News by Subject Agriculture

Researchers at the University of Waterloo may have discovered a new, pesticide-free way to limit mosquito populations in some area and reduce the spread of the West Nile virus.

For decades, biologists have believed a key enzyme in plants had one function -- produce amino acids, which are vital to plant survival and also essential to human diets. But for Wellington Muchero, Meng Xie and their colleagues, this enzyme does more than advertised. They had run a series of experiments on poplar plants that consistently revealed mutations in a structure of the life-sustaining enzyme that was not previously known to exist.

New study from the University of Copenhagen reports that political discussions about genetically modified foods have ignored concerns among Danes that GM foods are 'unnatural'. This is very regrettable, according to Jesper Lassen, a researcher who has investigated public attitudes about genetic modification for the past 25 years.

A new Food-PRICE study finds persistent nutritional disparities within the food choices of those receiving assistance under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) compared to those not receiving SNAP assistance.

Plants containing the element gold are already widely known. The flowering perennial plant alfafa, for example, has been cultivated by scientists to contain pure gold in its plant tissue. Now researchers from the Sun Yat-sen University in China have identified and investigated the characteristics of gold nanoparticles in two plant species growing in their natural environments.