The challenge to produce more food for a rising global population on diminishing agricultural land is complicated by the effects of climate change on agricultural productivity. Although great progress has been made in crop improvement, so far most efforts have targeted above-ground traits. Roots are essential for plant adaptation and productivity, but are less studied due to the difficulty of o...

Zinc (Zn) and iron (Fe) deficiencies are well-documented public health issue and an important soil constraint to crop production. Generally, there is a close geographical overlap between soil deficiency and human deficiency of Zn and Fe, indicating a high requirement for increasing concentrations of micronutrients in food crops. Breeding new plant genotypes for high grain concentrations of Fe a...

Despite the recent emphasis in Africa by national and regional plant protection organizations to control pest birds, traditional farmers usually are still left to their own initiative, as they have been for centuries, to protect their crops. These farmers employ many ingenious visual and oratory frightening techniques, barriers, agronomic planting or harvesting modifications, and bird populatio...

Compared to those of dicot-infecting bacteria, the available genome sequences of bacteria that infect wheat and barley are limited. Herein, we report the draft genome sequences of four pseudomonads originally isolated from these cereals. These genome sequences provide a useful resource for comparative analyses within the genus and for cross-kingdom analyses of plant pathogenesis.

Amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) datasets have been used to construct neighbor-joining trees from which monophyletic origins for crops such as einkorn wheat, barley, and emmer wheat have been inferred. We simulated several different multiple domestication scenarios for an imaginary cereal crop and examined the resulting domesticated populations. The simulations showed that the popu...