Recent Posts

Opinion: Towards lowering crop N requirement (Plant Cell Environ)

Current and future food production demands a lot of nitrogen (N) fertilizers. Inefficient N fertilization leads to N losses to the environment and generates greenhouse gases that cause environmental problems. In a recent article, Swarbreck and colleagues discuss a strategy to develop crop varieties with…

Development of drought tolerant breeding lines derived from Helianthus annuus × H. argophyllus interspecific crosses (Plant Breeding)

Due to climate change, drought stress is threatening sunflower yield, and phenotypic diversity could be the solution. Here Hussain et al. studied the introgression of silver canopy traits related to lower excised leaf water loss (high cuticular waxes, intense hairiness, and smaller leaf area) from the…

GmFT2a and GmFT5a collectively controls flowering of soybean (Plant Biotech. J)

Soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] is a globally important high-protein crop, whose breeding is an ongoing, important objective for plant biologists. Since soybean is a short-day plant, controlling flowering time is a key step to influence its adaptation to diverse latitudes and farming system. Recently,…

Review: Crop breeding technologies to feed the world (Nature Biotech)

The world demands food, plant scientists and breeders have the challenge of feeding a growing population. In a recent review Hickey et al. summarize the state-of-the-art technologies used for crop improvement. In use since 2003, ‘speed breeding’ is a set of improved methods for fast-tracking plant…

Breeding improves wheat productivity under contrasting agrochemical input levels (Nature Biotech.)

Wheat breeding programs are releasing new cultivars almost every year for improved yield potential. But is this intensive breeding not compromising the plant performance under adverse environmental conditions? Voss-Fels et al. studied the elite cultivars of winter wheat released during the last 50 years,…

Genomic regions associated with economic traits in walnut (Plant Breeding)

The bearing habit refers to the location of flower buds in woody plants. For walnut cultivars, lateral bearing is preferred for its yield superiority. Deciphering its genetic architecture would improve seedling and sapling selection. Here, Aradhya et al. performed a SNP-based linkage map to estimate…

High resolution mapping of RphMBR1012 conferring resistance to Puccinia hordei in barley (Front Plant Sci)

Barley leaf rust (Puccinia hordei) is a biotrophic fungus, in which mutations cause newly virulent races (pathothypes) with severe effects on cultivars. Marker-assisted Selection for Rph (Resistance to P. hordei) genes has been studied to provide sustainable control of this disease. Fazlikhani et al.…

Population genomic analysis of mango suggests a complex history of domestication ($) (New Phytol)

Mango trees have been cultivated for approximately 4000 years which places their domestication in the same timeline as that of walnut, peach, sweet orange, lychee, citron, sweet orange, lemon, and jujube. Throughout the process of domestication, most crops undergo severe bottlenecks which decrease genetic…

Development of genome-wide SNP markers for barley via reference- based RNA-Seq Analysis (Front Plant Sci)

The availability of marker-assisted systems is key for crop improvement, allowing trait selection by identifying consensus polymorphisms. However, for discriminating between related strains, these DNA markers are limited, time-consuming and expensive. Here, Tanaka et al. developed a RNA-Seq-based genotyping…