Barley next to wheat is the most important and widely adapted food cereal in the lower parts of Karkhe River Basin. This crop is one of the most salt-tolerant crop species. Varieties of the crop differ considerably in their ability to tolerate salinity. These differences can be used for selecting high yielding varieties under saline conditions. A field experiment was conducted in Dasht-e Azadeg...

Global climate change is predicted to shift seasonal temperature and precipitation patterns. An increasing frequency of extreme weather events such as heat waves and prolonged droughts is predicted, but there are high levels of uncertainty about the nature of local changes. Crop adaptation will be important in reducing potential damage to agriculture. Crop diversity may enhance resilience to cl...

Salt stress reduces land and water productivity and contributes to poverty and food insecurity. Increased salinization caused by human practices and climate change is progressively reducing agriculture productivity despite escalating calls for more food. Plant responses to salt stress are well understood, involving numerous critical processes that are each controlled by multiple genes. Knowledg...

The recurrent evolution of crop-related weeds during agricultural history raises serious economic problems and challenging scientific questions. Weedy forms of sunflower, a species native from America, have been reported in European sunflower fields for a few decades. In order to understand their origin, we analysed the genetic diversity of a sample of weedy populations from France and Spain, a...

Red rice is an interfertile, weedy form of cultivated rice (Oryza sativa L.) that competes aggressively with the crop in the southern US, reducing yields and contaminating harvests. No wild Oryza species occur in North America and the weed has been proposed to have evolved through multiple mechanisms, including “de-domestication” of US crop cultivars, accidental introduction of Asian weeds, and...

Crop growth and productivity has largely been vulnerable to various abiotic and biotic stresses that are only set to be compounded due to global climate change. Therefore developing improved varieties and designing newer approaches for crop improvement against stress tolerance have become a priority now-a-days. However, most of the crop improvement strategies are directed toward staple cereals ...

Genealogical data have been used very widely to construct indices with which to examine the contribution of plant breeding programmes to the maintenance and enhancement of genetic resources. In this paper we use such indices to examine changes in the genetic diversity of the winter wheat crop in England and Wales between 1923 and 1995. We find that, except for one period characterized by the do...

Wild maize (teosinte) has been reported to be less susceptible to pests than their modern maize (corn) relatives. Endophytes, defined as microbes that inhabit plants without causing disease, are known for their ability to antagonize plant pests and pathogens. We hypothesized that the wild relatives of modern maize may host endophytes that combat pathogens. Fusarium graminearum is the fungus tha...

Let X/K be an absolutely simple abelian variety over a number field; we study whether the reductions Xp tend to be simple, too. We show that if End(X) is a definite quaternion algebra, then the reduction Xp is geometrically isogenous to the self-product of an absolutely simple abelian variety for p in a set of positive density, while if X is of Mumford type, then Xp is simple for almost all p. ...

In rice, amylose content (AC) is controlled by a single dominant Waxy gene. We used Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated 9 (Cas9) to introduce a loss-of-function mutation into the Waxy gene in two widely cultivated elite japonica varieties. Our results show that mutations in the Waxy gene reduce AC and convert the rice into glutinous ones without ...