(Press-News.org) SOMERVILLE, TEXAS, March 27, 2024- The Pecan Breeding and Genetics Program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) recently completed a $2.5 million laboratory modernization to accelerate pecan breeding through innovations in genetics and plant disease research. A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held on March 26 to commemorate the completion of the project.
Pecan trees represent North America's native nut tree and a multimillion-dollar crop. These trees have been cultivated commercially for less than 150 years. It takes an average of 28 years from planting a new seedling to releasing a new pecan cultivar with traditional methods of pecan breeding. This is due to the long waiting period for pecan trees to start producing nuts, which takes up more than half of the time. With the new modernized laboratory, the Pecan Breeding and Genetics Program will now be able to incorporate genetic techniques into pecan breeding to accurately predict mature nut traits on young seedlings, saving up to a decade in the breeding process.
Breeding new pecan cultivars is a lengthy process with long waiting periods of 7-10 years before a pecan tree can produce nuts and long testing phases to evaluate potential cultivars. It is challenging to support pecan breeding efforts due to their high resource demands and extended timelines, which make it impractical for private or commercial entities and challenging for academic programs.
The event was hosted by USDA's ARS and the Texas Pecan Grower’s Association. ARS leaders, scientists, and members of the pecan industry organizations toured the new laboratory with now dedicated research spaces for plant genetics, microscopy, tissue culture, controlled-environment growth chambers, and plant disease research.
"Today marks the celebration of the opening of a new genetics and pathology laboratory," said Warren Chatwin, the Lead Scientist at the Pecan Breeding and Genetics Program in Somerville, Texas. "This facility will enable ARS' researchers here at Somerville to advance pecan breeding and support modern genetics and plant disease research, which hasn't been possible since this site was established in the 1980s."
"This event also highlights the significant impact of our stakeholders, the pecan industry organizations. They have unified their voice through the National Pecan Federation to express the need for increased quality, accuracy, and speed of pecan breeding, genetics, and plant disease research, leading to the establishment of this laboratory space. The success of our research is only possible through partnerships with stakeholders including the Texas Pecan Grower’s Association, which has provided decades of support and significant contributions, most recently through the National Pecan Federation," added Chatwin.
In addition, researchers will now be able to do controlled evaluations of promising breeding lines with different regional strains of pecan scab. Pecan scab, caused by the fungal pathogen Venturia effusa, is the most economically significant disease in the pecan industry and has high diversity across the geographic range of cultivated pecans. For the first time, the Pecan Breeding and Genetics Program will now be able to screen pecan scab cultures from all areas of the country in controlled environments to identify new sources of disease resistance and incorporate those unique samples into the breeding program. Researchers will also be able to do controlled evaluations for other significant and emerging pathogens of pecan, including the heavily quarantined international pathogen, Xylella fastidiosa.
The Pecan Breeding and Genetics program has released 32 pecan cultivars to the industry, with notable releases like 'Pawnee,' which moved the commercial harvest window forward to mid-September, 'Lakota,' which has high scab resistance, and 'Wichita,' a high-yielding cultivar that performs well in the West. USDA-ARS’ most recently released cultivars include 'Pueblo,' 'Seneca,' and 'Zuni,' which were patented in 2022.
The Agricultural Research Service is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief scientific in-house research agency. Daily, ARS focuses on solutions to agricultural problems affecting America. Each dollar invested in agricultural research results in $20 of economic impact.
###
USDA is an equal opportunity provider, employer, and lender.
END
Liver disease is a major health concern, causing millions of deaths worldwide each year. One serious complication is liver fibrosis, scarring that can lead to liver failure. There is currently no effective treatment, but new research suggests promise for exosomes, tiny sacs released by cells.
Non-parenchymal cells like hepatic stellate cells (HSCs), Kupffer cells (KCs), and liver sinusoidal endothelial cells (LSECs) play a key role in fibrosis development. These cells are involved in inflammation, scar formation, and tissue repair. Understanding ...
Flexible solar cells have many potential applications in aerospace and flexible electronics, but low energy conversion efficiency has limited their practical use. A new manufacturing method has increased the power efficiency of flexible solar cells made from perovskite, a class of compounds with a specific crystalline structure that facilitates the conversion of solar energy into electricity.
Current flexible perovskite solar cells (FPSCs) suffer from lower power conversion efficiency than ...
A new image from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration— which includes scientists from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA)— has uncovered strong and organized magnetic fields spiraling from the edge of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). Seen in polarized light for the first time, this new view of the monster lurking at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy has revealed a magnetic field structure strikingly similar to that of the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, suggesting that strong magnetic fields may be common to all black holes. This similarity also hints toward a hidden ...
People with specific genetic traits and those who have anxiety or depression have a significantly higher heart attack risk during periods of social or political stress than at other times, according to a new study being presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session. Researchers said the findings suggest opportunities to identify those at elevated risk and perhaps even prevent cardiac events.
Doctors have long noticed that heart attacks tend to spike around certain times, such as the winter holidays, but the reasons ...
Young adults who were prescribed stimulant medications for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were significantly more likely to develop cardiomyopathy (weakened heart muscle) compared with those who were not prescribed stimulants, in a study presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session.
The study found that people prescribed stimulants such as Adderall and Ritalin were 17% more likely to have cardiomyopathy at one year and 57% more likely to have cardiomyopathy at eight years compared with those who were not taking these medications. Cardiomyopathy involves structural ...
Sleeping fewer than seven hours is associated with a higher risk of developing high blood pressure over time, according to a study presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session.
While the association between sleep patterns and high blood pressure has been reported, evidence about the nature of this relationship has been inconsistent, according to researchers. The current analysis pools data from 16 studies conducted between January 2000 and May 2023, evaluating hypertension incidence in 1,044,035 people from six countries who did not have a prior history of high blood pressure over a median follow-up of five years (follow-up ranged from 2.4 to 18 years). ...
Many new drugs inhibit the processes that cancer cells need to divide rapidly. So as to inhibit the cancer as a whole. But cancer cells have all sorts of workarounds to get around that effect. As a result, the tumor becomes unresponsive to treatment.
That's why researcher Matheus dos Santos Dias is taking a completely different approach. He had to convince some colleagues before he could start working on this quite surprising idea. After all, you're not going to give cancer cells a boost, are you? "We're going against the prevailing view that you can only fight cancer cells by inhibiting them," he knows. "But we had strong evidence that it also works if you overstimulate ...
This unusual, subterranean mammal with extreme longevity shows genetic adaptations to low oxygen environments which could offer opportunities for advancing other areas of physiological and medical research in humans, including the development of novel therapeutic approaches.
New research from Queen Mary University of London led by Dr Dunja Aksentijevic in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry has revealed that that the genome of the naked mole-rat contains specific adaptations that allow them to survive in low-oxygen, and even no oxygen environments ...
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Understanding the structure of proteins is critical for demystifying their functions and developing drugs that target them. To that end, a team of researchers at Brown University has developed a way of using machine learning to rapidly predict multiple protein configurations to advance understanding of protein dynamics and functions.
A study describing the approach was published in Nature Communications on Wednesday, March 27.
The authors say the technique is accurate, fast, cost-effective and has the potential to revolutionize drug discovery ...
The researchers had previously identified a ‘weak spot’ in the brain, which is a specific network of higher-order regions that not only develop later during adolescence, but also show earlier degeneration in old age. They showed that this brain network is also particularly vulnerable to schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease.
In this new study, published in Nature Communications, they investigated the genetic and modifiable influences on these fragile brain regions by looking at the brain scans of 40,000 UK Biobank participants aged over 45.
The researchers examined 161 risk factors for dementia, and ranked their impact on this vulnerable ...
