News & Events

After a two-year lockdown, an international team of banana researchers convenes for a three-day workshop in Arusha to continue forging a path to speed up the breeding process and deliver new bananas to East African farmers. Together with the Hon. Hussein Bashe, Tanzanian Minister of Agriculture, the project partners will also celebrate the release in Tanzania of the first new,

Bees are one of the most hard-working creatures on earth. Bees do so much for our planet, including pollinating flowers, fruit and food crops, and even some trees. They produce the nutritious sweet syrup called honey and contribute to the earth’s biodiversity and ecosystem stability. Bees could constitute a source of livelihood for anyone who learns to keep bees for honey production.

Grain yield (GY) production can be expressed as the result of three main efficiencies: light interception (Ei), radiation use (RUE), and harvest index (HI). Although dissecting GY through these three efficiencies is not entirely new, there is a lack of knowledge about the phenotypic variation, the genetic architecture, and the relative contribution of these three efficiencies on GY in soybean. This knowledge gap coupled with laborious phenotyping prevents the active consideration of these efficiencies into breeding programs.

As Bangladesh’s agriculture and food sector faces challenges, the country’s Agriculture Ministry sought the cooperation of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in key research and development initiatives that can help alleviate poverty among farmers, address climate change impacts, increase rice production, and make the country self-sufficient in rice.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is endowing FAOSTAT, the world’s largest agricultural data base, with an important new domain that enables much easier comparison and assessment of trends over time of the agricultural structures of all Member countries. An open access portal serving as a global public good, FAOSTAT gathers and harmonizes a wealth of data on the production, trade and consumption in the agricultural sectors, by far the world’s largest economic sector in terms of employment and sustaining livelihoods

Rice blast, caused by Magnaporthe oryzae, is one of the most devastating diseases in rice and can affect rice production worldwide. Rice plasma membrane (PM) proteins are crucial for rapidly and precisely establishing a defense response in plant immunity when rice and blast fungi interact. However, the plant-immunity-associated vesicle trafficking network mediated by PM proteins is poorly understood. In this study, to explore changes in PM proteins during M. oryzae infection

After extensive deliberations of genetic engineering experts in India, the government released the final guidelines for the safety assessment of genome-edited plants on May 17, 2022. According to the office memorandum released by the Department of Biotechnology, the guidelines serve as a road map for the development and sustainable application of genome editing, including the regulatory pathways to be taken for the release of genome-edited plants.

The SunUp Papaya was developed in the 1990s to be resistant to the papaya ringspot virus (PRSV), a deadly virus that almost wiped out the papaya industry in Hawaii. It was produced using the particle bombardment-mediated transformation technique, which involved a gene gun shooting gold particles covered with the PRSV coat protein gene into the cells of non-transgenic papaya. The result was transgenic papaya that contained gene sequences of PRSV and was protected from infection by RNA-mediated gene silencing.

Lodging is a barrier to achieving high yield in wheat. As part of a study investigating the potential to breed low-lodging high-yielding wheat, populations were developed crossing four low-lodging high-yielding donors selected based on lodging related traits, with three cultivars. Lodging was evaluated in single rows in an early generation and subsequently in plots in 2 years with contrasting lodging environment.

The genome of oats has been decoded by an international team of scientists led by Lund University, the ScanOats Industrial Research Center, and Helmholtz Munich. Researchers from Edith Cowan University (ECU), Australia's national science agency CSIRO, and WEHI (the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research) played a key role in the project with the results now published in Nature.

During the Global Food Security Ministerial meeting held at the United Nations in New York entitled “Global Food Security Call to Action” on May 18, 2022, the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Qu Dongyu, made an urgent call to action for the transformation of agrifood systems, to make them more inclusive, economically viable and resilient to multiple shocks, as well as to produce better and more with less negative impact on the environment.

Genotype imputation is a strategy to increase marker density of existing datasets without additional genotyping. We compared imputation performance of software BEAGLE 5.0, IMPUTE 5 and AlphaPlantImpute and tested software parameters that may help to improve imputation accuracy in soybean populations. Several factors including marker density, extent of linkage disequilibrium (LD), minor allele frequency (MAF), etc.