Published 10 AM EST, Fri Mar 27, 2026 While modern cultivated rice is an annual that dies after a single harvest, its wild ancestors were hardy perennials. To bridge this gap, plant geneticists Han Bin and Wang Jiawei from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Center for Excellence in Molecular Plant Science teamed up to identify the genetic mechanism that allows ancient plants to survive the winter and regrow from their own roots. For generations, rice farming has followed an unchanging rhythm:...

Published 10AM EST, Mon Mar 23, 2026. Cannabis cultivation is no longer a monolithic industry. The era when virtually all commercial production occurred in climate-controlled indoor warehouses, and genetics were selected exclusively for those conditions, is ending. Today, legal cannabis is produced in sealed indoor facilities with 1,000+ PPFD LED lighting, in mixed-light greenhouses supplementing natural sunlight with blackout curtains and supplemental fixtures, and in open-field outdoor...

Published 10 AM EST, Fri Mar 20, 2026 An international project has uncovered millions of ancient DNA ‘switches’ that have been regulating plant genes for up to 300 million years – a discovery that could pave the way for more precise engineering of crop traits. A landmark study published in Science  has revealed that plant genomes contain millions of ancient regulatory DNA sequences, called conserved non-coding sequences (CNSs), that have been hiding in plain sight for decades. These sequences...