Making Crops Climate Ready

Herbicide use on roundup ready crops.

In his News Focus article "GM crops in the cross hairs" (26 Nov., p. 1662), Dan Ferber refers to the assessment by Charles Benbrook of the effect that the introduction of Roundup Ready crops has had on herbicide use, concluding that the benefits are not clear-cut. We disagree with this conclusion. Changes in herbicide use are largely meaningless unless relative environmental and health risks ar...

Climate Ready Boston

CWRF Ready for Climate Service

The CWRF has been developed as the Climate extension of the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF, Skamarock et al. 2008) by incorporating numerous improvements in representation of physical processes and integration of external (top, surface, lateral) forcings that are crucial to climate scales, including interactions between land–atmosphere–ocean, convection–microphysics and cloud–aeros...

Molecular basis for the herbicide resistance of Roundup Ready crops.

The engineering of transgenic crops resistant to the broad-spectrum herbicide glyphosate has greatly improved agricultural efficiency worldwide. Glyphosate-based herbicides, such as Roundup, target the shikimate pathway enzyme 5-enolpyruvylshikimate 3-phosphate (EPSP) synthase, the functionality of which is absolutely required for the survival of plants. Roundup Ready plants carry the gene codi...

Food crops in a changing climate