Personalized nutrition (PN) has gained popularity in recent years as a customized approach to health outcomes. PN combines biomedical, genetic, and lifestyle data to provide individualized recommendations, and a plethora of companies offer various forms of health screenings, apps, programs, products, and diet advice.
The physical structure of corn plants — including the angle of leaves bending from the stem and the number of pollen-laden tassel branches — makes a big difference for yield. Compact plants can be planted closer together, adding up to more ears per acre. But compact corn didn’t happen by accident; years of hybrid breeding did that. Now, two new genome-based studies are making it possible to precisely adjust corn architecture to meet future demands.
Nanozymes are synthetic materials that have enzyme-like catalytic properties, and they are broadly used for biomedical purposes, such as disease diagnostics. However, inorganic nanozymes are generally toxic, expensive, and complicated to produce, making them unsuitable for the agricultural and food industries.
How do wildlife researchers know when an endangered population is sick? They can detect infectious microbes in animal waste, but the presence of a microbe doesn’t always equate to impactful symptomatic infections.
When Allison Kokal, a junior, first applied to the College of ACES at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she was searching for what she thought would be her second-choice major. That was until she saw Plant Biotechnology on the list of options. It was then that Kokal knew she had found her true calling.
Weeds like Palmer amaranth make farming harder and less profitable, and available herbicides are becoming less effective. For scientists to find solutions, they first need to know their enemy.
Researchers at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) and the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) have developed a sustainable process that has redefined and expanded oilcane’s product portfolio, adding value to this feedstock.
In a traditional biorefinery, sugarcane is used as a feedstock to produce bioethanol fuel. Sugarcane stalks are crushed to extract their juice, and that juice goes on to be processed into fuel. Meanwhile, the dry fibrous material that remains after crushing, called bagasse, is burned.
As a perennial and drought-resistant plant that is indigenous to the region, the Kalahari melon is an effective and ancient cover crop for traditional grain/sorghum/maize crops and will play a key role for food security in the era of climate change.
Using funds provided by the ACES International Graduate Grant, I initiated a study about Kalahari melon oil extraction in Namibia.