Articles about 'crops'

Over £30m has been announced for a new Cambridge Centre for Crop Science that will focus on linking with farming and food industries to translate research into real world impact.

Africa’s food requirements, along with its population, are growing fast. Three research programmes ask how a better understanding of viruses, parasites and the spread of disease can pave the way to improving agricultural yields.

A photoreceptor molecule in plant cells has been found to moonlight as a thermometer after dark – allowing plants to read seasonal temperature changes. Scientists say the discovery could help breed crops that are more resilient to the temperatures expected to result from climate change.

Study of bee-manipulating plant virus reveals a “short-circuiting” of natural selection. Researchers suggest that replicating the scent caused by infection could encourage declining bee populations to pollinate crops – helping both bee and human food supplies. 

Professor Sir Venki Ramakrishnan (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology) discusses how genetically modified crops could help solve the problem of food security.

 A collaboration between leading scientists in the UK and India will focus on tackling global food shortages with research into increasing crop yields and improving disease and drought resistance.

A protein that detects hormones in smoke has a much wider and more ancient role in the plant kingdom – detecting microscopic soil fungi which colonise plants and feed nutrients to their cells. This ancient symbiosis with soil fungi is thought to be how plants survived on land millions of years before they evolved roots.

The Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge's connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, Q is for Queen Bumblebee, one of the UK's 1,500 species of wild pollinators that play a vital role in the environment and food production.

“Ancient relationship” between fungi and plant roots creates genetic expression that leads to more root growth. Common fungus could one day be used as ‘bio-fertiliser’, replacing mined phosphate which is now depleted to the point of impending fertiliser crisis.

A passion for fungi led Cambridge mycologist Dr Dillon Weston to ever-more inventive means of trapping fungal spores, even from the open window of an airship on its maiden flight in the first half of the 20th century.