the main objective of this research was the measurement of soil characteristics, land evaluation and determination of potential yield of sugar beet in yekanat plain of marand. for doing this, firstly, yield potential of sugar beet was estimated by fao method and secondly land evaluation of different soil units for sugar beet cultivation was determined by parametric method. results showed that m...

Genotype by environment interaction (GxE) influences and complicates the selection of superior genotypes in trials by confounding the determination of true genetic values. Trials therefore need to be planted over several locations and seasons. The South African Sugarcane Research Institute (SASRI) operates seven regional breeding programmes representing the major agro-climatic regions of the su...

Delay of leaf senescence through genetic modification can potentially improve crop yield, through maintenance of photosynthetically active leaves for a longer period. Plant growth hormones such as cytokinin regulate and delay leaf senescence. Here, the structural gene (IPT) encoding the cytokinin biosynthetic enzyme isopentenyltransferase was fused to a functionally active fragment of the AtMYB...

Genetic analyses and association mapping were performed on a winter wheat core collection of 96 accessions sampled from a variety of geographic origins. Twenty-four agronomic traits were evaluated over 3 years under fully irrigated, rainfed and drought treatments. Grain yield was the most sensitive trait to water deficit and was highly correlated with above-ground biomass per plant and number o...

The objective of marker assisted recurrent selection (MARS) is to increase the frequency of favorable marker alleles in a population before inbred line extraction. This approach was used to improve drought tolerance and grain yield (GY) in a biparental cross of two elite drought tolerant lines. The testcrosses of randomly selected 50 S1 lines from each of the three selection cycles (C0, C1, C2)...

Improving crop yields are essential to meet the increasing pressure of global food demands. The loss of high quality land, the slowing in annual yield increases of major cereals, increasing fertilizer use, and the effect of this on the environment all indicate that we need to develop new strategies to increase grain yields with less impact on the environment. One strategy that could help addres...

The Arabidopsis SUMO E3 ligase gene AtSIZ1 plays important roles in plant response to abiotic stresses as loss of function in AtSIZ1 leads to increased sensitivity to drought, heat and salt stresses. Overexpression of the AtSIZ1 rice homolog, OsSIZ1, leads to increased heat and drought tolerance in bentgrass, suggesting that the function of the E3 ligase SIZ1 is highly conserved in plants and i...

Experiments were conducted to determine methane emission from a rainfed lowland rice field (water depth about 3–30 cm) and an irrigated shallow rice field (4–6 cm), both planted to the same cultivar, cv. ‘Gayatri,’ as influenced by fertilizer management practices. Methane emission peaked from 100 to 125 days after transplanting followed by a decline in rainfed lowland field plots. Application o...

Yields of dryland (rainfed) wheat in Australia have increased steadily over the past century despite rainfall being unchanged, indicating that the rainfall-use efficiency has increased. Analyses suggest that at least half of the increase in rainfall-use efficiency can be attributed to improved agronomic management. Various methods of analysing the factors influencing dryland yields and rainfall...

A quantitative understanding of yield response to water and nutrients is key to improving the productivity and sustainability of rainfed cropping systems. Here, we quantified the effects of rainfall, fertilization (NPK) and soil organic amendments (with straw and manure) on yields of a rainfed wheat-soybean system in the North China Plain (NCP), using 30-years' field experimental data (1982-201...