Biotech News

New genetically modified canola varieties could be commercially available in Australia by March next year, just shy of a decade since Roundup Ready was first grown in WA in 2010. TruFlex technology has been designed to eventually phase out Bayer’s Roundup Ready counterpart, which Bayer Crop Science regional business manager Hugh Trenorden said was because…

Harvest Brings Calyxt One Step Closer to Commercializing First High Fiber Wheat Product for Consumers MINNEAPOLIS & ST. PAUL, Minn.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Calyxt, Inc. (CLXT) (NASDAQ:CLXT), a consumer-centric, food- and agriculture-focused company, today announced that the Company has completed the inaugural harvest of its high-fiber wheat product, the world’s first gene-edited, consumer-focused wheat product. The high-fiber…

Gene editing can speed up plant domestication, taming wild vines, bushes and grasses and turning them into new crops. Editing just two genes in ground cherries (Physalis pruinosa) produced plants that yielded more and bigger fruit, researchers report October 1 in Nature Plants. Those edits mimic changes that occurred in tomato plants during domestication, bringing…

Today, virtually everything we eat is produced from seeds that have been genetically altered in some manner. If we’re going to feed the growing population without further destroying the environment, then we’re going to have to get comfortable with the idea of eating modified crops, Pamela Ronald, Director of the Institute for Food and Agricultural…

Kenyan policy makers have promised to fast-track Bt cotton growing in the country. This is after participating in a study tour of India’s Bt cotton program from September 17-22, 2018, together with other senior government officials from various regulatory and cotton value chain players. India’s cotton sub-sector actors led by Dr. P. G. Patil, Director…

In a conference call during the Global Climate Action Summit held in San Francisco on September 12-14, 2018, Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said that the power of innovation should extend to climate change. Gates believes that innovation will be key to confronting climate change, helping those affected by it,…

China has experienced large and sustained reductions in pesticide use as a result of adopting GMO cotton, according to the largest-ever scientific study on the impacts of Bt cotton use in that country. The study, lead-authored by Wei Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute, examines cotton pest severity and insecticide use at a county scale…

As we face our global food security challenges, are gene-editing techniques replacing the decades-old “genetic modification” as the go-to tool? Peter Beetham, a plant scientist and CEO of the agricultural biotech firm Cibus, writes in Scientific American about how this “new revolution in plant breeding” is ushering in a new era of agriculture innovation: As…

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) just released its 2018 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report. Two alarming facts immediately stand out. First, for the third straight year …. the number of undernourished people in the world has increased …. 821 million people are undernourished; about 50 million more…

One of the world’s leading agricultural research institutions wants to be sure there is enough safe, sustainably produced healthy food available for the world’s growing population. Increasing potential yields is the focus of research at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Dr. Arthur Mol is Vice Chancellor and Vice Chairman of Agricultural research. “I think I’m…