Stay updated with breaking news from Luke Dunning. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
The nominees are officially in – who will YOU be voting for?
The nominees are officially in – who will YOU be voting for?
© Shutterstock / Diyana Dimitrova Sign up for our daily newsletter featuring the top stories from The Press and Journal. Thank you for signing up to The Press and Journal newsletter. Something went wrong - please try again later. Sign Up A process of gene borrowing could help boost crop productivity and make crops more resistant to climate change, claim scientists. Research, led by the University of Sheffield, has shown grasses can incorporate DNA from other species into their genomes through a process known as lateral gene transfer. Scientists say this process, which essentially allo...
E-Mail Grass crops are able to bend the rules of evolution by borrowing genes from their neighbours, giving them a competitive advantage, a new study has revealed. Research, led by the University of Sheffield, is the first to show that grasses can incorporate DNA from other species into their genomes through a process known as lateral gene transfer. The stolen genetic secrets give them an evolutionary advantage by allowing them to grow faster, bigger or stronger and adapt to new environments quicker. These findings could inform future work to create crops that are more resistant to the ef...
Little did biologist Gregor Mendel know that his experiments with sweet peas in a monastery garden in Brno, Czech Republic, would lay the foundations for our understanding of modern genetics and inheritance. His work in the 19th century helped scientists to establish that parents pass their genetic information onto their offspring, and in turn, they pass it on to theirs. Indeed, this premise forms the basis of much of our understanding of evolution. But we now know that this process is not sacrosanct and some of our most widely grown crops may be fiddling the system by supplementing their ge...