Genetics

NUS researchers have reconstructed nearly a thousand microbial genomes from green leafy vegetables commonly consumed in Singapore to improve the quality of urban farmed crops. This study is a first step towards uncovering the microbiomes associated with urban farmed vegetables. It also marks progress in…

Tomatoes are one of the most popular types of fresh produce consumed worldwide, as well as being an important ingredient in many manufactured foods. As with other cultivated crops, some potentially useful genes that were present in its South American ancestors were lost during domestication and breeding…

Alongside Dennis vanEngelsdorp, associate professor at the University of Maryland (UMD) in Entomology named for the fifth year in a row for his work in honey bee and pollinator health, Yiping Qi, associate professor in Plant Science, represented the College of Agriculture & Natural Resources on the Web…

The article talks about whether genetically modified foods are safe to eat. Based on evidence and research so far, and understanding genes of GM foods, they prove to be safe to eat.

A gene-edited tomato recently approved in Japan contains a large amount of gamma-aminobutyric acid, a type of amino acid, commonly known as GABA, which is a component that lowers blood pressure and relaxes the mind. The product name is “Sicilian Rouge High Gaba”. This is the first approval of…

As Tomato Brown Rugose Fruit Virus infects tomato and pepper plants across the globe, seed companies are working on breeding a resistant tomato. Rich genetic and genomic resources were available to tomato breeders even before the inception of the tomato’s genomic sequencing projects. Large tomato…

Greenhouse growers deal with plenty of pests, and it’s the ones below ground, like root-knot nematodes, that can be especially frustrating. More greenhouse pepper growers are looking for non-chemical ways to control these microscopic, parasitic worms. In the search to find ways to make bell pepper…

This year many events took place in a digital setting, including the Global Berry Congress. The Italian Molari Berries & Breeding also attended the special event. "It is interesting to see how, despite the pandemic, the sector was able to keep up with a remarkable trend. Consumers' lifestyles have…

A tomato made with CRISPR/Cas9 has been approved for growing and consumption in Japan. The tomato "Sicilian Rouge High GABA” was developed by the University of Tsukuba and startup Sanatech Seed. Thanks to a tweaking of the genes, the variety features five times the normal amount of GABA…

This study aims to determine grafting’s efficiency to improve tomato growth and production under salinity stress conditions. A commercial tomato hybrid (cv. Bark) and eight wild tomato accessions were evaluated at molecular, physiological and agronomic levels. At the molecular level, two robust gene-targeting marker systems (Conserved DNA-Derived Polymorphism; CDDP and Start Codon Targeted Polymorphism; SCoT) were employed. Bark cv. was grafted as a scion onto the four tomato genotypes’ roots as stocks. The rootstocks effect was evaluated by growing plants at 0, 100 and 200 mM NaCl. Our results showed that grafting enhanced plant shoots and roots growth (plant height, number of branches, plant fresh weight, root length, and root fresh and dry weight), fruit yield (total yield, number and weight of fruits) and fruit quality (Vitamin C, firmness and total soluble solids) in Bark on most tested rootstocks. A significant interaction between salinity levels and rootstocks for all measured hormones, antioxidants and proline was observed. In conclusion, our consistent results from the three approaches (molecular, physiological and agronomical) revealed that the four genotypes (LA1995, LA2711, LA2485 and LA3845) were found to be grouped and exhibit better performance under salinity stress conditions. Furthermore, grafting could be a low-cost alternative method to improve salt tolerance in sensitive tomato genotypes.

Scientists have produced a tomato enriched in the Parkinson’s disease drug L-DOPA in what could become a new, affordable source of one of the world’s essential medicines. The development of the genetically modified (GM) tomato has implications for developing nations where access to pharmaceutical drugs…

Cooked, fresh, sun-dried, or juiced, whichever way you prefer them, tomatoes are arguably one of the most versatile fruits on the planet—and yes, despite mainly being used in savory dishes, tomatoes really are a fruit. The popularity of tomatoes has led to the development of more than 10,000 cultivars of…

Thousands of years ago, people in South America began domesticating Solanum pimpinellifolium, a weedy plant with small, intensely flavored fruit. Over time, the plant evolved into S. lycopersicum – the modern cultivated tomato. Although today’s tomatoes are larger and easier to farm compared with their…

Syngenta Vegetable Seeds today announced the launch of its first commercial Tomato brown rugose fruit virus (ToBRFV) resistant variety, available in early 2021. The new variety will be released in areas where growers face severe disease pressure from the virus and will support against crop losses.   “The Syngenta Vegetables…

Moolec Science has developed a hybrid concept â which combines plant-based and cell-based technologies â to make affordable alternative proteins for food. FoodNavigator caught up with the companyâs co-founders to find out how molecular farming can boost ingredient functionality.

The biological clock of a popular food crop controls close to three-quarters of its genes, according to research from Dartmouth College. The genetic research shows how the crop uses internal responses to the day-night cycle--known as circadian rhythms--to regulate processes such as reproduction,…

The transfer of genetic variability from related species into crops has been a main objective for decades in breeding programs. Breeders have used interspecific genetic crosses and alien introgression lines to achieve this goal, but the success is always dependent on the interspecific chromosome associations between the alien chromosomes and those from the crop during early meiosis. In this Special Issue, the strength of chromosome manipulation in a breeding framework is revealed through research and review papers that combine molecular markers, cytogenetics tools and other traditional breeding techniques. The papers and reviews included in this Special Issue “Chromosome manipulation for plant breeding purposes” describe the development and/or characterization of new plant material carrying desirable traits and the study of chromosome associations and recombination during meiosis. New tools to facilitate the transfer of desired traits from a donor species into a crop can be developed by expanding the knowledge of chromosome associations during meiosis.

The physiology of fruit ripening is defined as either ‘climacteric’ or ‘non-climacteric’. In climacteric fruit respiration during ripening increases until it reaches a peak, which is accompanied by an increase in autocatalytic ethylene production, whereas the respiration of non-climacteric fruit does not increase and they have no requirement for ethylene to complete their ripening. In an attempt to gain further insight into the involvement of autocatalytic ethylene production with the climacteric rise in respiration, tomato fruit were harvested at three defined stages of maturity prior to the climacteric peak (mature green, breaker, and early orange) and immediately exposed to the gaseous molecule 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP). The gene expression profile at each of these stages was monitored after 24 h, using an Affymetrix tomato microarray chip. This approach enabled us to identify ethylene responsive genes that are commonly regulated at early stages of ripening, as well as new candidate genes. In addition, 1-MCP treatment affected the levels of metabolites related to methionine biosynthesis. Methionine feeds climacteric ethylene production and we found that promotors of the genes of enzymes that catalyze the production of homoserine and homocysteine (aspartokinase/homoserine dehydrogenases and cystathionine beta lyase, respectively), precursors in the methionine pathway, contain the AtSR1 binding motif.

Novel grafted plants — consisting of rootstock epigenetically modified to “believe” it has been under stress — joined to an unmodified scion, or above-ground shoot, give rise to progeny that are more vigorous, productive and resilient than the parental plants. The grafted tomato plants involved in the…

A study led by researchers from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) has identified a tomato gene that is involved in the accumulation of cesium and that plays a key role in the formation of seedless tomato fruits. This advance opens a door for the cultivation of this vegetable in…

Samuel Acheampong hails from a farmer family from the Ashanti Region of southern Ghana. His family cultivated cassava, yams, plantains, tomatoes, peppers and other crops. These days, Acheampong works mostly in a science lab, but his interest in farming remains strong and he is using the Nobel…

The latest adventure in food enhancement is CRISPR (e.g., clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/Cas9) gene-editing technology. It potentially has many major implications for enhanced global agriculture and much needed improvements in food security. CRISPR and gene editing tools…

SlTDC1, a candidate gene for tryptophan decarboxylase (TDC) in tomato, was the focus of a new study because SlTDC1 may play a role in the biosynthesis of serotonin (Hano et al., 2017), which is a novel functional ingredient because of its anti-obesity effects; further, its developmental roles are largely…

The European Commission has authorised a new GMO for food and feed – a genetically modified soybean developed by Bayer. While some welcome the approval, others fear the risk of contamination threatens the GMO-free food production chain.

WUR researchers will participate in the new EU research initiative HARNESSTOM. In this project breeding companies, scientists and farmers join forces to increase resilience and quality of tomato varieties. Tomato is a paradigm of crop domestication: a widely cultivated and consumed vegetable but with…

Rice is staple food for nearly 50% of the world population, cultivated on an area of about 150 million ha across the world (9% of total cultivated area). India has the largest rice acreage in the world, 43.8 million ha accounting for nearly one fourth of gross cultivated area in country.

San Marzano tomatoes have been genetically redrawn by a team of researchers from Enea, CREA, Polytechnic University of Valencia and Tuscia University to obtain new organoleptic qualities from both an aesthetic and nutritional point of view. Types of San Marzano tomatoes "We maintained the typical…

A recent Food Navigator article highlighted the progress of a global research initiative to help prevent the extinction of the banana. This fruit, which is very popular in the world, is an important food and commercial crop in tropical and subtropical regions. The most common banana variety is the…

Feed Me, Seymour

When we think of geoengineering the environment to counteract global climate change, we typically conjure the image of massive projects like blocking out sunlight.

But a new report suggests that a biological approach to geoengineering — gene hacking the DNA of plants and animals to curb carbon emissions — could be a far more useful approach, according to Axios. In other words, the idea is that we need to alter the entire biosphere to make up for the damage humanity has done to the planet.

Planned Obsolescence

To protect crops from the pesky fall armyworm, a caterpillar that plagues farmers around the world, a team of scientists altered its DNA so that any eggs it lays will self-destruct.

Unfortunately, the end result isn’t the dazzling explosion we’d hoped for. Rather, Wired reports, the caterpillar eggs are so overloaded with certain proteins that they’re blocked from ever developing or hatching, nipping the invasive species’ growth in the bud. Oxitec, the biotech company that developed the new worms — along with similar mosquitoes in the past — is already running small tests on its pesticide-free approach to crop protection.