Guangzhou researchers have teamed up with china scientists to successfully identify the Dt1 as a new negative regulator to control soybean seed weight that provide new insights into how soybean seed development responds to photoperiod at different latitudes .We unveiled a new mechanism of how seed weight is controlled by photoperiod in crops , offering an ideal genetic component for improving soybean ’ s yield by manipulating its seed weight and growth habit , " said HOU Xingliang .Which als...

Plant genetic transformation is essential for crop engineering and modern molecular breeding .The genetic and cytological results confirmed that efficient meristem transformation of and rapid transformant regeneration were the reasons for rapidly and efficiently obtaining stable transgenic plants .The RAPID method overcomes the limitations of traditional methods for achieving rapid   in planta   transformation , and can be potentially applied to a wide range of plant species that are capabl...

The timing of floral induction is tightly controlled by environmental cues and intrinsic signals. The critical role of gibberellin (GA) in this process has been extensively studied in the past decades. DELLA proteins serve as the central regulatory hubs of GA signaling. The mechanism of GA-dependent transcription involves the recruitment of DELLA proteins to transcription factors. In general, epigenetic modifiers are believed to cooperate with transcription factors to regulate gene expression...

Sweet potatoes ( Ipomoea batatas L . ) are an important cash crop in the world , and China is the world ' s largest producer , consumer , and exporter of sweet potatoes , accounting for more than 60% of the world ' s total production .Sweet potato weevils are the most harmful pests in sweet potato cultivation and are also important international quarantine pests , which cause great harm to sweet potatoes during planting and tuber storage by biting leaves and tubers .

Plants have evolved a set of highly sophisticated mechanisms to deal with environmental stresses and to survive in a cost-efficient manner .Balance between nuclear and cytoplasmic EDS1 pools is important for a complete plant innate immune response and to avoid over-reaction of the plant immune system .The study has been published in the online edition of the international journal Plant Cell . For further reading , please refer to : https : / / doi . org / 10.1093 / plcell/koaa007 .

By 2050, the world’s population is predicted to reach 9.8 billion and food production through conventional agriculture has been straining the global environment. Moreover, urbanization has continued to reduce farmland capacity and farm labor. The rise in urbanization also means that more food needs to be transported into inner cities, and the increasing food miles demand greater efficiency in food preservation. Various calls have been made to consider farming within urban settings to red...

Due to internal resource restriction , plants have evolved an elaborate regulatory mechanism to modulate the tradeoff between growth and defense for survival under external stress .If plants reallocate resource to enhance resistance without restriction , growth and development would be arrested , even cause death .This brings us a question : how plants modulate the balance between meeting the necessary growth and achieving maximum resistance ? The underlying mechanism remains unclear .

While GM crops of past years contain one to few traits , the continuous discovery of new trait genes would mean that over time , crops could end up with a large number of transgene insertions .If they were dispersed throughout the genome , extensive breeding would be needed to reassemble all of them into a single breeding line .Stacking new DNA to a preexisting transgenic locus insures that the package of transgenes can be transmitted through breeding programs as a single locus rather than se...

Exposure to cadmium ( Cd ) , a toxic heavy metal classified as a group 1 carcinogen can lead to cancer , osteoporosis and renal disorder .To reduce the risk of Cd toxicity to human , Dr . David W . Ow and his team have made a lot of effort on the research about creating new rice cultivars that can substantially reduce the Cd content in the rice grain .In 2016 , they discovered that overexpression of truncated gene fragments derived from the rice genes OsO3L2 and OsO3L3 could reduce Cd accumul...

Conventionally , transgenic traits are introduced into transformable varieties before introgressing them out to field cultivars .Within these target sites , the new genes can be correctly integrated , the insertion of new genes does not affect the expressions of the other genes in rice , the newly inserted genes have relatively high expression , etc .Hopefully , this gene stacking system can be used in various crops and a great service platform with the intellectual property of our own countr...