Rice is a staple food crop for more than half the world’s population, but most farmers don’t grow high-yielding varieties because the seeds are too expensive. Researchers from the University of California’s Davis and Berkeley campuses have identified a potential solution: activating two genes in rice egg cells that trigger their development into embryos without the need for fertilization, which would efficiently create high-yielding clonal strains of rice and other crops.

Venkatesan Sundaresan, Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Plant Biology and Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis, has been awarded a 2024 Wolf Prize in Agriculture for key discoveries on plant developmental biology of relevance to crop improvement.

An international team has succeeded in propagating a commercial hybrid rice strain as a clone through seeds with 95 percent efficiency. This could lower the cost of hybrid rice seed, making high-yielding, disease resistant rice strains available to low-income farmers worldwide. The work was published Dec. 27 in Nature Communications. 

A simple roadside weed may hold the key to understanding and predicting DNA mutation, according to new research from University of California, Davis, and the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany. 

The findings, published today in the journal Nature, radically change our understanding of evolution and could one day help researchers breed better crops or even help humans fight cancer.

Two UC Davis students—Abelina Jackson and Saarah Kuzay—are among those who have been selected as 2020 Borlaug Scholars by the National Association of Plant Breeders (NAPB).

The Borlaug Scholars Program seeks to strengthen the plant breeding profession by helping support attendance of future leaders at the NAPB annual meeting. However, this year’s annual meeting will be held in a virtual format because of COVID-19 concerns. Each student will receive free registration for the conference and a membership in NAPB.