News

China’s small-scale rice farmers hold the key to both feeding their nation and reducing nitrogen pollution by 2030, benefiting soil, water and air quality and slowing climate change. A research team, including Cameron Pittelkow of the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, has published a strategy for how to do that, in the March 2 edition of Nature.

Growing wheat in drought conditions may be easier in the future, thanks to new genetic research out of the University of California, Davis.

An international team of scientists found that the right number of copies of a specific group of genes can stimulate longer root growth, enabling wheat plants to pull water from deeper supplies. The resulting plants have more biomass and produce higher grain yield, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers from the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences attended the 39th biennial Rice Technical Working Group conference, held Feb. 20-23 in Hot Springs, Ark. The conference is hosted by the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.

Nearly 40 high school students dropped iodine into test tubes during a special class recently at UC Davis. They wanted to see if certain genes affecting the starch in potatoes had been passed on to the plants being tested in the little tubes.

Ten UC Davis students and postdoctoral researchers recently attended the annual Vegetable and Flower Conference of the American Seed Trade Association. They enjoyed the opportunity to showcase their research during poster sessions, hear speakers and network with people in the industry. More than 800 seed professionals from 33 countries attended.

Among those attending from the Department of Plant Sciences were:

Maria Alejandra Ponce de Leon

Farmers from rural Panama are learning a more sustainable way to graze their cattle, and now are sharing that knowledge with other farmers who want to learn, too. But, they view the relationship as an informal exchange, rather than a teacher-student relationship  ̶  and agricultural extension programs can learn from that view, graduate student Marina Vergara found.

G. David Miller, founder and director of the UC Davis Global Fellowships in Agricultural Development program and a collaborator in the Horticulture Innovation Lab, died Dec. 1, 2022, in Davis. A memorial service was held Dec. 4 at Congregation Bet Haverim in Davis.

Miller was a lecturer within the international agricultural development track in the Department of Plant Sciences, and faculty adviser in the IAD Graduate Group. “For many years, he was the heart of the IAD programs, teaching, hunting up fellowship and scholarship money, and more,” said Amanda Crump.

Top plant scientists from across Africa have just completed the first phase of a ground-breaking course in gene editing for crops: It aims to harness a cutting-edge breeding tool to adapt African agriculture to growing populations and the threat of climate change.

“The talent’s there. We just need to enable it,” said Allen Van Deynze, of the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences. “We’re enabling it with training, with tools and with support for their labs. That’s part of our program.”

Students, staff and faculty in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences come from a wide range of cultures, from all over the world. To celebrate the strength we find in our diversity, the department for several years has placed an evergreen tree in the lobby of the Plant and Environmental Sciences building amid the year-end holidays, and invites everyone to bring a symbol of their own heritage to hang on the tree.

Maeli Melotto, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences specializing in plant immunity, has been recognized as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.

From Chilean tidepools to the High Sierra, 12 UC Davis graduate students traveled the world during the summer of 2022 in search of answers to ecology’s most pressing questions.

Emanuel “Manny” Epstein, a long-term resident of Davis and a distinguished professor in the former department of soils and plant nutrition at the University of California, Davis, died on Dec. 4, 2022, in Davis. 

The nonprofit organization Pacific Horticulture has released a new video describing research to develop irrigation recommendations for landscape plants, the science behind the process, and early ideas for mindful gardeners and landscapers. It features UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences horticulturalist Lorence Oki, the lead investigator on the project.

Good news: Roses can be a part of your water-efficient landscape. Lorence Oki, UC Cooperative Extension environmental horticulture specialist in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, identified rose cultivars that remain aesthetically pleasing with little water.

Imtiyaz Khanday, an assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, is co-leading an international team that has propagated a commercial hybrid rice strain as a clone through seeds with 95 percent efficiency. The method that led to this breakthrough could lower the cost of hybrid rice seed, making high-yielding, disease-resistant rice strains available to low-income farmers worldwide.