Weedy rice gets competitive boost from its wild neighbors

Rice feeds the world. But a look-alike weed has many ways of getting ahead. Weedy rice is an agricultural pest with a global economic impact. It is an aggressive weed that outcompetes cultivated rice and causes billions of ...

Weedy rice is unintended legacy of Green Revolution

A new global study reveals the extent to which high-yielding rice varieties favored in the decades since the "Green Revolution" have a propensity to go feral, turning a staple food crop into a weedy scourge.

Rusted root: Weedy rice repeatedly evolves 'cheater' root traits

Weedy rice is neither wild rice nor crop rice, but rice gone rogue that has shed some traits important to people. It also is an incredibly aggressive, potentially detrimental weed that pops up almost everywhere rice is grown, ...

Finding rice traits that tackle climate-change challenges

People around the world depend on food crops adapted to an array of temperature and precipitation regimes, but those conditions are in flux because of global climate change. So scientists want to identify plant traits that ...

More carbon dioxide in the air could threaten rice crops

The increase in carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere--linked to human-caused global warming--may have another effect scientists hadn’t foreseen. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, ...