News

If crop science continues to advance at the pace it has over the last two decades, we hope secure, sustainable and affordable food could be only a further decade away. This is according to a research review by scientists at the Crop Science Centre, which has summarised the last ten years of dramatic advances on the topic of how legumes use benefici…

Tip of the Apex: 100 important questions for future Plant ScientistsUpdated list shows striking prominence of climate change and its effects.The Department’s Dr Cerian Webb has contributed to a study to identify 100 important questions facing plant science research, published today in New Phyologist (here and here)The project collected over 600 que…

Virus infection helps make tomato plants more successful fathersGene flow boost may aid development of virus-susceptible plant populationsDr Alexandra Murphy and her colleagues in the Virology and Molecular Plant Pathology group have discovered that bumblebees can preferentially boost the transfer of male genes in virus-infected tomato plants, whic…

Predicting threats to food securityHow mathematical modelling can prevent crop devastation and preserve livelihoods

C4 plants slower than C3 plants to engage photosynthesis as light levels increasePhotosynthesis is the fundamental basis of life on land – plants use the process to convert light and carbon dioxide into energy for their growth, and produce oxygen as a byproduct. Some plants, mostly in tropical and subtropical regions, have evolved a more efficient …

Standardised, low-cost, widely-applicable protocol eliminates common methodological error and improves data quality and reproducibility.A new protocol for monitoring water stress in pot-grown plants has been develop by Daniel Ginzburg, PhD student and scientist in the department and at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California. T…

A Cambridge-led consortium has received US$35m (£28m) over five years to develop sustainable solutions to increasing the yields of small-scale farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, without the need for costly and polluting inorganic fertilisers.The grant, from Bill & Melinda Gates Agricultural Innovations (Gates Ag One), will enable researchers led by the…

Precision agriculture enables farmers to closely monitor the status of their crops (such as nutrients, pests and diseases, and water stress) in real time, and use that information to apply just the right amount of management input in the right place to ensure the plant grows optimally. Such practices help ensure resources are not wasted, and the en…

New model increases vegetation prediction accuracy in Himalayan glacier melt zonesGreening dominated by grasslands as vegetation line shifts upwards by 7 – 28 m each year. Climate warming has long been known to cause glaciers to melt and ‘retreat’ up the mountain to higher altitudes, leaving land that had been under ice for many millenia suddenly …

Mysterious parasite: How plants develop parasitic organs

New funding to help University Herbarium identify and digitise globally-important specimensCambridge University Herbarium’s new grant from the Isaac Newton Trust will fund a Special Collections Researcher to focus on identifying a significant proportion of the estimated 50,000 type specimens held in this extraordinary collection. The project will r…

Brett Wilson's love of wild tulips has taken him to some of the most spectacular places in Central Asia, where he discovered a new species in Toktogul, Kyrgyzstan. His work has helped to uncover the plight of 53 tulips which have been added to the 'Red List' of threatened species.https://www.cam.ac.uk/this-cambridge-life/the-tulip-hunter-of-toktogu…

New UAV-based system enables efficient forest restoration monitoringEcologists at the Conservation Research Institute have developed a new method of mapping early successional species in tropical forests using Unoccupied Ariel Vehicles (UAVs) to generate reference crown images with attached GPS, a system that will enable practitioners to construct …

Plants employ chemical engineering to manufacture bee-luring optical devicesCambridge researchers have shown that plants can regulate the chemistry of their petal surface to create iridescent signals visible to bees.While most flowers produce pigments that appear colourful and act as a visual cue to pollinators, some flowers also create microscopic…

Modelling the future of soils in the world’s savanna-grasslands – new tools to help manage 24 million square km of drylandsA new grant from the ERC's ‘Starting Grants’ scheme will fund studies to improve carbon credit schemes in dryland areas by boosting our grasp of the effects of periodic fire events on carbon capture and storage. Managing ecosys…