News by Subject Agriculture

Historically credited as being the first bacterium ever characterized as a plant pathogen, fire blight is a bacterial disease that leads to significant losses of pear and apple. The role of insects in the spread of this disease has been long studied. In a new study, plant pathologists based at Cornell University and Cornell AgriTech take a hypothesis that has been more or less ignored for 100 years and provided support for its validity.

Today's tomatoes are larger and easier to farm than their wild ancestor, but they also are less resistant to disease and environmental stresses like drought and salty soil. Researchers from Boyce Thompson Institute created a high-quality genome for the ancestor, discovering structural variants that are involved in fruit flavor, size and ripening, stress tolerance and disease resistance. Plant breeders could use the resource to develop tomatoes that taste better, are more nutritious and more resilient.

Rates of soil erosion and alluvium accumulation in North America accelerated 10-fold after Europeans colonized the continent, according to new research carried out by scientists from China, Belgium and USA.

ORNL story tips: Air taxis, fungi speak, radiation game and climate collab.

Researchers at the University of Warwick have uncovered the mechanism that allows plants to pass on their 'memories' to offspring, which results in growth and developmental defects.

A group of experts from academic, governmental and international organisations have identified five large-scale 'megatrends' affecting forests and forest communities, published today in Nature Plants. These are likely to have major consequences - both positively and negatively - over the coming decade.

Researchers led by the University of Tsukuba demonstrated that Target-AID gene editing technology can be used to simultaneously introduce single-base changes into multiple genes in tomatoes. Using this technique, the researchers altered three genes associated with carotenoid accumulation, resulting in elevated levels of carotenoids, particularly lycopene, in the resulting tomato lines. This technology will allow tomato breeders to introduce multiple advantageous gene changes into elite commercial cultivars, bypassing lengthy back-crossing steps between generations.