News by Subject Agriculture

Dong and colleagues studied well-preserved plant fossils from the Middle-Late Jurassic Daohugou Bed in eastern Inner Mongolia, northeastern China. These fossils closely resemble the extant catkin-yews Amentotaxus. They provide unequivocal evidence that the catkin-yews have undergone little morphological change over at least ~160 million years. Like ginkgo, the catkin-yews are living fossils that provide an important new example of evolutionary stasis.

Many processes of photosynthesis, including the intake of magnesium, follow a pattern of variation over 24 hours. In a new study, scientists from Okayama University, Japan and Fujian A & F University, China, tested the effect of this variation on the efficiency of photosynthesis in rice plants. Their findings suggest potential candidates for modification for increasing the yield of rice crops, thereby offering a potential solution to the global food shortage.

Advanced herbicides and treatments for infection may result from the unravelling of a 50-year-old mystery by University of Queensland researchers.

CSU biologists have traced the stability of plant mitochondrial genomes to a particular gene - MSH1 - that plants have but animals don't. Their experiments, described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could lend insight into why animal mitochondrial genomes tend to mutate.

Microbes found deeper in the ocean are believed to have slow population turnover rates and low amounts of available energy. But a new examination of microbial communities found deeper in seafloor sediments and around hydrocarbon seepage sites has found they have more energy available and a higher population turnover. The deeper sediments in the seepages are most likely heavily impacted by the material coming up from the bottom, which means that the seep could be supporting a larger amount of biomass than previously thought.