News by Subject Agriculture

Precision agriculture technologies can improve efficiency on smaller farms

Following high-severity fire, scientists have found forest recovery may increasingly be compromised by lack of tree seed sources, warmer and drier post-fire climate and more frequent reburning.

Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have uncovered a clue to the mystery of how epigenetic regulation impacts the entire plant genome, by looking at how plant cells suppress transcription - the first stage of how genes manufacture their products. Their findings, recently published in Nature Communications, pinpoint previously unknown sections of DNA that are silenced by epigenetic regulation, many of which originate within transposons.

After several years of experimentation, scientists have engineered thale cress, or Arabidopsis thaliana, to behave like a succulent, improving water-use efficiency, salinity tolerance and reducing the effects of drought. The tissue succulence engineering method devised for this small flowering plant can be used in other plants to improve drought and salinity tolerance with the goal of moving this approach into food and bioenergy crops.

Based on the cytidine deamination and base excision repair (BER) mechanism, the researchers led by Prof. GAO Caixia from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a series of APOBEC-Cas9 fusion-induced deletion systems (AFIDs) that combine Cas9 with human APOBEC3A (A3A), uracil DNA-glucosidase (UDG) and AP lyase, and successfully induced novel precise, predictable multi-nucleotide deletions in rice and wheat genomes.