Name: Maize or Corn Scientific name: Zea mays Known for: Food of the Gods (or Blasphemy against them when in Corn Dogs) Record broken: Yields I expect most of you have limited direct experience with many of our other...
Tag - GM
Editor Pat Heslop-Harrison
Plants, given a helping hand
I’ve been known to remind my students that just because testing demonstrates presence of e.g. ‘phosphate’ in a soil sample that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s in a form that can be accessed/utilised by plants. And...
Nigel Chaffey
GM crops, quantity or quality…?
GM crops can help, not only with the quantity of food produced worldwide, but also the quality. Golden Rice has enhanced levels of β-carotene.
Measuring the flow of transgenes from GM crops into wild plants
How fast do transgenes move from crops into wild relatives via gene flow?
AJ Cann
Could GM technology help avert a conservation crisis in coffee?
GMO coffee could buy time to fight coffee rust says the Biofortfied blog.
Alun Salt
Scientists find elixir of youth – giant plants ensue
Here’s a story that you should be hearing more about. It’s got monster-sized plants, eternal youth and a plant most people have heard of. The Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology...
Potential new fertiliser
This month’s winner in the ‘so simple it’s positively brilliant (but why did nobody think of it before?)’ category is Damar López-Arredondo and Luis Herrera-Estrella’s paper entitled, ‘Engineering phosphorous [sic.]...
A blooming marvellous innovation
I know that this year’s British summer hasn’t been much to write home about (and you would be writing home to the UK– who would have sojourned in that sodden isle given the choice?). But at least the traditional hay...
Making plants work harder [or, Vorsprung durch Botanik]
Not content with just being grateful for all of the marvellous things that plants do and provide, we humans always seem to want them to do even more. Well, in that vein there has been a veritable avalanche of stories...
Manioc marriage mystery unearthed
Echoing Forrest Gump’s famous box of chocolates quote (number 40 in the American Film Institute’s Top 100 movie quotes), you never really know what to expect when you get married. Well, certainly in some parts of Africa...
Hot Bot…
Botany is officially ‘hot’ (or even ‘really cool’…), according to no less a publication than the FT (Financial Times) Magazine, where Clive Cookson lists ‘plants to feed the world’ amongst his ‘Science’s 10 hottest...
Plants on the prowl
Plants are not noted for their dynamic lifestyles. Indeed, rooted in the soil as they tend to be, they are usually written off as little more than ‘stick in the muds’. But their sedentary lifestyle is not always so...
Gene manipulation in plants – open educational resource
Genetic manipulation of crops is an issue of great current interest and controversy. This unit is part of the Open University OpenLearn project and covers some of the basic science that underpins the debate and examines...
