News by Subject Agriculture

Consuming potato puree during prolonged exercise works just as well as a commercial carbohydrate gel in sustaining blood glucose levels and boosting performance in trained athletes, scientists report.

Ugandans and Kenyans in poor urban households are willing to pay a premium for more nutritious flour, new research shows. The study, led by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), addresses huge knowledge gaps on consumers in urban slums and their interest in buying motivated nutritionally enriched foods.

Engineering biology is transforming technology and science. Researchers in the international Genome Project-write, including two authors from the UTIA Center for Agricultural Synthetic Biology, outline the technological advances needed to secure a safe, responsible future in the Oct. 18 issue of Science.

A secret weapon used by the killer rice blast fungus to infect host plants has been discovered in new research.

Using optogenetic and chemogenetic techniques, researchers at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki, Japan, identified brain circuits underlying hunger-induced changes in the preferences for sweet and aversive tastes in mice. These circuits involved Agouti-related peptide-expressing neurons, which projected to glutamate neurons in the lateral hypothalamus. From there, glutamate neurons projecting to the lateral septum increased sweetness preferences, and glutamate neurons projecting to the lateral habenula decreased sensitivity to aversive tastes.

Over the past two decades, approximately 20% of the Earth's cultivated surfaces have become less productive. According to the latest report from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), humans are the culprit -- we have not done enough to protect nature's biodiversity. Today an international research team coordinated by the University of Würzburg and Eurac Research confirmed the advantages of biodiversification: agricultural fields with greater biodiversity are better protected from harmful insects, promote pollination and produce higher yields.