Wednesday, August 21, 2019
Penn State scientists are helping crops survive drought and poor soils by redesigning their roots, from external architecture to internal anatomy.
A free public lecture titled "Roots of the Second Green Revolution" will take place at 11 a.m. on Feb. 25 in Room 100 of the Thomas Building on Penn State's University Park campus. The speaker will be Jonathan Lynch, who is a professor of plant nutrition in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State.
A new partnership between a professor in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences and one of the world's leading philanthropists is aimed at easing Africa's hunger problems long-term.
Two thousand years ago, a Chinese healer might have mashed the thick tuberous root of the Mongolian snake gourd, steeped it in fresh water, sieved out the grounds, and then sponged the liquor on a tumor, mixed it with other medicines to treat diabetes, or prescribed it as a potion against pregnancy.
A plant cell wall is like a sweater. Sort of. Dan Cosgrove plucks at his own sweater and laughs. "It's like a fabric " He abandons the analogy with a shrug. "A plant cell wall is made of interlinking fibers, that's clear." It's a rigid wall, responsible for both the size and the shape of the cell. And yet it has to expand to let the plant grow. In the tip of a root or shoot, the new-made cells are very small—only 5 microns in diameter.
The wire worm is an orange-tan insect recognizable by its considerable mouth parts. A small curveless pest, it lays its eggs in the soil; its larvae swim around dirt particles until they bump into a root. Then they attack, gnawing away at the finest fibers, leaving the plant vulnerable to fungi and bacteria.
Black beans, navy beans, kidney beans, pinto beans, snap, green, string, wax, butter beans - all, to a breeder, are varieties of the common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris. It's a staple crop for small and subsistence farmers the world around, yet it grows with varying success. The average yield in some developing countries—500 kilograms per hectare, or less—is often a mere 10 percent of the textbook yield.
"There's not enough fertilizer," explains Penn State plant nutritionist Jonathan Lynch. "Phosphorous, especially, is limiting."
The article in our March issue about Civil War historian Gary Gallagher included the story of my great-grandfather William H. Stubbs.
Readers searching their Civil War roots have asked how I gathered the Stubbs background.
