News & Events

A 2018 integrated survey by the National Statistical Office of Malawi listed Dedza district among those with the highest malnutrition rates in Malawi. Ironically, Dedza is one of the major production hubs for legumes such as beans and groundnut in Malawi. The district is also popular for cereals such as maize, as well as root and tuber crops such as Irish potato. It was noted that many farmers in the district produce most of their crops for sale, using only maize and vegetables for their own consumption.

Three improved sorghum varieties with a yield potential of approximately 4 tons per hectare and tolerant to grey leaf spot, rust and other common diseases were released in Malawi early this year. These new varieties replace two varieties released in 1993, and have since been the only improved sorghum varieties available in Malawi. “As farmers diversify their production systems to meet their livelihood needs, including food and household income, agricultural research remains pivotal for development of technologies that secure productivity,” Okori said.

The exploitation of novel alleles from wild rice that were lost during rice cultivation could be very important for rice breeding and evolutionary studies. Plant height (PH) was a target of artificial selection during rice domestication and is still a target of modern breeding. The "green revolution" gene semi-dwarf 1 (SD1) were well documented and used in the past decades, allele from wild rice could provide new insights into the functions and evolution of this gene.

At the moment FAO is fighting the second generation of Desert Locusts. We have made significant progress in a number of countries, especially in Kenya, where only two of the 29 counties that were infested in February have Desert Locusts today. In the coming days, that will drop to one county, and within three weeks Kenya should be free of large-scale infestations altogether. That is a success but the threat of possible re-infestation towards the end of the year will call for careful and continued surveillance.

The FAO Director-General QU Dongyu and the Executive Director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) Yannick Glemarec discussed today ways to expand FAO’s and GCF’s collaboration. Three FAO project proposals focused on bolstering rural green growth, forest resilience, promotion of zero-deforestation cocoa production – amongst its many benefits – in Armenia, Colombia and Ivory Coast, respectively, are being assessed for GCF funding, leading up to GCF’s next Board meeting in August.

Oryza rufipogon and O. longistaminata are important wild relatives of cultivated rice, harboring a promising source of novel genes for rice breeding programs. Here, we present de novo assembled draft genomes and annotation of O. rufipogon and O. longistaminata. Our analysis reveals a considerable number of lineage-specific gene families associated with the self-incompatibility (SI) and formation of reproductive separation.

Scientists at the University of Edinburgh's Roslin Institute and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service Meat Animal Research Center have decoded the whole genome of pigs. The new reference genome, built using the latest cutting-edge DNA sequencing technologies, provides information on the location of more than 21,000 pig genes and is freely available online.

Researchers from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals and Texas Tech University reviewed the latest approaches used to minimize off-target effects in genome editing such as biased or unbiased off-target detection, cytosine or adenine base editors, prime editing, dCas9, Cas9 paired nickase, ribonucleoprotein delivery and truncated gRNAs. The review article is published in Cells.

Asian cultivated rice is believed to have been domesticated from a wild progenitor, Oryza rufipogon, offering promising sources of alleles for world rice improvement. Here we first present a high-quality chromosome-scale genome of the typical O. rufipogon. Comparative genomic analyses of O. sativa and its two wild progenitors, O. nivara and O. rufipogon, identified many dispensable genes functionally enriched in the reproductive process.

An inter-university team of scientists developed a method to successfully edit the mitochondrial DNA within living cells in a precise manner by combining two new breeding techniques: CRISPR and TALENs. The scientists found an interbacterial toxin that enabled them to change a cytosine base in the DNA code to thiamine, thereby harnessing the potential to correct some point of mutations in the mitochondrial genome

Researchers from Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas-Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain have developed two techniques based on trans-acting small interfering RNAs (syn-tasiRNAs) to moderate the degree of silencing induced by a plant's genes. The findings are released in Nucleic Acids Research.

A total of 94 blast isolates were collected from five provinces in the Mekong River Delta in southern Vietnam. The pathogenicities of these isolates were evaluated using 25 international differential varieties (DVs) covering 23 resistance genes and a susceptible Chinese cultivar, Lijiangxintuanheigu (LTH). Based on the reaction patterns of the DVs, the isolates were classified into two clusters (I and II).