A student from my BOT331 Plant Physiology class pointed me to this AP news and video. I am sharing the same with you with additional writeup.

This is a new book edited by Matthew Jenks and Andrew Wood, published by Wiley-Blackwell. It covers a range of topics such as water stress, poor quality soil and temperature extremes, the genetic and biological mechanisms involved in stress tolerance, and discusses future crop improvement.

Check this out....2009 Gallery

Here's a beautiful talk on crop genetic diversity and its preservation by Cary Fowler. Enjoy !

The Jaiswal Lab is collaborating as working group member of the iPlant's Genotype to Phenotype (iPG2P) grand challenge project. We are part of the working group on Modelling Tools and Data Integration.

The Plant Ontology project (www.plantontology.org), was awarded the NSF's Division of Biological Infrastructure grant in February, 2009. The project is a collaboration between the labs of Pankaj Jaiswal (Oregon State University) who is also a lead investigator and the Co-PIs Maria Gandolfo-Nixon (Cornell University) and Dennis Stevenson (New York Botanical Garden).

A publication by Schnable et al. reported today in the journal Science 2009, Vol. 326. no. 5956, pp. 1112-1115 the draft sequence of the maize B73 genome. 2.3Gb genome size is predicted to have over 32,000 genes. The genome data is released from the project website www.maizesequence.org.

Today's Nature issue reports the sequence of the soybean genome by Schmutz et al. Soybean is one of the most important legumes which went through two genome duplications about 59 and 13 million years ago, leading to multiple copies of nearly 75% of the genes, followed by gene diversification, loss and chromosome rearrangements. The 1.1Gb, 20 chromosome genome of Glycine max var.