One cause of the yield advantage in the 'three sisters' polyculture is that the crops have different, possibly complementary, root foraging strategies.
A study of common bean genotypes, with variable degrees of N2-fixation tolerance to water stress, finds variable accumulation of ureides in their leaves.
BRWN is associated with increased phosphorus acquisition and this may have value for selection of genotypes with better performance in low-phosphorus soils.
One of the traits that appeared during domestication of common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris, is determinacy, in which stems end with a terminal inflorescence. Kwak et al. examine sequence variation in PvTFL1y, the gene that...