Researchers have identified a set of genes that help control early drought response in a popular global crop...

The dynamics of local climates make development of agricultural strategies challenging. Yield improvement has progressed slowly, especially in drought-prone regions where annual crop production suffers from episodic aridity...

Effective implementation of technology that facilitates accurate and high-throughput screening of thousands of field-grown lines is critical for accelerating crop improvement and breeding strategies for higher yield and disease tolerance...

Many important crops are members of the Poaceae family, which develop root systems characterized by a high degree of root initiation from the belowground basal nodes of the shoot, termed the crown...

Spirodela polyrhiza is a fast-growing aquatic monocot with highly reduced morphology, genome size and number of protein-coding genes. Considering these biological features of Spirodela and its basal position in the monocot lineage, understanding its genome architecture could shed light on plant adaptation and genome evolution...

Black raspberry (Rubus occidentalis) is an important specialty fruit crop in the U.S. Pacific Northwest that can hybridize with the globally commercialized red raspberry (R. idaeus). Here we report a 243 Mb draft genome of black raspberry that will serve as a useful reference...

A report on the 10 th plant genome meeting entitled ‘Plant genomes and biotechnology: from genes to networks’, held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 2–5 December, 2015.

Plant genomes, and eukaryotic genomes in general, are typically repetitive, polyploid and heterozygous, which complicates genome assembly1. The short read lengths of early Sanger and current next-generation sequencing platforms hinder assembly through complex repeat regions, and many draft and reference genomes are fragmented, lacking skewed GC and repetitive intergenic sequences, which are gaining importance due to projects like the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE)2. Here we report the whole-genome sequencing and assembly of the desiccation-tolerant grass Oropetium thomaeum..