Agricultural and Forestry Science

Plants have a conductive tissue, phloem, for transporting sugars and hormones to non-green parts after photosynthesis. Phloem has two basic cell types, enucleate sieve elements (SE) and companion cells (CC). Scientists from the University of Helsinki have developmentally analyzed the process of phloem development in Arabidopsis plant and identified a mutation in a novel gene that is required for instructing phloem differentiation in young, developing plant tissue. Their article is published in Nature

Columbia economist offers new way to compute prizes for agriculture research

After many decades of economic growth, the single most important cause of human mortality remains malnutrition. The World Health Organization estimates that food deficits cause about 6 million deaths per year, or 14 percent of the total. Surprisingly, most people who die from hunger are actually farmers – not by choice, but by necessity. They are born in rural areas, and have no other resources with which to

Australian farmers are trialling a satellite-based pasture monitoring system which dramatically improves their ability to make informed farm management decisions.

Utilising the MODIS sensor in the Terra satellite, Australia’s ’Pastures From Space’ consortium can now deliver much more detailed data relating to pasture growth rates (PGRs), says CSIRO Livestock Industries’ Mr Gonzalo Mata.

“We can now provide farmers with 16-times more detail about their pastures,” Mr Mata says. “Inst

Researchers at Uppsala University and the Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences (SLU) report in the latest issue of Nature that they have identified a regulatory mutation in a gene for a known growth factor that makes pigs more muscular and less fat than wild boars.

Most characteristics, such as common diseases like diabetes, have a multifactorial background, which means that they are influenced by many different genes and environmental factors. Even though we know the entire DNA sequ

The industrial pollutant ozone, long known to be harmful to many kinds of plants, can also affect the very earth in which they grow.

Researchers at Michigan Technological University and the North Central Research Station of the USDA Forest Service have discovered that ozone can reduce soil carbon formation – a measure of the amount of organic matter being added to the soil. Their findings are published in the Oct. 16 issue of the journal Nature.

The scientists exposed forest stands

Research carried out in the Netherlands has revealed that the genetic background of cattle apparently determines how quickly and effectively they acquire immunity to infections from gastrointestinal worms. Such infections cause considerable economic losses in the beef farming industry. During her doctoral research, Kirezi Kanobana investigated how cattle rid themselves of worms and prevent new infections.

Kanobana used an infection model in which, based on their genetic background, animals e