Increased temperatures from global climate change are projected to cause substantial losses in crop productivity by the end of the twenty-first century. High temperature is predominant among the cardinal ecological factors that determine crop growth and productivity (Al-Khatib and Paulsen, 1999). In cotton, temperature is a primary controller of the rate of plant growth, developmental events, a...

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Directorate of Economics is undertaking collaborative research on food security with Michigan State University's Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics. We wish to acknowledge the financial and substantive support of the Ministry of Agriculture (MINAG) of Mozambique and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Maputo to complete foo...

Agbiotechnology uses genetic engineering to improve the output and value of crops. Altering the expression of the plant Type I Proton-pumping Pyrophosphatase (H+-PPase) has already proven to be a useful tool to enhance crop productivity. Despite the effective use of this gene in translational research, information regarding the intracellular localization and functional plasticity of the pump re...

Minnesota’s crop economy, which totaled more than $12.7 billion in 2009, depends largely on corn and soybeans. However, a variety of other crops, including wheat, sugar beets, dry beans, alfalfa, sunflower, potatoes, oats, and barley, are also frequently grown in Minnesota. All of these crops are important in Minnesota in large part because its climate is conducive to their growth. The term cli...

Agronomic practices, climatic variables, and soil conditions are key factors in crop productivity. Although the effects of soil chemical properties and water and agronomic crop management are known, there is little information about effective soil depth and its influence on crop productivity. Since most crop fertilization systems are based on the productive potential associated with climatic co...

There is a need to accelerate crop improvement by introducing alleles conferring host plant resistance, abiotic stress adaptation, and high yield potential. Elite cultivars, landraces and wild relatives harbor useful genetic variation that needs to be more easily utilized in plant breeding. We review genome-wide approaches for assessing and identifying alleles associated with desirable agronomi...

The present day world is becoming more and more information based. At present, the data which is generated and stored at a rapid rate has exceeded the human comprehensibility and also, there is a huge amount of information stored in the databases which is potentially important and needs to be discovered. The process of extraction of previously unknown and potentially useful information from lar...

Roots are crucial for nutrient and water acquisition and can be targeted to enhance plant productivity under a broad range of growing conditions. A current challenge for plant breeding is the limited ability to phenotype and select for desirable root characteristics due to their underground location. Plant breeding efforts aimed at modifying root traits can result in novel, more stress-tolerant...

Sugarcane is a unique crop with the ability to accumulate high levels of sugar and is a commercially viable source of biomass for bioelectricity and second-generation bioethanol. Water deficit is the single largest abiotic stress affecting sugarcane productivity and the development of water use efficient and drought tolerant cultivars is an imperative for all major sugarcane producing countries...

Roots are the first organ to sense water deficit, and at the same time they extract virtually all those mineral nutrients from soil that are consumed by humans. Soil resource acquisition under challenging conditions such as drought is a primary limitation on plant productivity, resulting in low yields and thus food insecurity in the poorest countries. Indeed, in overall global agriculture, drou...