Amaranth has attracted a great deal of interest in recent decades due to its valuable nutritional, functional, and agricultural characteristics. Amaranth seeds can be cooked, popped, roasted, flaked, or extruded for consumption. This study compared the in vitro starch digestibility of processed amaranth seeds to that of white bread. Raw seeds yielded rapidly digestible starch content (RDS) of 3...

The flow of transgenes into landraces and wild relatives is an important biosafety concern. The case of transgene flow into local maize varieties in Mexico (the center of origin of maize) has been intensively debated over the past 15 years, including legal, political, and environmental disputes fanned by the existence of a significant scientific controversy over the methods used for the detecti...

Apomixis in plants covers a variety of cloning systems through seeds of great potential for plant breeding. Among long-standing approaches for crop improvement is the attempt to exploit wild relatives as natural, vast reservoirs for novel genetic variation. With regard to apomixis, maize possesses an apomictic wild relative, Tripsacum, which we used to produce advanced maize-Tripsacum hybrid ge...

Targeted mutagenesis using programmable DNA endonucleases has broad applications for studying gene function in planta and developing approaches to improve crop yields. Recently, a genetic method that eliminates the need to emasculate the female inbred during hybrid seed production, referred to as Seed Production Technology, has been described. The foundation of this genetic system relied on cla...

Gene flow in agricultural crops is important for risk assessment of genetically modified (GM) crops, particularly in countries with a large informal agricultural sector of subsistence cultivation. We present a pollen flow model for maize (Zea mays), a major staple crop in Africa. We use spatial properties of fields (size, position) in three small-scale maize farming communities in Zambia and es...

Identifying and characterizing alternative splicing (AS) enables our understanding of the biological role of transcript isoform diversity. This study describes the use of publicly available RNA-Seq data to identify and characterize the global diversity of AS isoforms in maize using the inbred lines B73 and Mo17, and a related species, sorghum. Identification and characterization of AS within ma...

Fermented maize product, ogi, is a popular weaning and breakfast cereal in west coasts of Africa. In the study proximate, mineral and amino acid compositions of ogi from a composite mixture of white maize (Zea mays L.) and scarlet runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus L.) flours were evaluated using standard processing techniques. Maize ogi was substituted with scarlet runner bean flour at ratios of...

Fermented pastes of soybeans and soybean-maize blends were evaluated to determine sensory properties driving consumer liking. Pastes composed of 100% soybeans, 90% soybeans and 10% maize, and 75% soybeans and 25% maize were naturally fermented (NFP), and lactic acid bacteria fermented (LFP). Lactic acid bacteria fermentation was achieved through backslopping using a fermented cereal gruel, thob...

The content of indoleacetic acid (IAA) was determined in dry and germinating seeds of French bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), sugar maize (Zea mays), and Scots pine (Pinus silvestris). IAA was found in both the dry and the soaked seeds of the three species examined. The amount of IAA per gram fresh weight was extremely different in the three species whereas the variation between different harvests of...