Grasses are amongst the most important crops worldwide, and the composition of their cell walls is critical for uses as food, feed, and energy crops. Grass cell walls differ dramatically from dicot cell walls in terms of the major structural polysaccharides present, how those polysaccharides are linked together, and the abundance and importance of pectins, proteins and phenolic compounds. Recen...

BACKGROUND Boreal cropping systems are heavily focused on the production of small-grain cereals; to improve their resilience to climate change and to achieve food and feed security, diversification is needed. This study investigated the potential of faba bean, narrow-leafed lupin and lentil as protein crops in southern Finland, where faba bean is traditional but the other two are novel. RESUL...

KE VI N V AN A EL ST R OBERT GOLDBERG SAGS INTO HIS DESK CHAIR AND GESTURES AT THE AIR. “FRANKENSTEIN monsters, things crawling out of the lab,” he says. “This the most depressing thing I’ve ever dealt with.” Goldberg, a plant molecular biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, is not battling psychosis. He is expressing despair at the relentless need to confront what he sees as b...

advice. That is what we are looking for from the work of the review group,” he said. In a report to EU leaders, Barroso said the food price rises had added a ‘new dimension’ to the public debate on GM crops. “The recent surge in agricultural commodity prices could be exacerbated by trade obstacles related to GMOs, thus resulting in an increase of [animal] feed and food prices in the EU higher t...

Image analysis for ornamental crops is discussed with examples from the bedding plant industry. Feed-forward artificial neural networks are used to segment top and side view images of three contrasting species of bedding plants. The segmented images provide objective measurements of leaf and flower cover, colour, uniformity and leaf canopy height. On each imaging occasion, each pack was scored ...

There is a new resolve, provoked by recent hikes in food prices around the world, to increase global food production in order to feed a rapidly growing population. In response made optimistic claims about the ability of genetically engineered (GE) crops changed using spliced genes that are often from unrelated organisms Agricultural biotechnology has shown to increase countries, far beyond the ...

1. THE PROBLEM Aflatoxins are the secondary metabolites produced by Aspergillus flavus and A. parasiticus in several crops and commodities. They are carcinogenic, teratogenic and immunosuppressants that are implicated in growth retardation in children, immune-suppression, interference in micronutrient metabolism, liver cirrhosis, liver and esophageal cancers and decreased human and animal produ...

One prominent concern about genetically modified crops is the possibility of environmental impacts from the movement of fitness-enhancing traits to wild plant populations. Decisions to deregulate Bt crops in the USA have relied strongly on arguments that these crops will not interbreed with wild relatives in the permitted growing regions. Limited attention therefore has been directed to analyse...

abstract surface water restriction and supply variation of these resources causes of over extraction of groundwater and unbalance between feed and extraction of groundwater in iran. agricultural sector as the biggest consumer of water resources has the most share of this unsustainability. this paper studies the conjunctive use of surface and groundwater in agronomy production in qazvin basin, o...

Glyphosate [N-(phosphonomethyl) glycine]-resistant crops (GRCs), canola (Brassica napus L.), cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.), maize (Zea mays L.), and soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] have been commercialized and grown extensively in the Western Hemisphere and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere. Glyphosate-resistant cotton and soybean have become dominant in those countries where their planting is p...