Plants have evolved a set of highly sophisticated mechanisms to deal with environmental stresses and to survive in a cost-efficient manner. For example, upon pathogen attack, plants reallocate their limited resources away from growth towards defense against pathogens, and this trade-off between growth and defense is finely balanced to optimize fitness. To date, extensive researches on how plants recognize and response to pathogens have been done, but the molecular mechanisms underlying fine-t...

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.

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 segre...

Exposure to cadmium (Cd), a toxic heavy metal classified as a group 1 carcinogen can lead to cancer, osteoporosis and renal disorder. Contamination of soil with Cd results in human dietary intake from plant-derived food, with rice as the major source of dietary Cd for nearly half of the world’s population that relies on it as a staple.