Biocontrol agents are critical for pest management in sustainable agriculture. Generalist arthropod predators may hold a great potential as biocontrol because they ubiquitous and consume pests agroecosystems. However, their diet composition over the entire crop season has rarely been quantified, which hinders our ability to assess real field conditions that foster temporal dynamics of alternati...

Substantial increases in grain yield of cereal crops are required to feed a growing human population. Here we show that a natural variant of SEMIDWARF AND HIGH-TILLERING (SDT) increases harvest index and grain productivity in rice. Gain-of-function sdt mutation has a shortened polyadenylation tail on the OsmiR156h microRNA precursor, which cause the up-regulation of OsmiR156h. The plants carryi...

OsWUS has recently been shown to be a transcription factor gene critical for tiller development and fertility in rice. The OsWUS protein consists of three conserved structural domains, but their biological functions are still unclear. We discovered a new rice mutant resulting from tissue culture, which hardly produced tillers and exhibited complete female sterility. The male and female floral o...

The teosinte branched1(tb1) gene is a major QTL controlling branching differences between maize and its wild progenitor, teosinte. The insertion of a transposable element (Hopscotch) upstream of tb1 is known to enhance the gene's expression, causing reduced tillering in maize. Observations of the maize tb1 allele in teosinte and estimates of an insertion age of the Hopscotch that predates domes...

In the present study, the research results concluded that yield attributes of scented rice under aerobic culture responded up to 150 kg/ha nitrogen with four equal splits of nitrogen at 1⁄4 basal + 1⁄4 at active tillering + 1⁄4 at panicle initiation and 1⁄4 at heading. Grain and straw yields obtained higher values with highest level of nitrogen i.e. 175 kg/ha comparable with 150 kg/ha. Grain qu...

Waterlogging reduces shoot and root growth and final yield of wheat. Waterlogged sites have a combination of low slope, high rainfall, heavy texture and low permeability. This study was aimed the importance of waterlogging on root growth and wheat yield. In order to study the effects of different waterlogging duration (0, 10, 20 and 30 days) at growth stages (1-leaf stage, tillering stage and s...

Previous studies with 95 bread wheat doubled haploid lines (DHLs) from the cross Chinese Spring (CS)xSQ1 trialled over 24 yearxtreatmentxlocations identified major yield quantitative trait loci (QTLs) in homoeologous locations on 7AL and 7BL, expressed mainly under stressed and non-stressed conditions, respectively. SQ1 and CS contributed alleles increasing yield on 7AL and 7BL, respectively. T...