Improvements in plant agricultural productivity are urgently needed to reduce the dependency on limited natural resources and produce enough food for a growing world population. Human intervention over thousands of years has improved the yield of important crops; however, it is increasingly difficult to find new targets for genetic improvement. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are promising targets for crop ...

Scarcity of water for irrigation is an alarming issue limiting crop production worldwide and is becoming increasingly severe with the passage of time in Pakistan. Rice production in Pakistan is thus, being adversely hampered by the shortage of water. The study was therefore, contemplated to determine the effect of drought stress on some physiological and agronomic parameters of three rice culti...

Field pennycress (Thlaspi arvense L.) has potential as an oilseed crop that may be grown during fall (autumn) and winter months in the Midwestern United States and harvested in the early spring as a biodiesel feedstock. There has been little agronomic improvement in pennycress through traditional breeding. Recent advances in genomic technologies allow for the development of genomic tools to ena...

Maize (Zea mays subsp mays) was domesticated from teosinte (Z. mays subsp parviglumis) through a single domestication event in southern Mexico between 6000 and 9000 years ago. This domestication event resulted in the original maize landrace varieties, which were spread throughout the Americas by Native Americans and adapted to a wide range of environmental conditions. Starting with landraces, 2...

There is disagreement internationally across major regulatory jurisdictions on the relevance and utility of whole food (WF) toxicity studies on GM crops, with no harmonization of data or regulatory requirements. The scientific value, and therefore animal ethics, of WF studies on GM crops is a matter addressable from the wealth of data available on commercialized GM crops and WF studies on irrad...

The diversity of microbial communities constitutes a critical component of good soil-management practices. To characterize the effects of different management practices, molecular indicators such as phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA), denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) and composition of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria were used to analyze bacterial community structure and diversity from fou...

Modern maize breeding programs gave rise to genetically uniform varieties that can affect maize's capacity to cope with increasing climate unpredictability. Maize populations, genetically more heterogeneous, can evolve and better adapt to a broader range of edaphic-climatic conditions. These populations usually suffer from low yields; it is therefore desirable to improve their agronomic perform...

High molecular weight glutenin subunits (HMW-GS) play an essential role in wheat processing quality. In this study, we evaluated the genetic pattern with HMW-GS composition between generations and examined whether agronomic and quality traits were correlated with each other. A wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) cultivar with high protein content and 2 cultivars with low protein content were subjected...

To enhance our understanding of the genetic basis of nitrogen use efficiency in maize (Zea mays), we have developed a quantitative genetic approach by associating metabolic functions and agronomic traits to DNA markers. In this study, leaves of vegetative recombinant inbred lines of maize, already assessed for their agronomic performance, were analyzed for physiological traits such as nitrate c...