The African Orphan Crops Consortium, or AOCC, launched with a lofty goal in 2013: to help local scientists develop more nutritious, productive and resilient varieties of commonly used but rarely studied crops to improve public health.

Growing wheat in drought conditions may be easier in the future, thanks to new genetic research out of the University of California, Davis.

An international team of scientists found that the right number of copies of a specific group of genes can stimulate longer root growth, enabling wheat plants to pull water from deeper supplies. The resulting plants have more biomass and produce higher grain yield, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.