Two years ago Bayer, mostly known as a chemical and pharmaceutical company, announced their plans to take over the US-based agriculture specialist Monsanto. The future merger caused quite the stir from the get-go, as the resulting super agro-chemical company would be the largest worldwide. With a price tag of US$62.5 billion, the takeover would also be the largest one ever to be realized by a German company.
There are many reasons why insects are vanishing in alarming numbers. One reason is intensive farming and the corresponding use of synthetic crop protection agents and pesticides. For instance, the widespread use of the neonicotinoids has been shown to be hazardous to the health of bees and bumblebees.
An initial financing round helped the founders of ECF Farmsystems GmbH realize their idea of an aquaponics farm in Berlin in 2014. Since then, the start-up has been supported by co-founder and managing director Nicolas Leschke from the "IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH".
Better together – this applies in particular to many creatures that form symbioses with microbes in order to tap new food sources or protect their offspring. The same goes for the wool beetle Lagria villosa. This beetle is colonised by several strains of closely related Burkholderia gladioli bacteria, which protect the beetle's eggs from fungal attack.
The ruling of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) regarding the regulation of crops created with new molecular and genome-editing breeding techniques was announced yesterday, July 25th, in Luxembourg. The long-awaited decision was met with cheers by environmental groups and consumer organisations, but caused disillusionment and lack of understanding among researchers and entrepreneurs
Soil is much more than dirt. It contains a slew of microorganisms, fungi and roots of a plethora of plants. All of which interact with each other and together, they make up the soil microbiome. Headed by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg and the University of Tartu in Estonia, an international research team for the first time conducted a study of bacteria and fungi in soil.
The genome of the arguably most important crop worldwide, bread wheat, has been decoded. The results of the thirteen-year scientific endeavor of 200 scientists from 73 research institutions in 20 countries were published in the journal “Science”.
Not only humans rely on photosynthesis by plants for the coveted oxygen. For plants themselves photosynthesis is an essential metabolic pathway. And for it to work well, they require chlorophyll – the green “blood” of plants. However, in order to produce enough chlorophyll, plants require iron, which in turn is often hardly soluble from the soil.
Plants get their nutrients from the ground via their root network. However, many nutrients are nearly insoluble or very rare. Therefore, many plants live in symbiosis with root fungi that facilitate the plants’ nutrient uptake and help them thrive under extreme conditions. In fact, more than 70% of higher plants establish an association with these fungi, so-called mycorrhiza, which are believed to be more than 400 million years old. The mutualistic association allows the plant to better absorb nutrients, such as phosphate – an especially important but rare nutrient.
For thousands of years people have been breeding crops such as wheat, maize and tomatoes. When doing so, farmers and breeders have been particularly concerned with increasing crop yields. However, targeted breeding has resulted in the loss of other useful traits and genetic diversity, and modern cultivated plants are often more susceptible to disease and have a reduced vitamin and nutrient content. The problem: Characteristics that are determined by the interplay of numerous genes cannot be restored by classical breeding.