Tell me Mercury isn’t checking his cellphone to see whether anyone has sent him an SMS? One of the great things about Washington DC is just how much free art is available. (I think I’ve blogged about this before, but I’m blowed if I can find the post.) Anyway, that means one can pop in and out of g...
Last time, I looked at research on the benefits of harvesting low-input high-diversity prairie plants as a feedstock for bioenergy. This week, practicalities and policies.
Biomass can be burned directly, alongside coal or some other fuel, as a source of energy for heat or power. But unless you’r...
Last year at the Annual General Meeting of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research I don’t believe I heard the word “biomass” once. This year, along with its kissing cousin “climate change,” it was a cold sore on everybody’s lips. For whatever reason—and you can think of as many as I can—these are ideas whose time seems to have come. And by a strange coincidence, two fascinating papers in this week’s Science (as ever hard to access in full for non-subscribers) tackle biomass and bio-energy head on. (They’ve had quite some coverage, but I thought it worthwhile adding a slightly different angle.)
Scientists in the US and Israel have discovered a gene that can boost the protein, iron and zinc levels of modern wheats. It is present in wild emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum ssp. dicoccoides) but somewhere along the way to modern bread and pasta wheats became non-functional. Inserting the gene into modern wheat -- by normal breeding, they hasten to say, not genetic engineering -- raises the protein and minerals by about 10 to 15 per cent. Modern wheat does have genes that are similar to the “wild” gene, which has been called Gpc-B1 for its effect on grain protein content. Blocking the activity of those genes in modern wheats causes the plants to live longer, but depresses the amounts of protein, iron and zinc even further.
