Related topics: plants

Genetics may lie at the heart of crop yield limitation

You might think that plants grow according to how much nutrition, water and sunlight they are exposed to, but new research by Dr Nick Pullen and a team from the John Innes Centre, UK shows that the plant's own genetics may ...

Fungi tweaked to boost industrial enzymes

Filamentous fungi produce powerful enzymes that break down tough plant material that can be used for biofuels and other industrial processes. But the enzymes often work too slowly for industrial use and the fungi are difficult ...

How vitamin C helps plants beat the sun

While vitamin C in plant chloroplasts is known to help prevent a reduction in growth that plants experience when exposed to excessive light—phenomenon called photo inhibition—how it gets into chloroplasts to begin with ...

Sending algae into space to probe plants in extreme environments

It may sound like the opening scene in a low-budget science fiction movie: Scientists send algae into space—some of it mutant—to see if it will grow. But an Agricultural Research Service scientist and an international ...

When a gene is worth 2

The notion that each gene can only codify for a single protein has been challenged for some years. Yet, the functional outcomes that may result from genes encoding more than one protein are still largely unknown.

Plants in space

How plants handle stress in space and what astronauts can learn from them is the subject of a new study at Michigan State University.

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