News & Events

On December 21, 2021, Clemson University's cotton research will take off from the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida bound for the International Space Station on board the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. The project will be conducted in microgravity to determine the ability to directly edit the genome of elite cotton varieties with disease resistance and drought tolerance traits while avoiding the lengthy conventional breeding process.

Chiral asymmetry is important in a wide variety of disciplines and occurs across length scales. While several natural chiral biomolecules exist only with single handedness, they can produce complex hierarchical structures with opposite chiralities. Understanding how the handedness is transferred from molecular to the macroscopic scales is far from trivial. An intriguing example is the transfer of the handedness of helicoidal organizations of cellulose microfibrils in plant cell walls. All previously reported examples of a helicoidal structure in plants are left-handed except, remarkably, in the Pollia condensata fruit; both left- and right-handed helicoidal cell walls are found in neighboring cells of the same tissue.

A new method developed by American scientists now allows the real-time detection of gene editing tools in plants, and possibly in animals, bacteria and fungi in the future, with just an ultraviolet flashlight and the naked eye. The researchers of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory of the United States Department of Energy described their method like an alarm system with two components: a biosensor guide RNA that redirects CRISPR activity, and a reporter protein that flags the activity.

The Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO Panel) of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has published the Scientific Opinion on the safety of three-event stack genetically modified (GM) maize glufosinate, glyphosate, 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and aryloxyphenoxypropionate (AOPP) herbicides tolerant maize NK603 × T25 × DAS-40278-9 and its subcombinations independently of their origin.

Fusarium wilt (FW) caused by Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. raphani is an important disease in radish, leading to severe decrease in yield and quality. YR4 as a novel genetic source to resistant to FW was confirmed through screening with five pathogen isolates. We have generated F₂ and F_2:3 populations segregated with FW resistance using YR4 and YR18 inbred lines. The disease symptom was evaluated in F_2:3 population (n = 180) in three independent studies over two years.

The USDA FAS Global Agricultural Information Network (GAIN) released 2021 updates on the status of agricultural biotechnology in Brazil. According to the report, Brazil remains to be the second largest producer of biotech crops globally, with 115 approved events. The total area planted to GM crops was estimated to be over 56 million hectares for the crop year of 2020/2021

Nigeria's National Biotechnology Development Agency (NABDA) and the Foreign Agricultural Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have rolled out a nutrition outreach program aimed at increasing consumption and boosting the demand of genetically modified Bt cowpea in the country. The outreach campaign, dubbed ‘Eating is Believing' further seeks to demonstrate the food safety and nutrition effects of Bt cowpea, Nigeria's first biotech food crop

Drought is a common abiotic stress for terrestrial plants and often affects crop development and yield. Recent studies have suggested that lignin plays a crucial role in plant drought tolerance; however, the underlying molecular mechanisms are still largely unknown. Here, we report that the rice (Oryza sativa) gene CINNAMOYL-CoA REDUCTASE 10 (OsCCR10) is directly activated by the OsNAC5 transcription factor, which mediates drought tolerance through regulating lignin accumulation

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported that the number of hungry people in Africa continues to increase due to conflict, climate change, and the economic slowdowns, including those triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The report was published in partnership with the African Union Commission and the UN Economic Commission for Africa.

New research led by Shaobing Peng, professor of agronomy at Huazhong Agricultural University, and Patricio Grassini, associate professor of agronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and co-leader of the Global Yield Gap Atlas, provides an analysis of roadmaps toward sustainable intensification for a larger global rice bowl. The study, conducted in collaboration with 10 research institutions from seven countries, assessed rice yields and efficiency in the use of water, fertilizer, pesticides, and labor across 32 rice cropping systems that accounted for half of the global rice harvested area.

Rice tolerance to salinity stress involves diverse and complementary mechanisms, such as the regulation of genome expression, activation of specific ion-transport systems to manage excess sodium at the cell or plant level, and anatomical changes that avoid sodium penetration into the inner tissues of the plant. These complementary mechanisms can act synergistically to improve salinity tolerance in the plant,

Experts from the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard successfully designed a new type of prime editing that can install or swap out gene-sized DNA sequences. This breakthrough is published in Nature Biotechnology. Prime editing was first developed in 2019 for precise edits in human cells, including small substitutions, insertions, and deletions.