b'INDUSTRY NEWS Delivering the people, industry, business and product news you need to know.Submissions are welcome. Email us at news@issuesink.com.alleviate a long-standing bottleneck in gene editing and, in the process, make it easier and faster to develop and test new crop varieties with two new approaches described in a paper recently published in Nature Biotechnology. A Purdue University-affiliated agbioscience startup is creating technology to help meet the growing global demand for bioenergy and, in partnership with Purdue, has received new support from the U.S. government. The approach enables breeders to scale research operations and empowers them with precise, repeatable analytic solutions for high throughput phenotyping in the field. The startup is partnering with Purdue on a $4.5 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a division Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory scientists areof the U.S. Department of Energy. figuring out how to pack more kernels onto a corn Experiments involving the integration of cattle into cob. One way to boost the productivity of a plantcrop rotations in organic food production showed is to redirect some of its resources away fromsuch systems performed well in keeping pathogens maintaining an overprepared immune system andout of meat, according to a recently published study. The study involved three experimental organic into enhanced seed production. Now, a team ledfarming systems on which crops were rotated with by Professor David Jackson has found a gene thatcattle. Researchers found no traces of common strains of E. coli or salmonella on the meat produced could help them tweak that balance. in the experiments, and pathogens detected in feed, fecal and hide samples remained below thresholds commonly detected in conventional production The decommissioning of coal-fired power plants in thesystems.continental United States has reduced nearby pollution and its negative impacts on human health and cropAustralian growers have made significant inroads yields, according to a new University of California Sanagainst herbicide-resistance weeds in recent years by Diego study. Jennifer Burney, associate professor offocusing on harvest-time weed seed controls. One of environmental science at the UC San Diego Schoolthe most popular strategies is the use of an impact mill of Global Policy and Strategy, studied changes inthat intercepts chaff as it exits the harvester. The mill county-level mortality rates and crop yields usingdestroys weed seeds and then deposits the residue on data from the Centers for Disease Control and the U.S.the field for moisture conservation and nutrient cycling. Department of Agriculture. Burney found that between 2005 and 2016, the shutdown of coal-fired units savedConsumers were more willing to buy unlabeled an estimated 26,610 lives and 570 million bushels ofproduce after being shown food tagged as genetically corn, soybeans and wheat in their immediate vicinities.modified in a new Cornell University study, which The inverse calculation, estimating the damagescomes as a new U.S. federal law requiring genetically caused by coal plants left in operation over that samemodified organism disclosure labels on food products time period, suggests they contributed to 329,417goes into effect. In the study, the Cornell researchers premature deaths and the loss of 10.2 billion bushelsrecruited 1,300 consumers, who were shown GM, of crops, roughly equivalent to half of years typicalnon-GM and unlabeled opportunitiesin random production in the U.S. sequencesto purchase apples, as well as other fruits and vegetables. The paper found that when A University of Minnesota research team recentlyan unlabeled apple was presented first, the initial developed new methods that will make it significantlyconsumer demandwillingness to purchasewas faster to produce gene-edited plants. They hope to65.2%. But if the unlabeled apple was presented 72/ SEEDWORLD.COMFEBRUARY 2020'