News by Subject Agriculture

A total of 174 chicken breeds are described in a publicly accessible database which scientists from the University of Göttingen and the Friedrich Loeffler Institute in Neustadt-Mariensee have built up in recent years with numerous international partners. This database, the Synbreed Chicken Diversity Panel (SCDP), includes information about a large proportion of the available chicken species and their diversity. The researchers created a family tree of exceptional completeness and detail. The results have been published in the journal BMC Genomics.

New research by an international group of scientists, from Inland Norway University, Bioversity International, Wageningen University and World Agroforestry, examines whether incorporating suitable trees into crop systems or replacing coffee with cocoa could help the thousands of families in Mesoamerica meet future climate conditions.

Beekeepers across the United States lost 40.7% of their honey bee colonies from April 2018 to April 2019, according to preliminary results of the latest annual nationwide survey conducted by the University of Maryland-led nonprofit Bee Informed Partnership. The survey results indicate winter losses of 37.7%, which is the highest winter loss reported since the survey began 13 years ago and 8.9 percentage points higher than the survey average.

When plants absorb excess light energy during photosynthesis, reactive oxygen species are produced, potentially causing oxidative stress that damages important structures. Plants can suppress the production of reactive oxygen species by oxidizing P700 (the reaction center chlorophyll in photosystem I). A new study has revealed more about this vital process.

Accelerating plant evolution with CRISPR paves the way for breeders to engineer new crop varieties.

A UC Berkeley team with NSF funding has compiled a roadmap for the future of synthetic or engineering biology, based on the input of 80 leaders in the field from more than 30 institutions. The report provides a strong case that the federal government should invest in this area, not only to improve public health, food crops and the environment, but also to fuel the economy and maintain the country's leadership in synthetic/engineering biology.

Groundwater pumping in the last century has contributed as much as 50% to stream flow declines in some US rivers. This is the first study to examine the impact of past groundwater pumping across the entire US. Previous research examined how groundwater pumping affected surface waters, but at smaller scales. The researchers compared what US surface waters would have been like without consumptive uses with changes since large-scale groundwater pumping began in the 1950s.

Plant root systems play a crucial role in ecosystems, radically impacting everything from nutrient cycling to species composition. Despite their importance, scientists are just beginning to develop the tools to understand how these complex systems are structured, how they function, and how structure and function are related. This special issue of Applications in Plant Sciences presents research from the cutting edge of root science, exploring questions from the subcellular to the ecosystem level.