A new analysis of 450 genomes from cultivated potatoes and 56 genomes of wild potato species has revealed that the potato lineage originated through natural interbreeding between a wild tomato plant and a potato-like species in South America about 9 million years ago.

This hybridization event led to the appearance of the nascent potato plant’s tuber, an enlarged structure housing nutrients underground, according to the researchers, who also identified two crucial genes involved in tuber formation. Whereas in a tomato plant the edible part is the fruit, in the potato plant it is the tuber.

“Potatoes are truly one of humanity’s most remarkable food staples, combining extraordinary versatility, nutritional value and cultural ubiquity in ways few crops can match,” said Sanwen Huang, a genome biologist and plant breeder at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and senior author of the study published on Friday in the journal Cell.

“People eat potatoes using virtually every cooking method – baking, roasting, boiling, steaming and frying. Despite being stereotyped as carbohydrates, potatoes offer vitamin C, potassium, fiber and resistant starch, and are naturally gluten-free, low-fat and satiating – a nutrient-dense calorie source,” Huang added.

Resistant starch is a type of carbohydrate that resists digestion in the small intestine and ferments in the large intestine, feeding beneficial bacteria in the gut.

Etuberosum to Solanum tuberosum

The modern-day potato plant’s scientific name is Solanum tuberosum. Its two parents identified in the study were plants that were the ancestors of a potato-like species now found in Peru named Etuberosum, which closely resembles the potato plant but lacks a tuber, and the tomato plant.

These two plants themselves shared a common ancestor that lived about 14 million years ago, and were able to naturally interbreed when the fortuitous hybridization event occurred five million years after they had diverged from each other.

“This event led to a reshuffling of genes such that the new lineage produced tubers, allowing these plants to expand into the newly created cold, dry habitats in the rising Andes mountain chain,” said botanist Sandra Knapp of the Natural History Museum in London, a co-author of the study.

This hybridization event coincided with the rapid uplift of the Andes. With a tuber, the potato plant was able to adapt to the changing regional environment and thrive in the harsh conditions of the mountains.

“Tubers can store nutrients for cold adaptation, and enable asexual reproduction to meet the challenge of the reduced fertility in cold conditions. These allowed the plant to survive and rapidly expand,” Huang said.

Study may improve potato breeding

The study’s findings, according to the researchers, may help guide improved cultivated potato breeding to address environmental challenges that crops presently face due to factors such as climate change.

There currently are roughly 5,000 potato varieties. The potato is the world’s third most important food crop, after rice and wheat, for human consumption, according to the Peru-based International Potato Center research organization. China is the world’s leading potato producer.

“It always is hard to remove all the deleterious mutations in potato genomes in breeding, and this study opens a new door to make a potato free of deleterious mutations using the tomato as the chassis of synthetic biology,” Huang said.

The study also may open the door to generate a new crop species that could produce tomato fruit above ground and potato tubers below ground, according to Zhiyang Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

The potato and tomato are members of the nightshade family of flowering plants that also includes tobacco and peppers, among others. The study did not investigate the evolutionary origins of other tuberous root crops that originated in South America such as the sweet potato and yuca, which are members of different families of flowering plants.

While the parts of the tomato and potato plants that people eat are quite different, the plants themselves are very similar.

“We use different parts of these two species, fruits in tomatoes and tubers in potatoes,” Knapp said. “If you look at the flowers or leaves, these are very similar. And if you are lucky enough to let your potato plant produce fruits, they look just like little green tomatoes. But don’t eat them. They are not very nice.”

The post Evolutionary origins of the potato revealed – and a tomato was involved appeared first on Country Guide.

Researchers said on Thursday they planted seeds of a diminutive flowering weed called Arabidopsis thaliana in 12 small thimble-sized containers each bearing a gram of moon soil, more properly called lunar regolith, and watched as they sprouted and grew. Lunar regolith, with its sharp particles and lack of organic material, differs greatly from Earth soil, so it was unknown whether seeds would germinate.

“When we first saw that abundance of green sprouts cast over all of the samples, it took our breath away,” said horticultural sciences professor Anna-Lisa Paul, director of the University of Florida Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research and co-leader of the study published in the journal Communications Biology.

“Plants can grow in lunar regolith. That one simple statement is huge and opens the door to future exploration using resources in place on the moon and likely Mars,” Paul said.

Every seed germinated and there were no outward differences at the early stages of growth between those sown in the regolith — composed mostly of crushed basalt rocks — and seeds sown for comparative reasons in volcanic ash from Earth with similar mineral composition and particle size.

The regolith seeds, perhaps unsurprisingly, did less well than the comparison plants. They were slower to grow and generally littler, had more stunted roots and were more apt to exhibit stress-related traits such as smaller leaves and deep reddish black colouration not typical of healthy growth. They also showed gene activity indicative of stress, similar to plant reactions to salt, metal and oxidation.

“Even though plants could grow in the regolith, they had to work hard metabolically to do so,” Paul said.

To the researchers, the fact that they grew at all was remarkable. Study co-leader Rob Ferl, a University of Florida assistant vice-president for research, said he felt “joy at watching life do something that had never been done before.”

“Seeing plants grow is an achievement in that it says that we can go to the moon and grow our food, clean our air and recycle our water using plants the way we use them here on Earth. It is also a revelation in that it says that terrestrial life is not limited to Earth,” Ferl added.

Arabidopsis, also called thale cress, is widely used in scientific research, including previous experiments in orbit, owing to its speedy life cycle and a deep understanding of its genetics.

NASA made available 12 grams — just a few teaspoons — of regolith collected during the Apollo 11, Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 missions. The researchers planted three or four seeds in a dozen containers moistened with a nutrient solution, then placed them in a laboratory at about 73 F (23 C) under LED lights giving off a pink hue.

The seeds sprouted within three days. After about a week of growth, the researchers removed all but one plant from each container. The one was left to grow until it was 20 days old, with its leaves then harvested to assess gene activity.

The researchers also determined that regolith that had experienced longer exposure to cosmic rays and solar wind on the lunar surface was less hospitable to growth.

Earth plants could help people establish outposts in places like the moon and Mars, as depicted in the 2015 film The Martian when an astronaut grew potatoes on the Red Planet. NASA’s Artemis program envisions people returning to the moon’s surface in the coming years.

“Plants are deeply embedded in the science of space exploration because of their life-support role, especially when we consider leaving the Earth for extended periods of time,” Ferl said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Will Dunham.

The post In one giant leap for Earth plants, seeds are grown in moon soil appeared first on Country Guide.

Researchers said on Wednesday they identified the pheromone — that is, a chemical produced by an animal that affects the behaviour of others of its own species — in the world’s most widespread locust species, the migratory locust, or Locusta migratoria.

Called 4-vinylanisole (4VA), it is primarily released from the hind legs and is detected by the antennae of other locusts and sensed by odorant receptors, the researchers said.

4VA powerfully attracted locusts regardless of age or sex, the research published in the journal Nature showed. Its production was triggered in the insects when as few as four to five solitary locusts came together, precipitating swarming behaviour.

“In human history, locust plagues, drought and flood were considered as three major natural disasters which caused serious agricultural and economic losses all over the world,” said research leader Le Kang, a professor of entomology and ecology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Zoology.

“As the most widely distributed and one of the most dangerous locust species, the migratory locust represents a serious threat to agriculture worldwide,” Kang added.

Swarms can include billions of locusts and span hundreds of square kilometres as the insects voraciously consume crops, imperiling food security. Migratory locusts inhabit Asia, Africa, Australia and New Zealand, attacking pastures and critical crops such as wheat, rice, corn, millet, barley, oats, sugarcane and sorghum.

Kang said further research is needed on whether 4VA exists in other locust species such as the desert locust, called Schistocerca gregaria, that currently is ravaging parts of Africa and the Middle East.

The chemical insecticides currently used to suppress locust outbreaks raise concerns about human health and safety. The identification of 4VA could inspire new methods.

A chemical could be developed to block 4VA’s effects to prevent swarming, Kang said, or a synthetic version could lure locusts into traps to be killed. Locusts genetically modified not to respond to 4VA could be developed and released to establish wild non-swarming populations, “subject to biosecurity evaluation,” Kang added.

— Reporting for Reuters by Will Dunham.

The post Locust swarming pheromone identified in step toward curbing plagues appeared first on Country Guide.

The Food and Drug Administration’s decision on the cotton plant developed by Texas A+M University scientists means it is allowed as food for people and all types of animals.

Texas A+M AgriLife Research plant biotechnologist Keerti Rathore said the scientists are holding discussions with companies and hope to have the plant commercially available within about five years. Rathore said the team also will explore seeking regulatory approval in other countries starting with Mexico.

“Yes, we are fully aware of the resistance to GMOs in many countries, but I remain hopeful that counties who are desperate for food will adopt this technology,” Rathore added.

Cotton is grown in more than 80 countries, with its fibre used to make textiles and cottonseed currently used among other purposes to feed animals such as cattle and sheep that have multiple stomach chambers. Ordinary cottonseed is unfit for humans and many animals to eat because it contains high levels of gossypol, a toxic chemical.

Rathore’s team used so-called RNAi, or RNA interference, technology to “silence” a gene, virtually eliminating gossypol from the cottonseed. Gossypol was left at natural levels in the rest of the plant because it guards against insects and disease.

“With adoption of this technology, cotton becomes a dual-purpose crop. It requires no additional effort on the part of farmers or inputs or land for cultivation. So, it will make cotton farming more sustainable,” Rathore said.

The genetic modification does not affect the plant’s fibre for use in textiles.

The U.S. Agriculture Department last year lifted the regulatory prohibition on cultivation by farmers of the modified cotton plant ahead of the FDA decision on human consumption.

“Cottonseed can be consumed in many ways. We will continue to crush it to extract oil (usable for cooking). However, now the leftover meal with its high protein content can be used as a protein supplement in tortilla, bread and baked goods. The seed kernels can be roasted and eaten as snack or as peanut butter type of spread or in protein bars,” Rathore said.

“To me it tastes like chickpea. Imagine hummus without any other ingredients added to it,” Rathore added.

Many of the world’s cotton-producing countries, particularly in Asia and Africa, have populations that face malnutrition that could be addressed with the new plant, Rathore said.

“There are approximately 10.8 trillion grams of protein locked up in the annual global output of cottonseed. This is enough to meet the basic protein requirements of over 500 million people at a rate of 50 grams of protein per person per day,” Rathore said.

The new cottonseed may also have commercial use as feed for poultry, pigs and farmed aquatic species like fish and shrimp, Rathore said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Will Dunham.

The post U.S. regulators allow GM cotton as human food source appeared first on Country Guide.

No matter how you slice it, the discovery detailed on Monday shows that hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Mediterranean achieved the cultural milestone of breadmaking far earlier than previously known, more than 4,000 years before plant cultivation took root.

The flatbread, likely unleavened and somewhat resembling pita bread, was fashioned from wild cereals such as barley, einkorn or oats, as well as tubers from an aquatic papyrus relative, that had been ground into flour.

It was made by a culture called the Natufians, who had begun to embrace a sedentary rather than nomadic lifestyle, and was found at a Black Desert archeological site.

“The presence of bread at a site of this age is exceptional,” said Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, a University of Copenhagen postdoctoral researcher in archaeobotany and lead author of the research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Arranz-Otaegui said until now the origins of bread had been associated with early farming societies that cultivated cereals and legumes. The previous oldest evidence of bread came from a 9,100-year-old site in Turkey.

“We now have to assess whether there was a relationship between bread production and the origins of agriculture,” Arranz-Otaegui said. “It is possible that bread may have provided an incentive for people to take up plant cultivation and farming, if it became a desirable or much-sought-after food.”

University of Copenhagen archeologist and study co-author Tobias Richter pointed to the nutritional implications of adding bread to the diet. “Bread provides us with an important source of carbohydrates and nutrients, including B vitamins, iron and magnesium, as well as fibre,” Richter said.

Abundant evidence from the site indicated the Natufians had a meat- and plant-based diet. The round floor fireplaces, made from flat basalt stones and measuring about a yard in diameter, were located in the middle of huts.

Arranz-Otaegui said the researchers have begun the process of trying to reproduce the bread, and succeeded in making flour from the type of tubers used in the prehistoric recipe. But it might have been an acquired taste.

“The taste of the tubers,” Arranz-Otaegui said, “is quite gritty and salty. But it is a bit sweet as well.”

— Reporting for Reuters by Will Dunham.

The post World’s oldest bread found at prehistoric site in Jordan appeared first on Country Guide.

Researchers said Monday they have sequenced the genome of the carrot, an increasingly important root crop worldwide, identifying genes responsible for traits including the vegetable’s abundance of vitamin A, an important nutrient for vision.

The genome may point to ways to improve carrots through breeding, including increasing their nutrients and making them more productive and more resistant to disease, pest and drought, the researchers said.

The vitamin A in carrots arises from their orange pigments, known as carotenoids. The study identified genes responsible for carotenoids as well as pest and disease resistance and other characteristics. In addition to eyesight, vitamin A also is important for immune function, cellular communication, healthy skin and other purposes.

The researchers sequenced the genome of a bright orange variety of the vegetable called the Nantes carrot, named for the French city. The carrot genome contained about 32,000 genes, a typical total for plants, which average around 30,000 genes, which is more than the human genome.

“Carrots are an interesting crop to work on because of their wide range of diversity. They are familiar to everyone, and generally well-regarded by consumers, but like most familiar things, people don’t necessarily know the background stories,” said University of Wisconsin horticulture professor and geneticist Phil Simon, who led the study published in the journal Nature Genetics.

Worldwide carrot consumption quadrupled between 1976 and 2013 and they now rank in the top 10 vegetable crops globally, the researchers said. In the past four decades, carrots have been bred to be more orange and more nutritious, with 50 per cent more nutrients.

The earliest record of carrots as a root crop dates from 1,100 years ago in Afghanistan, but those were yellow carrots and purple ones, not orange ones. Paintings from 16th-century Spain and Germany provide the first unmistakable evidence for orange carrots.

Knowledge of the carrot genome could lead to improvement of similar crops, from parsnips to the cassava, the researchers said. Close relatives of carrots include celery, parsley, parsnips, coriander, cilantro, dill, fennel, cumin and caraway. The common weed called Queen Anne’s Lace is a wild carrot.

The wild ancestors of carrots were white, the researchers said. While orange carrots are most commonly grown, some purple and yellow carrots are grown from the Middle East to South Asia, while some red carrots are grown in Asia.

— Reporting for Reuters by Will Dunham.

The post Scientists peel back carrot’s genetic secrets appeared first on Country Guide.

The researchers on Monday cited 139 counties as especially worrisome, with wild bee numbers decreasing while farmland for crops dependent on such pollinators is increasing.

The counties included agricultural regions of California such as the Central Valley, the Pacific Northwest, the upper Midwest and Great Plains, west Texas and the southern Mississippi River valley.

The counties grew crops such as almonds, pumpkins, squashes, blueberries, watermelons, peaches and apples that are highly dependent on pollinators, or had large amounts of less-pollinator-dependent crops including soybeans, canola and cotton.

Taylor Ricketts, director of the University of Vermont’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, said the 139 counties represent 39 per cent of the pollinator-dependent crop area of the U.S. and most likely will face inadequate pollination in the future.

“Wild bee declines may increase costs for farmers and, over time, could even destabilize crop production,” Ricketts said.

Some crops such as corn and wheat do not need pollinators.

The study estimated that wild bee numbers diminished in 23 per cent of the continental U.S. between 2008 and 2013 in a trend driven by conversion of their natural habitat into farmland including corn for biofuel production.

Pesticides and diseases were cited as other factors behind the declines among the roughly 4,000 U.S. species of wild bees.

“Wild bees help pollinate many of our most nutritious crops, support natural ecosystems and contribute over US$3 billion to the U.S. economy each year,” Ricketts said.

Their decline may prompt greater dependence on commercial honeybee colonies for pollinating crops, but honeybee numbers also are falling, added Gund Institute researcher Insu Koh, the lead author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Our results highlight the need for strategies to maintain pollinator populations in farmland, and the importance of conservation programs that provide flowering habitat that can support wild bees and other pollinators,” said Michigan State University entomologist Rufus Isaacs, who heads the U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded Integrated Crop Pollination Project.

The study followed a 2014 memorandum by President Barack Obama creating a task force to study pollinator losses. The task force in May called for preserving wide swathes of pollinator habitats.

— Reporting for Reuters by Will Dunham in Washington, D.C.

The post Wild bees seen dwindling in main U.S. crop regions appeared first on Country Guide.

The amounts of two important nutrients, zinc and iron, were found to be lower in wheat, rice, soybeans and field peas grown in open-air fields where the scientists created CO2 concentrations at the level they forecast for Earth by roughly 2050, about 550 parts per million.

They grew 40 varieties of six different grains and legumes, also including corn and sorghum, at seven locations on three continents, in Japan, Australia and the U.S.

“This is important because almost two billion people globally receive most of these two nutrients (zinc and iron) by eating crops,” said University of Illinois plant biology professor Andrew Leakey, one of the researchers.

The researchers said these findings point to one of the most important health threats shown to be linked to climate change.

Dr. Samuel Myers of the Harvard School of Public Health, who led the study published in the journal Nature, said there already is a significant public health problem in parts of the world due to inadequate intake of zinc and iron.

Myers noted that inadequate zinc intake affects the immune system and makes people more vulnerable to premature death from maladies like malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea. Myers said iron deficiency is linked to increases in maternal mortality, anemia, reductions in IQ and reduced work productivity.

Scientists have sought to gauge the impact of climate change on humankind in the coming decades including the effects of CO2 levels that have been rising due to the burning of fossil fuels since the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

Earth’s atmospheric CO2 concentration currently is about 400 parts per million and continues to rise.

The study found that in wheat grown under elevated CO2 conditions there were about nine per cent lower levels of zinc and five per cent lower levels of iron compared to wheat grown under normal conditions. The rice grown with elevated CO2 levels had three per cent less zinc content and five per cent less iron.

In wheat and rice, there also was lower protein content at the elevated carbon dioxide levels, the researchers said.

Nutrients in sorghum and corn remained stable at the higher carbon dioxide levels because these crops use a kind of photosynthesis that concentrates CO2 in their leaves, the researchers said.

The scientists simulated higher CO2 levels in open-air fields using a system known as free air concentration enrichment (FACE), which pumps out, monitors and adjusts ground-level CO2 in the air to simulate future conditions.

“You have an open agricultural field that looks like any other except that in the middle of the field you have rings of carbon dioxide-emitting jets. At the center of the ring you have a sensor that tells you the CO2 concentration and the wind direction. When the CO2 falls below your prescribed level the upwind jets emit some more CO2 to keep it at a constant level,” Myers said.

These crops were grown in identical conditions to crops grown outside the ring in terms of weather, pests, pathogens and soil nutrients, with CO2 concentration as the only variable. The scientists then compared nutrient content using those crops grown in matching plots without the added CO2.

Leakey said rice, wheat and soybeans made more sugars through photosynthesis at the elevated CO2 levels and produced about 15 per cent more seeds but had decreases in zinc and iron content.

He said more work is needed to nail down the details of why higher CO2 levels drive down the nutrients. He also said it will be important to study how crops in tropical countries will respond to elevated CO2 and other aspects of global environmental change.

— Will Dunham reports for Reuters from Washington, D.C.

The post Rising CO2 levels may cut nutrient levels in crops: study appeared first on Country Guide.

The scientists said their process turns carbon monoxide gas into liquid ethanol with the help of an electrode made of a form of copper. They said the new technique may be more environmentally friendly and efficient than the current method.

Critics say that growing crops for biofuels is energy-intensive and takes up vast tracts of non-agricultural land, using too much water and fertilizer. They also say diverting corn and sugar to make biofuels pushes up food prices.

The U.S. leads the world in ethanol production, with 13.3 billion gallons in 2013, followed by Brazil’s 6.3 billion gallons, according to the Washington-based Renewable Fuels Association, which represents the U.S. ethanol industry.

A group of scientists led by Stanford University chemist Matthew Kanan described the new method in research published in the journal Nature. Kanan said a prototype device could be ready in two to three years, enabling an assessment on whether the process can become commercially viable.

“I emphasize that these are just laboratory experiments today. We haven’t built a device,” Kanan said. “But it demonstrates the feasibility of using electricity that you could get from a renewable energy source to power fuel synthesis — in this case ethanol. There are some real advantages to doing that relative to using biomass to produce ethanol.”

Ethanol fuel generally is produced at high-temperature fermentation facilities that chemically transform corn, sugarcane and other plants into liquid fuel.

Kanan and his colleagues built an electrochemical cell – a device consisting of two electrodes that were put in water saturated with carbon monoxide gas. One of the electrodes was made of a material they call “oxide-derived copper.”

When voltage was applied across the electrodes, the carbon monoxide gas was converted into ethanol, they said.

The researchers hope to take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it to carbon monoxide, which then would be fed into the copper-oxide catalyst. The researchers hope the catalytic cell would be powered by a renewable energy source such as solar or wind.

Chemist Aaron Appel of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy government research lab, said that the work from Kanan’s group demonstrates “a remarkable improvement in selectivity and energy efficiency” for the production of ethanol from carbon monoxide.

Appel was not part of the study but wrote a commentary in Nature on the findings.

Advocates call ethanol a green energy source that, compared to gasoline, reduces greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. Ethanol last year directly supported more than 86,000 U.S. jobs in fuel production and agriculture, the RFA said.

Last November, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed cutting the amount of ethanol required to be mixed with the gasoline supply, responding to pressure from the petroleum industry. It marked the first planned cut to renewable fuel targets written into a 2007 U.S. law.

— Will Dunham reports for Reuters from Washington, D.C.

The post Scientists make ethanol without corn or other crops appeared first on Country Guide.