Bread wheat's large and complex genome is revealed

Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) is one of the "big three" globally important crops, accounting for 20% of the calories consumed by people. Fully 35% of the world's 7 billion people depend on this staple crop for survival. ...

MicroRNAs in plants: Regulation of the regulator

MicroRNAs are essential regulators of the genetic program in multicellular organisms. Because of their potent effects, the production of these small regulators has itself to be tightly controlled. That is the key finding ...

Genome evolution and carbon dioxide dynamics

Using the size of guard cells in fossil plants to predict how much DNA each cell contained (the genome size), researchers have discovered that variations in genome sizes over geological time correlate with atmospheric carbon ...

Mystery of nematode pest-resistant soybeans cracked

For 50 years, the world's soybean crop has depended on the use of cyst nematode resistant varieties of beans, but no one knew how these plants fought off the nematode pests. Now, the secrets of resistant soybean plants are ...

Scientists reclassify eukaryotic microorganisms

One of the biggest scientific challenges is the classification of the natural world, especially the protists, which are eukaryotic microorganisms. While the classification proposed by Sina Adl et al. (2005) was conservative ...

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