Breedbase software to help speed crop improvement

To help plant breeders speed crop improvement around the world, Lukas Mueller of the Boyce Thompson Institute worked with an international team of 57 people to create Breedbase, a database software that was described in the ...

Worms as a model for personalized medicine

Tailoring a person's diet or medicine based on their genomes has been a goal of the medical community for decades, but the strategy has not been widely successful because people metabolize chemicals differently. A drug may ...

The missing links: Finding function in lincRNAs

Genomes contain regions between protein-coding genes that produce lengthy RNA molecules that never give rise to a protein. These long intergenic non-coding RNAs (lincRNAs) are thought to have important functions, such as ...

New species of alga named for poet Amanda Gorman

In 2020, a group of researchers in Fay-Wei Li's lab at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) had done what many scientists dream of doing: They discovered a new species. But as they discussed what to name this green alga from ...

New software to help discover valuable compounds

As a postdoctoral research associate in the lab of BTI faculty member Frank Schroeder, Max Helf saw his labmates continually struggle when they were analyzing data. So, he decided to do something about it and developed a ...

Quillwort genome highlights divergences in aquatic CAM photosynthesis

The humble quillworts are an ancient group of about 250 small, aquatic plants that have largely been ignored by modern botanists. A group of researchers, led by Boyce Thompson Institute's Fay-Wei Li, have sequenced the first ...

New cyanobacteria species spotlights early life

Cyanobacteria are one of the unsung heroes of life on Earth. They first evolved to perform photosynthesis about 2.4 billion years ago, pumping tons of oxygen into the atmosphere—a period known as the Great Oxygenation Event—which ...

Fungi could manipulate bacteria to enrich soil with nutrients

A team of researchers from the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) has discovered a distinct group of bacteria that may help fungi and plants acquire soil nutrients. The findings could point the way to cost-effective and eco-friendly ...

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