90 / SEEDWORLD.COM JANUARY 2019 INDUSTRY NEWS Delivering the people, industry, business and product news you need to know. Submissions are welcome. Email us at news@issuesink.com. Droughts or heat waves have consequences that spread beyond farmers anxiously watching their fields; these fluctuations in crop yields can send shockwaves through local and global food supplies and prices. In a new study, researchers with NASA, the University of Chicago and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research added data on when each specific region plants and harvests its crops — and found it was the single most effective way to improve the simulations. The innovative adaptation could improve the information available for policymakers and markets to brace for the impacts of crop loss. A group of Kumamoto University researchers has discovered how plant root hair grows straight and long. Root hair increases the surface area of the root which enables it to absorb more water and nutrients from the soil. To develop an elongated structure, cell expansion on the lateral sides of the root hair must be suppressed as the tip continues to elongate. If expansion on the sides of the hair isn’t suppressed, it will bulge out like a balloon and become unable to form the elongated structure. Without this growth suppression, it is impossible for the hair to grow long in soil. Technology first used by NASA to grow plants extra-terrestrially is fast tracking improvements in a range of crops. Scientists at the John Innes Centre, Earlham Institute, Quadram Institute and the University of Queensland have improved the technique, known as speed breeding, adapting it to work in vast glasshouses and in scaled-down desktop growth chambers. The ability to work at these scales gives scientists greater opportunities than ever before to breed disease resistant, climate resilient and nutritious crops to feed a growing global population. In the dramatically changing conditions of ancient Earth, organisms had to evolve new strategies to keep up. From the mid-Oligocene, roughly 30 million years ago, to the mid-to-late Miocene, about 5 million years ago, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere fell by a roughly a third. This same period saw the emergence of a new form of photosynthesis in a subset of plants, the C4 pathway. Researchers have long believed that falling carbon dioxide levels drove the origin of plants with this innovation, but a new study, based on biochemical modeling by a group led by University of Pennsylvania biologists and paleoclimate modeling by a group at Purdue University, indicates that water availability may have been the critical factor behind the emergence of C4 plants. Extreme drought is one of the effects of climate change that is already being perceived. This year, the decrease in rainfall and the abnormally hot temperatures in northern and eastern Europe have caused large losses in cereals and potato crops and in other horticultural species. Experts have long warned that to ensure food security it is becoming necessary to use plant varieties that are productive in drought conditions. Now, a team led by the researcher at the Center for Research in Agricultural Genomics, Ana Caño-Delgado, has obtained plants with increased drought resistance by modifying the signaling of the plant steroid hormones, known as brassinosteroids. Plant biologists at the University of Zurich have now demonstrated that naturally occurring epigenetic variation in mouse-ear cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) is subject to selection. The team of Ueli Grossniklaus at the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology also showed that newly selected traits – which are important for seed dispersal – are passed on for at least two to three generations even without selection. Discovery of a gene that helps plants control their response to disease could aid efforts to develop crops that are resistant to infection, research suggests. The