The quest for the missing proteins in rice

Niall on 9 January, 2019

Rice (Oryza sativa) is the major food source for more than half the world’s population. Photo: Pille-Riin Priske/Unsplash CC

Researchers have identified over 5,700 new proteins in rice and are calling for a global effort to find the remaining missing proteins, in a new study co-authored by Macquarie University.

The international team of scientists from Australia, Iran and Japan say there’s an estimated 35,000 proteins encoded by the rice genome, and yet we still don’t have experimental evidence for 82 per cent of them.

This is important because rice is the major food source for more than half the world’s population, and in order for it to grow in warmer climates and with less water we will need to better understand rice at the molecular level. Read More about The quest for the missing proteins in rice

How cotton was born

Niall on 28 July, 2011

A million year-old mating opens up an improved future

A coming together and genetic merging of an American plant with an African or Asian plant one or two million years ago produced the ancestor of the bush that now provides 90% of the world’s commercial cotton. And although the resulting plant has been domesticated and changed genetically by breeding over thousands of year, it retains a genetic structure and capacity which is conducive to further modification. Read More about How cotton was born

Tuesday at the International Botanical Congress

Operations on 26 July, 2011

The world’s favourite tree

The world loves our eucalypts. Now Eucalyptus had become the world’s favourite tree for farming and today in Melbourne its genome is revealed at the International Botanical Congress.

Other stories today include: a series of talks on how plants will respond to climate change; more on the future of wine and the Breathing Planet Programme. Read More about Tuesday at the International Botanical Congress