After steadily declining for over a decade, global hunger is on the rise again, affecting 815 million people in 2016, or 11 per cent of the global population, says a new edition of the annual United Nations report on world food security and nutrition released today. At the same time, multiple forms of malnutrition are threatening the health of millions worldwide.
 

Biodiversity Conservation Agency, in coordination with CropLife Asia, held a workshop on Insect Resistance Management (IRM) on Genetically Modified Crops in Vietnam. The workshop took place in Vinh Phuc province on August 3-4, 2017. Biodiversity Conservation Agency Director, Phạm Anh Cường, stressed the need to establish and issue the guidelines for risk assessment of GM crops.

Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences researchers successfully incorporated a Bt gene into cabbage plants to improve resistance to destructive pest, diamondback moth (Plutella xylostella). The results of their study are published in Scientia Horticulturae. The researchers used Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation to develop transgenic cabbage plants with Bacillus thuringiensis cry1Ia8 gene.

Corn is currently one of the ten agricultural commodities that Vietnam imports the most. Without rapidly raising productivity to meet the shortage of corn, it is expected that spending billions of dollars to import corn will continue in the years to come. According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, in the first seven months of 2017, corn imports reached 4.13 million tonnes valued at $825 million,

The seventh most important crop in the world, sweet potato is an important source of calories, proteins, vitamins, and minerals. An international team of researchers from China and Germany has been able to sequence and phase the sweet potato genome, giving insights about the evolutionary history of the sweet potato.

Photosynthesis is one of the most important biological processes in the world. It works by using photosynthetic reaction centers (RC) — specialized membrane proteins — which collect the energy from light and use it to pump electrons across a biological membrane from one cellular electron carrier to another, resulting in the conversion of electromagnetic into chemical energy, which can be used by organisms.

The evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis by cyanobacteria was arguably one of the most significant biological events in Earth’s history, shaping the atmosphere and subsequently leading to diverse ecosystems (1). The permanent endosymbiotic merger between a cyanobacterium and a unicellular heterotrophic eukaryote in deep evolutionary time set the stage for the stunning diversity of photosynthetic eukaryotes and ecosystems seen today, giving rise to the supergroup Archaeplastida, the red, glaucophyte, and green algae and their descendent land plants.

Speaking at the conclusion of a four-day visit to Ethiopia, including to the drought-stricken Somali region, the heads of the United Nations food agencies made a joint call for greater investment in long-term activities that strengthen people's resilience to drought and the impacts of climate shocks.
 

Vietnam Genetics Association, Agricultural Genetics Institute, and Phu Yen Center for Application and Transformation of Technology (PYCAT) organized a conference on biotechnology applications and genetically modified products on July 17, 2017 in Tuy Hoa City, Phu Yen, Vietnam. The meeting was attended by leaders of Phu Yen Department of Science and Technology and more than 120 representatives from agencies under the Department of Science and Technology:

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs with roles in plant development and stress responses. Loss-of-function analysis of miRNA genes has been challenging due to the lack of suitable knockout tools. A team of scientists from various universities, led by Jian-Ping Zhou from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, aim to study miRNA genes, specifically OsMIR528, in rice using CRISPR-Cas9.