) crops, biotech products in the pipeline, and the existing biosafety regulatory guidelines in the Philippines during the Biotechnology 101 and Joint Department Circular (JDC) Public Briefing held at Villa Caceres Hotel in Naga City, Camarines Sur on September 26, 2018.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a science and technology think tank, filed a Citizen Petition to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to prohibit the use of non-GMO labels. The group claims that the non-GMO label "deceives consumers through false and misleading claims about foods, food ingredients and their health and safety characteristics."

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.