Growth Spurts

Three new leaf lettuce breeding lines with resistance to corky root, a serious disease of lettuce, have been released by the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Corky root is caused by a bacterium called Sphingomonas suberifaciens which lives in the soil and attacks the plant’s roots, causing them to enlarge and develop [...]

On a long winter’s night, no treat seems simpler than a big bowl of popcorn — until you start to trace the connections between traditional races of popping corns and modern commercial varieties of popcorn.
Plant geneticist Amalio Santacruz Varela — then a graduate student at Iowa State University and currently a professor and researcher at [...]

Researchers at Cornell University have cloned a novel aluminum-tolerant gene in sorghum and expect to have new genetically-engineered aluminum-tolerant sorghum lines by next year. This development could have a huge impact on crop production, as nearly half the world’s arable land is affected by aluminum toxicity.
The research, published in the September 2007 issue of Nature [...]