Engineering cereal crops that are self-supported by nitrogen fixation has been a dream since the 1970s when nitrogenase was transferred from Klebsiella pneumoniae to Escherichia coli. A renewed interest in this area has generated several new approaches with the common aim of transferring nitrogen fixation to cereal crops. Advances in synthetic biology have afforded the tools to rationally engin...

Cereal crops are used throughout the world for livestock feed. When they are managed properly they provide excellent grazing and high-quality silage or hay. It is important to remember that grazing should occur during the vegetative stage and silage or hay harvest should occur during flowering to early seed fill. Corn is one of the few annual crops that will provide quality forage after seed ma...

This article presents average agricultural yield data per hectare for key cereal, legume and root crops from 2001 until 2017. Data was obtained from the annual Agricultural Sample Surveys of the Central Statistics Agency (CSA) of Ethiopia. We present data at national, regional (SNNPRS) and zonal (Wolaita) levels. The data shows that average yields for all crops, at all levels, show increasing t...

Vitamin A deficiency is a serious global health problem that can be alleviated by improved nutrition. Development of cereal crops with increased provitamin A carotenoids can provide a sustainable solution to eliminating vitamin A deficiency worldwide. Maize is a model for cereals and a major staple carbohydrate source. Here, we discuss maize carotenogenesis with regard to pathway regulation, av...

Agricultural crop species represent a negligible part of the existing biodiversity. Over 50 percent of the daily global requirement of proteins and calories is met by just three crops – maize, wheat and rice (FAO, 1996) – and only 150 crops are commercialised on a significant global scale. On the other hand, ethnobotanic surveys indicate that, worldwide, more than 7,000 plant species are cultiv...

High-amylose cereal starches provide many health benefits for humans. The inhibition or mutation of starch branching enzyme (SBE) genes is an effective method to develop high-amylose cereal crops. This review summarizes the development of high-amylose cereal crops through the inactivation of one or more SBE isoforms or combination with other genes. This review also reveals the causes of increas...

—The results of about 12 years' study deals with rodent damage to several annual and perennial crops of India including cereal, vegetable, fruit, plantation and other cash crops. The rodent species composition in order of predominance infesting different crops and cropping patterns percent damages and cost effectiveness of rodent control operations in each crop and status of rodent management b...

Suggestions that novel, non-food, dedicated biomass crops used to produce bioenergy may provide opportunities to diversify and reinstate biodiversity in intensively managed farmland have not yet been fully tested at the landscape scale. Using two of the largest, currently available landscape-scale biodiversity data sets from arable and biomass bioenergy crops, we take a taxonomic and functional...

Cereal crops that have rigid non-cellulose components in the cell wall tissues of leaves and high starch and protein content in grains face limitations in DNA extraction. Advanced molecular genetic techniques such as mapping and marker-assisted selection programs require pure and quick DNA extraction. In this study, we developed methods for isolating high-quality genomic DNA from leaves and see...