Mexico has the most diverse maize germplasm of any country, and is characterized by many small producers and high maize consumption. The country has an intricate agrarian history and a strongly polarized society. Maize is grown in contrasting environmental, social and technological conditions in plots that range from garden size to fields of hundreds of hectares. The typical campesino subsidize...

Maize (Zea mays) was a primary food crop for aboriginal societies of the arid American Southwest. Water used for maize production in these arid zones could have come from precipitation and runoff during the summer monsoon, from perennial streams and springs, or from stored soil water fed by snowmelt. The oxygen stable isotope ratio (dO) of summer and winter precipitation on the Colorado Plateau...

Asia is the home of the Green Revolutions in wheat and rice (Hazell, 2010), as well as more than half of the world’s poor people, but has been slow to introduce biotech food or feed crops. The only country in Asia to have approved a biotech food or feed crop is the Philippines, where Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) maize was initially commercialized in 2003. Not only is the Philippines unique as an...

BACKGROUND Aflatoxins are toxic fungal metabolites enable to contaminate a wide range of natural substrates. This contamination can be host-specific for different plant species. In this study, the ability of a toxigenic Aspergillus parasiticus to produce various aflatoxins on major Iranian cereals was evaluated with special focus on plant susceptibility to toxin production at cultivar level. ...

The effect of the forage source on ruminal fermentation in vitro was investigated for fine (F) and coarse (C) milled diets, using a modified Hohenheim gas production test and a semi-continuous rumen simulation technique (Rusitec). It was hypothesised that the replacement of maize silage by grass silage might lead to associative effects and that interactions related to particle size variation co...

The present study was conducted with a view to analyzed growth and trend in area, production and yield of major crops of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. A time series data from 1980-81 to 2011-12 (32 years) of major crops (wheat, maize, rice and sugarcane) were collected. The compound growth rate as well as trend analysis indicated that the area under wheat crop has decreased over the time due to shifting ...

The presented work studies the possibilities of using maize silage for biogas production in laboratory as well as in full-scale conditions. From the results of long-term operation of a mixed laboratory anaerobic reactor, it follows that processing of maize silage as a single substrate is an unstable process due to the low alkalinity of silage that has to be compensated by pH adjustment. Specifi...

This opinion reports on an evaluation of a risk assessment for placing on the market the genetically modified herbicide tolerant and insect resistant maize MON89034 x NK603 for food and feed uses, import and processing. Conventional breeding methods were used in the production of maize MON89034 x NK603 from inbred lines of the respective parental events. The structural integrity of the inserts ...

Biomass crops are being promoted as environmentally favorable alternatives to fossil fuels or ethanol production from maize (Zea mays L.), particularly across the Corn Belt of the United States. However, there are few if any empirical studies on inorganic N leaching losses from perennial grasses that are harvested on an annual basis, nor has there been empirical evaluation of the hydrologic con...

The E.coli produced recombinant human interleukin-2 (rhIL-2) has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the immunotherapeutic treatment of the end-stage metastatic melanoma and renal cell cancer. However, the E.coli produced rhIL-2 is very expensive (~$11,400 USD per treatment). In the present study, we explored the feasibility of producing rhIL-2 in transgenic Zea mays (maize) v...