Poaceae is a large monocotyledonous plant family encompassing the true grasses, characterized by herbaceous, often culm-forming stems with hollow internodes, leaves composed of sheaths, ligules, and linear blades, and a distinctive inflorescence of spikelets bearing reduced, wind-pollinated florets. Flowers are typically subtended by glumes and lemmas, with lodicules facilitating anthesis, and produce single-seeded dry fruits (caryopses) in which the seed coat is fused to the pericarp. Poaceae exhibits C3, C4, and intermediate photosynthetic pathways, occupies diverse terrestrial habitats worldwide, and plays central roles in primary productivity, biogeochemical cycling, and the evolution of grass-dominated ecosystems.
Phosphorus is crucial for crop growth. But too little can lower crop yields, and too much can lead to pollution downstream. Studies show that some soils are losing phosphorus, while others are accumulating and leaking into ...
Ecology
Jan 26, 2026
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Corn is a colossal grain in the global food and feed chain, with the U.S. producing roughly 30% of the world's supply, or nearly 278 million metric tons in the 2024–25 growing season alone. But its journey from wild grass ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 22, 2026
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35
Researchers at the John Innes Center and the Earlham Institute are pioneering powerful single-cell visualization techniques that could unlock higher yields of global wheat.
Cell & Microbiology
Jan 20, 2026
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338
When anyone talks about the future of sustainable aviation fuel, one question dominates: how do we replace fossil carbon without compromising food security or biodiversity? Experience leads some researchers to believe the ...
Biotechnology
Jan 19, 2026
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Cereals have natural resistance to pathogenic fungi, but powdery mildew, for example, can overcome this resistance. A team at the University of Zurich has now discovered a new mechanism that enables powdery mildew to outsmart ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jan 12, 2026
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24
A 60-year study covering 205 countries and regions worldwide has systematically uncovered the evolutionary patterns of nitrogen and phosphorus use efficiency (NUE and PUE) in the four major staple crops—rice, wheat, maize, ...
Agriculture
Jan 12, 2026
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Inducible promoters provide remarkable utility when sustained transgene expression compromises plant development or agronomic performance.
Molecular & Computational biology
Jan 8, 2026
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13
A collaborative team of researchers from the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, the University of Florida, Gainesville and University of Iowa have developed tools that allow grasses—including major grain crops like corn—to ...
Biotechnology
Jan 6, 2026
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44
In a new study published in The Crop Journal on November 7, researchers developed an AI model named TillerPET that enables simultaneous in-situ high-throughput phenotyping of tiller number and compactness from post-harvest ...
Biotechnology
Dec 17, 2025
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15
A new study shows that machine-learning models can accurately predict daily crop transpiration using direct plant measurements and environmental data. By training models on seven years of high-resolution lysimeter data, the ...
Biotechnology
Dec 15, 2025
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