This week, for the first time, scientists from Brazil, the US and Germany used CRISPR-Cas9 to create a new crop from a wild plant within a single generation. Using a relative of the wild tomato from South America as the parent plant species, the researchers modified it so that the following plants …
The Maize Lethal Necrosis Disease (MLND) Screening Facility in Naivasha, Kenya, recently released 15 disease-resistant hybrid maize varieties to Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Researchers found and – through molecular marker assisted breeding – transferred resistant genes into 30 maize varieties adapted for Africa, a process that took three years, in …
A recently released report titled State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has provided a current snapshot of the state of global food security. For the third year in a row, the report states, there has been …
Last weekend, the 2018 African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) concluded in Kigali, Rwanda. Besides the launch of a new consortium to fight the invasive Fall armyworm threatening African maize, sorghum and other crops, the three-day conference featured the announcement of a farmer-led irrigation initiative, the Irrigation for Smallholder Farming Enterprises, …
Scientists have made a genetic breakthrough in the fight against the globally devastating wheat stripe rust disease, isolating three rust resistance genes: Yr7, Yr5 and YrSP. The work of these researchers – a collaboration between the University of Sydney, CSIRO, the John Innes Centre, Limagrain UK and the National Institute …
At a two-day regional forum in Nairobi earlier this month, the East African Secretariat launched a set of policy briefs outlining recommendations to control aflatoxin contamination along East Africa’s food and feed value chains. The briefs contain key findings and recommendations of 11 multisectoral technical papers developed under the EAC Aflatoxin Prevention …
This week in plant science news, the complete sequence of the wheat genome has now been mapped, and is published in Science. The dataset, generated after 13 years of collaborative and interdisciplinary research by the International Wheat Sequencing Consortium, will help plant breeders more quickly develop more nutritious, disease- and climate-resilient …
This week, a Californian jury ruled that glyphosate caused the cancer of groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, awarding him $289 million in damages. While Monsanto maintains glyphosate’s safety (as do many scientific studies and regulatory organisations) and plans to appeal, this decision is likely to have an impact on agriculture worldwide as glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in …
This week, we lead with a report from Phys.org that a team of researchers from Spain, the U.S. and the U.K. has genetically modified a strain of rice to produce HIV-neutralizing proteins. The rice produces one type of antibody and two kinds of proteins that bind directly to the HIV virus preventing it from …
This week we continue to report on reaction to the European Court of Justice’s ruling that gene-edited crops should be subject in the European Union to the same stringent regulations as conventional genetically modified (GM) organisms. Nature reports the decision as ‘a major setback for proponents of gene-edited crops, including …
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