Agriculture sciences

Biochar is a carbon-rich, charcoal-like substance made from oxygen-deprived plants or other organic material. It can store large amounts of carbon and when applied as a fertilizer it slowly releases nutrients into the ground. However, the exact mechanisms how biochar stores nutrients and promotes plant growth have not been identified yet, which also severely limits its commercial potential. An international team of researchers, led by the University of Tübingen in Germany, deciphered the storage and release mechanisms of biochar.

Air pollution is most commonly associated with traffic and car emissions. However, there are a number of other sources for pollution, such as agricultural emissions due to fertiliser use. According to researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, reducing ammonia (NH₃) emissions by 50% could avoid the deaths of more than 250,000 people each year that are caused by air pollution worldwide.

24 leading academic institutions and inter-governmental agencies have been working together to track current progress on the relationship between public health and climate change, and their implications for governments’ commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement. The Lancet Countdown’s 2017 report was launched on the October 31st.

Wheat is one of the most important cereal species worldwide and its products like bread or pasta are common staples of food. Researchers at the Helmholtz Zentrum München and international colleagues have decoded the complex genome sequence of goatgrass (Aegilops tauschii), an ancestor of common wheat.

The western corn rootworm (Diabrotica virgifera virgifera) is a devastating pest of maize plants, which has spread throughout Europe. This year’s pest monitoring in Germany revealed that the number of beetles caught in traps has again multiplied in comparison to the previous year. Several attempts to target this crop pest biologically by applying entomopathogenic nematodes have failed.

The number of people on the planet and thus the number of hungry mouths to feed is constantly growing and is expected to exceed 9 billion by the year 2050. Thus, there is an urgent need to improve crop yield for food output. To meet this demand, researchers lead by Manajit Hayer-Hartl at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich aim to increase the efficiency of photosynthesis and thus crop productivity by artificially engineering the plant Rubisco enzyme.

Plants produce a number of metabolites with diverse functions. Many of these metabolites are not only useful to the plant itself, but also have positive effects in humans and animals. However, the extraction of these compounds in sufficient quantities from the naturally producing resources is often laborious and costly. While some metabolites can be produced in bacteria, so far none can be manufactured in plants themselves.