Guardian angels for seeds
2010-11-11
(Press-News.org) The seeds that you plant in your backyard garden next spring — and farmers sow in their fields — may have a guardian angel that helps them sprout, stay healthy, and grow to yield bountiful harvests. It's a thin coating of chemicals termed a "seed treatment" that can encourage seeds to germinate earlier in the season, resist insects and diseases, and convey other advantages. These new seed defenders are the topic of an article in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine.
C&EN Senior Business Editor Melody Voith describes a boom in developing and producing chemical coatings that act as built-in pesticides to protect seeds from destructive insects, fungi, and other pests. Seed treatments for protecting cereal, corn, and beet crops already are common in agriculture and are growing in popularity in an effort to safeguard genetically modified seeds, which are expensive. The worldwide seed treatment market now generates $1.5 billion yearly and is growing at 10 to 12 percent annually, according to the article.
Voith notes that scientists are also developing a new generation of seed treatments that use microorganisms to protect plants from pests and promote earlier, more vigorous growth. One company, for instance, produces a bacterial coating that kills disease-causing fungi while secreting a substance that promotes plant growth. Unlike chemical treatments, which last for weeks, these biologic seed defenders last for months.
INFORMATION: ARTICLE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Seed Defenders"
This story is available at
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/business/88/8845bus1.html
END
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2010-11-11
CHICAGO --- We all know that living a stressful lifestyle can take its toll, making us age faster and making us more susceptible to the cold going around the office.
The same appears to be true of neurons in the brain. According to a new Northwestern Medicine study published Nov. 10 in the journal Nature, dopamine-releasing neurons in a region of the brain called the substantia nigra lead a lifestyle that requires lots of energy, creating stress that could lead to the neurons' premature death. Their death causes Parkinson's disease.
"Why this small group of neurons ...
2010-11-11
Fear is an adaptive response, essential to the survival of many species. This behavioural adaptation may be innate but can also be a consequence of conditioning, during the course of which an animal learns that a particular stimulus precedes an unpleasant event. There is a large amount of data indicating that the amygdala, a particular structure in the brain, is strongly involved during the learning of "conditioned" fear. However, until now, the underlying neuronal circuits have remained largely unknown. Now, research involving several Swiss and German teams and a researcher ...
2010-11-11
(Garrison, NY) Organizations that seek to provide health care, food, and other services to people held in drug detention centers in developing countries often face ethical dilemmas: Are they doing more good than harm? Are they helping detainees or legitimizing a corrupt system and ultimately building its capacity to detain and abuse more people?
Such dilemmas are explored in an article coauthored by Nancy Berlinger and Michael Gusmano, research scholars at The Hastings Center, along with Roxanne Saucier and Daniel Wolfe of the Open Society Institute, and Nicholas Thomson ...
2010-11-11
DALLAS – Nov. 11, 2010 – New findings by researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center suggest that serotonin – a brain chemical known to help regulate emotion, mood and sleep – might also have anti-diabetic properties.
The findings, appearing online this week in Nature Neuroscience, also offer a potential explanation for why individuals prescribed certain kinds of anti-psychotic drugs that affect serotonin signaling sometimes have problems with their metabolism, including weight gain and the development of diabetes.
"In this paper, we describe a circuit in the brain ...
2010-11-11
The November/December issue of the International Journal of Plant Sciences explores the current state of our knowledge of natural selection in plants.
"Plants were crucially important to Darwin's development of the theory of natural selection (six of his books were on plants)," writes Jeffrey Conner, a biologist at Michigan State University and guest editor of the issue. "Plants are still crucially important to the study of natural selection in the field."
The issue features reviews and original research articles that explore multiple aspects of this complex topic. ...
2010-11-11
PASADENA, Calif.—The eerie music in the movie theater swells; the roller coaster crests and begins its descent; something goes bump in the night. Suddenly, you're scared: your heart thumps, your stomach clenches, your throat tightens, your muscles freeze you in place. But fear doesn't come from your heart, your stomach, your throat, or your muscles. Fear begins in your brain, and it is there—specifically in an almond-shaped structure called the amygdala—that it is controlled, processed, and let out of the gate to kick off the rest of the fear response.
In this week's ...
2010-11-11
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — When a foreign object such as a catheter enters the body, bacteria may not only invade it but also organize into a slick coating — a biofilm — that is highly resistant to antibiotics. Like sophisticated organized crime rings, biofilms cannot be defeated by a basic approach of conventional means. Instead doctors and drug developers need sophisticated new intelligence that reveals the key players in the network and how they operate. New research led by biologists at Brown University provides exactly that dossier on some key proteins in ...
2010-11-11
MADISON, WI November 8, 2010 -- Conversion of sorghum grass to ethanol has increased with the interest in renewable fuel sources. Researchers at Iowa State University examined 12 varieties of sorghum grass grown in single and double cropping systems. The experiment was designed to test the efficiency of double cropping sorghum grass to increase its yield for biofuel production.
The author of the report, Ben Goff, found that using sorghum from a single-cropping system was more effective for the production of ethanol. Since most of the ethanol currently produced in the ...
2010-11-11
CORVALLIS, Ore. – There may be many similarities between the importance of large predators in marine and terrestrial environments, researchers concluded in a recent study, which examined the interactions between wolves and elk in the United States, as well as sharks and dugongs in Australia.
In each case, the major predators help control the populations of their prey, scientists said. But through what's been called the "ecology of fear" they also affect the behavior of the prey, with ripple impacts on other aspects of the ecosystem and an ecological significance that ...
2010-11-11
AURORA, Colo. (Nov. 10, 2010) – New research released today takes a look at birth outcomes and maternal smoking, building urgency for more states and cities to join the nationwide smoke-free trend that has accelerated in recent years. According to the new data, strong smoke-free policies can improve fetal outcomes by significantly reducing the prevalence of maternal smoking.
The study, which was presented today at the American Public Health Association's 138th Annual Meeting & Exposition in Denver, compared maternal smoking prevalence in one Colorado city where a smoking ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Guardian angels for seeds
