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.

Growers often harvest tomatoes before they ripen in hopes of extending shelf life and avoiding crop loss. But that act of removing the fruit from the vine affects flavor. And storing tomatoes below certain temperatures also hurts quality and shelf life. 

New research published this month out of University of California, Davis, examined changes in tomatoes at the molecular level to better understand what happens during postharvest handling and cold storage. 

Dan Potter is the new chair of the Department of Plant Sciences, overseeing graduate and undergraduate programming, 60 faculty members, several emeriti professors and many greenhouses, labs and teaching facilities. 

Room 1026 in the Sciences Laboratory Building is not your ordinary space. It’s home to the UC Davis Center for Plant Diversity Herbarium and a world of 300,000 preserved plants, including lichens, algae, mosses and other specimens.

An interdisciplinary team of scientists and researchers from University of California, Davis, are studying agave plants in the Golden State as farmers are turning to the crop as a potential drought-tolerant option of the future.

The research is centered on studying agave genetics, virus susceptibility, pest control, soil management and crop productivity, said Ron Runnebaum, a viticulture and enology professor who is leading the team of researchers at the newly formed UC Davis Agave Center.  

Invasive plants can stay dormant for decades or even centuries after they have been introduced into an environment before rapidly expanding and wreaking ecological havoc, according to a new study led by the University of California, Davis.

Springtime brings native wildflowers to bloom in the Santa Monica Mountains, northwest of Los Angeles. These beauties provide food for insects, maintain healthy soil and filter water seeping into the ground — in addition to offering breathtaking displays of color. 

They’re also good at surviving after wildfire, having adapted to it through millennia. But new research shows wildflowers that usually would burst back after a blaze and a good rain are losing out to the long-standing, double threat of city smog and nonnative weeds.

Researchers have sequenced the whitebark pine genome, presenting new opportunities to help the threatened, high-altitude tree endure environmental challenges.

To manage johnsongrass, a noxious weed that crowds out cotton and sickens horses, farmers have tried herbicides, burning and hand-pulling. Now, researchers at University of California, Davis, have developed a more high-tech weapon against the invasive weed: artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Sustainable orchards, regional pest control and organic agriculture education will advance with three grants awarded to faculty in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences. The $5 million in funding for the projects comes through the United States Department of Agriculture.