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July 14, 2010
·
BASF,
Monsanto expand joint efforts
· Plant breathing mechanism discovered
· Just how does broccoli fight cancer?
· Idaho potato acreage down in 2010
· New biofuels system goes mobile
BASF, Monsanto expand joint efforts
(FoodOnline.com) – The world's largest plant biotechnology collaboration just got larger. Recently, BASF and Monsanto announced an expansion of their joint efforts to develop higher-yielding and stress-tolerant crops to include a fifth crop, wheat. In addition, the companies are increasing their investments in the collaboration, reflecting the strong leads and commercial prospects in the collaboration's early work. The collaboration that was established in 2007 includes the following crops: corn, soy, cotton and canola. In the original collaboration, the two companies dedicated a joint budget of potentially $1.5B; the new agreement will result in a potential additional investment of more than $1B by the companies over the life of the collaboration.
"Our yield and stress collaboration with BASF already has brought forth so many promising leads, the first of which we'll see on farm in coming years with our first-generation drought-tolerant corn," said Robb Fraley, Monsanto's chief technology officer. "When I look at the promise Monsanto's unmatched pipeline holds, and the potential for the discovery work in progress at both our companies, today's announcement is excellent news for farmers around the world."
"BASF Plant Science is dedicated to discover genes for maximizing yield in crops that will be brought to farmers through partnerships. The collaboration with Monsanto was not only the first agreement that we entered, it also represents our most significant partnership, covering several large row crops," said Peter Eckes, President of BASF Plant Science. "The expansion of our partnership reflects the fit between the two companies. The yield increases that we have achieved together in the field so far give us confidence that we can do more in our collaboration crops, which now include wheat."
The terms of the original collaboration continue, with each company maintaining independent trait discovery programs, nominating from those programs specific candidate genes to advance for accelerated joint development. Projects will be jointly funded through each phase of development, and products that emerge from the joint development will be commercialized by Monsanto. The profits associated with commercialized products will be shared, with Monsanto receiving 60 percent of net profits and BASF receiving 40 percent of net profits.
With regard to the addition of wheat to the collaboration, the partners will initially focus on developing biotech products for the North American and Australian markets. The first enhanced yielding wheat product is expected to reach the market after 2020. This product will be followed by successive generations of higher-yielding wheat varieties.
Wheat is the world's second largest commodity crop after
corn and demand is expected to grow as millions of people in developing
countries such as
According to some estimates, the world's booming demand for food, feed, fibers and fuel will require a doubling of the world's agricultural production. BASF and Monsanto are strongly committed to providing farmers with plant biotechnology solutions that allow them to increase output while remaining good stewards of their land. After three years of jointly developing products that, in field testing, have shown significant yield increases in corn, soy, cotton and canola, the companies are confident that they can also help farmers meet the growing long term demand for wheat.
Around 2012, the companies expect to introduce the world's first genetically modified drought-tolerant corn, pending regulatory approvals. Drought-tolerant corn, the first product emerging from the companies' joint pipeline, is designed to provide farmers yield stability during periods of low rainfall by mitigating the effects of water scarcity on corn plants. Field trials for drought-tolerant corn conducted in the Western Great Plains met or exceeded the target yield enhancement – an increase of roughly 7 to 10 bushels per acre over the average yield of 70 to 130 bushels per acre in some of the key drought-prone areas in the United States.
About Monsanto Company
Monsanto Company is a leading global provider of technology-based solutions and agricultural products that improve farm productivity and food quality. Monsanto remains focused on enabling both small-holder and large-scale farmers to produce more from their land while conserving more of our world's natural resources such as water and energy. For more information, visit www.monsanto.com.
About BASF Plant Science
BASF Plant Science – a BASF group company - is one of the world's leading companies providing innovative plant biotechnology solutions for agriculture. Today, about 700 employees are helping farmers meet the growing demand for improved agricultural productivity and healthier nutrition for humans and animals. BASF Plant Science has developed an unparalleled gene discovery platform focusing on yield and quality traits in crops such as corn, soybean and rice. Jointly with leading partners in the seed industry BASF Plant Science is commercializing its products. Current projects include higher yielding row crops, nutritionally-enhanced corn for animal feed and higher content of Omega-3's in oil crops for preventing cardiovascular diseases. For more information, visit www.basf.com/plantscience.
For more information visit www.basf.com.
Plant breathing mechanism discovered
(Carnegie
Institution via ScienceDaily.com) – A tiny, little-understood plant pore
has enormous implications for weather forecasting, climate change, agriculture,
hydrology, and more. A study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution's
Department of Global Ecology, with colleagues from the Research Center Jülich in
The research is published the week of July 12, 2010, in the on-line early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Stomata are lip-shaped pores surrounded by a pair of guard cells that control the size of the opening. The size of the pores regulates the inflow of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) needed for photosynthesis and the outflow of water vapor to the atmosphere -- transpiration.
Transpiration cools and humidifies the atmosphere over vegetation, moderating the climate and increasing precipitation. Stomata influence the rate at which plants can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, which affects the productivity of plants and the concentration of atmospheric CO2. Understanding stoma is important for climate change research.
Current climate change models use descriptions of stomatal response based on statistical analysis of studies conducted with a few plant species. This approach is not based on a solid understanding of the mechanism of stomatal regulation and provides a poor basis for extrapolating to environmental conditions.
"Scientists have been studying stomata for at least 300 years. It's amazing that we have not had good grasp about the regulatory mechanisms that control how much stomata open or close in response to a constantly changing environment," remarked co-author Joseph Berry of Carnegie.
For the first time, these researchers looked at how the exchange of energy and water vapor at the outer surface of the leaf are linked to processes inside the leaf. They found that the energy from radiation absorbed by pigments and water inside the leaf influences how the stomata control water levels.
"In this study we illuminated a sunflower leaf with an
incandescent light that was filtered to include or exclude near infrared light
(NIR >700 nm)," remarked
The scientists replicated the experiment with five other plant species and over a range of carbon dioxide levels and temperatures. The researchers also developed a model based on energy balance of the leaf system to simulate responses. Results from the model mimicked the results from the lab.
It has been assumed that the guard cells forming the pore have sophisticated sensory and information processing systems making use of light and other environmental cues to adjust the pores. The breakthrough of this research is that it is the first to demonstrate that regulation of the rate of water loss by stomata is linked to physical processes that occur deep within the leaf.
"This means that the current model for what drives
stomata to change their size has to change," remarked co-author Roland Pieruschka, a Marie Curie Fellow from the European Union at
the Carnegie Institution (currently at the Research Center Jülich
in
"For a long time researchers have thought that heat from the sun, which is absorbed by pigments, moves from cell to cell until it gets to the cavities beneath the stomata where evaporation has been thought to take place. This probably happens to some degree, but the results presented here are more consistent with our hypothesis that much of this heat is transferred through air spaces inside the leaf that are saturated with water vapor. This key difference is pivotal for understanding how Otto Lange's seminal work in the 1970s, on responses of stomata to humidity, can be fit into a leaf-scale concept of stomatal regulation."
Just how does broccoli fight cancer?
Broccoli has been hailed as a 'superfood' after several studies suggested it had anti-cancer properties.
Now scientists have identified a chemical in the vegetable which interact with genes involved in cancer development.
The chemical called sulforaphane seems to counteract a fault with the gene called PTEN which is involved in prostate cancer.
The gene normally stops cancer from developing but in certain cells it is missing and this is when the disease can begin. However sulforaphane seems to dampen the effect of these cells that are missing PTEN and prevent them from triggering cancer growth.
The study was conducted by a team at the
The discovery could lead to new treatments for the disease which affects 36,000 men a year.
The findings are published in the journal BioMed Central, Molecular Cancer.
Idaho
(AP
via KTVB.com)
The U.S. Department of Agriculture says
The United Potato Growers of Idaho say 292,571 acres were planted, the lowest number of acres since 1965.
New biofuels system goes mobile
(Purdue
University via PHYSORG.com) – Chemical engineers at
"What's important is that you can process all kinds of available biomass -- wood chips, switch grass, corn stover, rice husks, wheat straw …," said Rakesh Agrawal, the Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering.
The approach sidesteps a fundamental economic hurdle in biofuels: Transporting biomass is expensive because of its bulk volume, whereas liquid fuel from biomass is far more economical to transport, he said.
"Material like corn stover and wood chips has low energy density," Agrawal said. "It makes more sense to process biomass into liquid fuel with a mobile platform and then take this fuel to a central refinery for further processing before using it in internal combustion engines."
The new method, called fast-hydropyrolysis-hydrodeoxygenation, works by adding hydrogen into the biomass-processing reactor. The hydrogen for the mobile plants would be derived from natural gas or the biomass itself. However, Agrawal envisions the future use of solar power to produce the hydrogen by splitting water, making the new technology entirely renewable.
The method, which has the shortened moniker of H2Bioil -- pronounced H Two Bio Oil -- has been studied extensively through modeling, and experiments are under way at Purdue to validate the concept.
Findings are detailed in a research paper appearing online in June in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. The paper was written by former chemical engineering doctoral student Navneet R. Singh, Agrawal, chemical engineering professor Fabio H. Ribeiro and W. Nicholas Delgass, the Maxine Spencer Nichols Professor of Chemical Engineering.
The article can be accessed online at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es100316z
Agrawal, Ribeiro and Delgass are developing reactors and catalysts to experimentally demonstrate the concept. Another paper by Agrawal and Singh addressing various biofuels processes, including fast-hydropyrolysis-hydrodeoxygenation, also appeared in June in the Annual Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. This paper can be accessed online at http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/eprint/gmGjKYuY7iQexh8Dd7XT/full/10.1146/annurev-chembioeng-073009-100955
The Environmental Science & Technology paper outlines the process, showing how a portion of the biomass is used as a source of hydrogen to convert the remaining biomass to liquid fuel.
"Another major thrust of this research is to provide guidelines on the potential liquid-fuel yield from various self-contained processes and augmented processes, where part of the energy comes from non-biomass sources such as solar energy and fossil fuel such as natural gas," said Singh, who is now a researcher working at Bayer CropScience.
The new method would produce about twice as much biofuel as current technologies when hydrogen is derived from natural gas and 1.5 times the liquid fuel when hydrogen is derived from a portion of the biomass itself.
Biomass along with hydrogen will be fed into a high-pressure reactor and subjected to extremely fast heating, rising to as hot as 500 degrees Celsius, or more than 900 degrees Fahrenheit in less than a second. The hydrogen containing gas is to be produced by "reforming" natural gas, with the hot exhaust directly fed into the biomass reactor.
"The biomass will break down into smaller molecules in the presence of hot hydrogen and suitable catalysts," Agrawal said. "The reaction products will then be subsequently condensed into liquid oil for eventual use as fuel. The uncondensed light gases such as methane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen and carbon dioxide, are separated and recycled back to the biomass reactor and the reformer."
Purdue has filed a patent application on the method.
The general concept of combining biomass and carbon-free hydrogen to increase the liquid fuel yield has been pioneered at Purdue. The researchers previously invented an approach called a "hybrid hydrogen-carbon process," or H2CAR.
Both H2CAR and H2Bioil use additional hydrogen to boost the liquid-fuel yield. However, H2Bioil is more economical and mobile than H2CAR, Singh said.
"It requires less hydrogen, making it more economical," he said. "It is also less capital intensive than conventional processes and can be built on a smaller scale, which is one of the prerequisites for the conversion of the low-energy density biomass to liquid fuel. So H2Bioil offers a solution for the interim time period, when crude oil prices might be higher but natural gas and biomass to supply hydrogen to the H2Bioil process might be economically competitive."
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