News & Events

The National Institute of Food and Agriculture is supporting scientists at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), the University of Florida, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service to develop plants with natural tolerance to HLB. UCR geneticist Danelle Seymour and plant pathologist Philippe Rolshausen will examine 350 citrus hybrids developed and grown by project collaborators in Florida. All trees in the set are already infected with HLB, yet they live longer, are healthier, and yield more fruit than their infected relatives.

A global consortium of scientists led by Earlham Institute and the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom marked a significant milestone by developing cheap and accessible methods for sequencing large collections of bacterial pathogens that low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) can use at a cost of less than US$10 per genome.

The COVID-19 pandemic made the Vietnam GDP in the third quarter decrease by 6.2 per cent as compared to the same period last year. Finally, the real GDP growth in 2021 reached 2.5% (General Statistics Office of Vietnam). Before that, both the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM), under the Ministry of Planning and Investment, and the World Bank were optimistic about Việt Nam’s economy in 2021, predicting growth of 6.0 per cent and 6.8 per cent, respectively.

Lychee is an exotic tropical fruit with a distinct flavor. The genome of cultivar ‘Feizixiao’ was assembled into 15 pseudochromosomes, totaling ~470 Mb. High heterozygosity (2.27%) resulted in two complete haplotypic assemblies. A total of 13,517 allelic genes (42.4%) were differentially expressed in diverse tissues. Analyses of 72 resequenced lychee accessions revealed two independent domestication events

The gene editing market continues to expand in recent years and is projected to go beyond US$19.45 billion by 2028. This is according to the gene editing market report by type and global forecast released by Adroit Market Research. According to the report, CRISPR has been the primary driver of the impressive growth of the gene editing market because of its precision in editing and cite-specific modifications.

The John Innes Centre announced that it has submitted an application for the conduct of the field trial of a high-iron wheat line they developed following the success of their greenhouse trials in 2019 and 2021. The application for a small-scale confined field trial was submitted to the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The trial will be conducted in the Centre's field station in Bawburgh between March and August of each year from 2022 to 2024.

The Hessian fly (HF, Mayetiola destructor) is a destructive insect pest of wheat in the USA and worldwide. Deploying HF-resistant cultivars is the most effective and economical approach to control this insect pest. A population of 186 recombinant inbred lines (RILs) was developed from ‘Overland’ × ‘Overley’ and phenotyped for responses to HF attack using the HF biotype ‘Great Plains’. A high-density genetic linkage map was constructed using 1,576 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers generated by genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS).

Chinese agriculture ministry official reports remarkable results in the pilot testing of GM soybeans and maize, which mark a historical milestone in the industrialization of these GM foods in China. The results show that both GM crops are high-yielding and exhibited excellent resistance to insect pests and herbicides. This is according to Liu Peilei, Director of the Agricultural GMO Safety Management Division of the Science and Technology Education Department of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.

World food prices fell slightly in December as international prices for vegetable oils and sugar fell significantly from lofty levels, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported today. The FAO Food Price Index averaged 133.7 points in December, a 0.9 percent decline from November but still up 23.1 percent from December 2020. The index tracks monthly changes in the international prices of commonly-traded food commodities. Only the dairy sub-index posted a monthly rise in December.

Final report by Dr Nguyen Huu Hy on “Cassava breeding for intensive practice areas and adverse soil regions” (2016-2021) at the IAS on December 11, 2021. Assessing the research items regarding MARD initiative projects in2021; December 13, 2021. The final evaluation on  “Strawberry breeding adapted to green house cultivation with hi-tec approaches” (2020-2021) by Dr Nguyen The Nhuan; December 17, 2021.

Flight ability is essential for the enormous diversity and evolutionary success of insects. The migratory locusts exhibit flight capacity plasticity in gregarious and solitary individuals closely linked with different density experiences. However, the differential mechanisms underlying flight traits of locusts are largely unexplored. Here, we investigated the variation of flight capacity by using behavioral, physiological, and multiomics approaches.

Three apparently unrelated findings led to the discovery of the temperature receptors: a better understanding of pain-sensing, the molecular nature of the channels in charge of touch and proprioception, and the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine bestowed to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian. In 1953, state-of-the-art research in temperature sensing concluded that temperature afferent fibers came in two flavors, “cold” and “warm,” characterized by discharging by a lowering in temperature and an increase in temperature, respectively