MRI texture analysis as means for addressing rehydration and milk diffusion in cereals

Cereals microstructure is one of the primary quality attributes of cereals. Cereals rehydration and milk diffusion depends on such microstructure and thus, the crispiness and the texture, which will make it more palatable for the final consumer. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a very powerful tomographic tool since acquisition parameter leads to a wide possibility for identifying textures, structures and liquids mobility. It is suited for noninvasive imaging of water and fats. Rehydration and diffusion cereals processes were measured by MRI at different times and using two different kinds of milk, varying their fat level. Several images were obtained. A combination of textural analysis (based on the analysis of histograms) and segmentation methods (in order to understand the rehydration level of each variety of cereals) were performed. According to the rehydration level, no advisable clustering behaviour was found. Nevertheless, some differences were noticeable between the coating, the type of milk and the variety of cereals

The role of the deep roots of perennial cereal kernza in a drying climate

Agricultural lands under annual crop production are prone to degradation and as the climate becomes increasingly variable researchers and farmers alike are looking at resilient crops such as perennial grains to produce food regeneratively. Perennial grain crops support a myriad of ecosystem services, such as reducing nitrate leaching, erosion control and increasing carbon storage. With their deep roots, perennial grain crops like Kernza (Intermediate wheatgrass) could furthermore avoid surface stresses such as droughts. This has however not been investigated before. Therefore we set out to determine the depth of root water uptake (RWU) of this crop and compared the contribution of deep roots before and after anthesis and between a year of adequate water supply (2019) and a year of drought (2018). Natural abundances of 2H and 18O were determined, but were unable to be used properly due to mistakes during sampling. A tracer application showed limited uptake from 2m depth. Furthermore, soil water content measurements were used to inverse model the soil hydraulic parameters under the Kernza crop in Hydrus 1D. Modelling RWU showed that the deep roots (>1m) were responsible for almost 50% of the RWU between anthesis and harvest in 2018, whereas they only contributed between 10% and 15% throughout 2019 and most of 2018 outside of the indicated period. Kernza may thus be an important addition to a farmers toolbox in areas with periodic droughts, but only if grain yields are increased to be competitive with annual cereals or when used as a multifunctional crop for grain, forage and other ecosystem services

Appropriate technology for sustainable food security:

CONTENTS: Brief 1. Overview / Per Pinstrup-Andersen Brief 2. Farmer-Based Agro-Ecological Technology / Jules Pretty Brief 3. Conventional Research-Based Technology / Prabhu Pingali Brief 4. Modern Biotechnology / Calestous Juma Brief 5. Modern Technology for African Agriculture / Jennifer Thomson Brief 6. Information and Communcations Technologies / Nuimuddin Chowdhury Brief 7. GIS, GPS, and Remote Sensing / Uwe Deichmann and Stanley Wood Brief 8. Alternative Energy Sources / R. K. Pachauri and Pooja Mehrotra Brief 9. Food Irradiation / Morton SatinTechnology., Technological innovations., Food security., Sustainability.,

'Self-help which ennobles a nation': development, citizenship, and the obligations of eating in India's austerity years

In the years immediately following independence, India's political leadership, assisted by a network of civic organizations, sought to transform what, how, and how much Indians ate. These campaigns, this article argues, embodied a broader post-colonial project to reimagine the terms of citizenship and development in a new nation facing enduring scarcity. Drawing upon wartime antecedent, global ideologies of population and land management, and an ethos of austerity imbued with the power to actualize economic self-reliance, the new state urged its citizens to give up rice and wheat, whose imports sapped the nation of the foreign currency needed for industrial development. In place of these staples, India's new citizens were asked to adopt ‘substitute’ and ‘subsidiary’ foods—including bananas, groundnuts, tapioca, yams, beets, and carrots—and give up a meal or more each week to conserve India's scant grain reserves. And as Indian planners awaited the possibility of fundamental agricultural advance and agrarian reform, they looked to food technology and the promise of ‘artificial rice’ as a means of making up for India's perennial food deficit. India's women, as anchors of the household—and therefore, the nation—were tasked with facilitating these dietary transformations, and were saddled with the blame when these modernist projects failed. Unable to marshal the resources needed to undertake fundamental agricultural reform, India's planners placed greater faith in their ability to exercise authority over certain aspects of Indian citizenship itself, tying the remaking of practices and sentiments to the reconstruction of a self-reliant national economy.Accepted manuscrip

Insights into wheat science: a bibliometric review using unsupervised machine learning techniques

Wheat (Triticum spp.) has been one of the most important cereal crops, serving as a source of protein and energy in the human diet. It remains a vital component of global food security, with extensive scientific literature dedicated to its study, although the large volume of literature often hinders global analysis. In this study, different unsupervised machine learning techniques, such as K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP), text mining analyses, including word embeddings and statistical word analysis, and graph analysis methodologies, were applied to gain a deeper understanding of the wheat literature. The proposed bibliometric analysis was conducted and integrated with the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to identify major wheat research trends in the PubMed literature. This analysis examined the evolution of these trends over time, evaluated the geographical distribution, impact, and research domains, and assessed author collaboration networks and the evolving relevance of different countries. Research on disease resistance, genetic modification, and dietary impact demonstrates a consistent increase in output, while interest in topics related to overcoming salt stress and enhancing animal feed appears to be diminishing. Interestingly, research on wheat germ agglutinin saw a surge in interest during the late 2000s, stabilizing thereafter. These trends underscore the dynamic nature of wheat research, driven by evolving priorities and technological advancements, particularly in genetics and omics tools. Moreover, the increasing significance of China in wheat research, including its size, impact, and networking, alongside longstanding leaders such as the United States, signals a shifting landscape in global wheat research.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia | Ref. UIDP/50006/2020Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia | Ref. UIDB/50006/2020Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED431C2022/03Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED431G2019/06Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED481D-2023-003Universidade de Vigo/CISU

Assessing genetic diversity of wheat genotypes from different origins by SNP markers

Genetic diversity was investigated in a set of eleven hexaploid wheat genotypes originated from CIMMYT, Turkey in comparison with some modern European mostly originated from KWS wheat breeding program using 24 wheat SNP markers. The lowest and highest genetic dissimilarities were observed between genotypes Opus and LDO 330/06, KWS Salix and LDO 330/06, respectively. Based on cluster analysis, 38 wheat genotypes were grouped in two main clusters. Although the grouping pattern is very origin heterogeneous in each group, the grouping pattern of some genotypes appeared to be associated, to some extent. Principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) was used as an alternative way of visualizing the genotypic data. The first, second and third principal components explained 17.79%, 14.39% and 12.24% of the variation, respectively. This study can also be an indicator for breeders to evolve genotypes with diverse genetic background to achieve sustainability in wheat production, to get favorable heterotic combinations in a wheat improvement program

BGI-RIS: An integrated information resource and comparative analysis workbench for rice genomics

Rice is a major food staple for the world's population and serves as a model species in cereal genome research. The Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) has long been devoting itself to sequencing, information analysis and biological research of the rice and other crop genomes. In order to facilitate the application of the rice genomic information and to provide a foundation for functional and evolutionary studies of other important cereal crops, we implemented our Rice Information System (BGI-RIS), the most up-to-date integrated information resource as well as a workbench for comparative genomic analysis. In addition to comprehensive data from Oryza sativa L. ssp. indica sequenced by BGI, BGI-RIS also hosts carefully curated genome information from Oryza sativa L. ssp. japonica and EST sequences available from other cereal crops. In this resource, sequence contigs of indica (93-11) have been further assembled into Mbp-sized scaffolds and anchored onto the rice chromosomes referenced to physical/genetic markers, cDNAs and BAC-end sequences. We have annotated the rice genomes for gene content, repetitive elements, gene duplications (tandem and segmental) and single nucleotide polymorphisms between rice subspecies. Designed as a basic platform, BGI-RIS presents the sequenced genomes and related information in systematic and graphical ways for the convenience of in-depth comparative studie

A smart precision plant protection technique based upon information and communication technologies for field crops in India for wide-area implementation

A smart and modern technique based upon information and communication technology (ICT) was conceptualized and developed. It facilitates pests’ information collection timely, its fast processing and planning with quickly implementable options - to manage biotic stresses on field crops on large-scale area basis. The pest mapping in field crops (paddy, cotton) in different agro-ecosystems of India was done based on using Geographic Information System (GIS) Arc-info package. To fast track the decision-making, its mass communication to farming community, an exhaustive e-database of plant protection measures as recommended by different agencies in the country for different field crops viz., cereal crops, oilseed crops, pulses, fibre crops, sugar crops, fodder crops etc. - had also been prepared and digitized. The outcome and benefits of this technique had been analyzed and findings - that demonstrate the benefits of using the proposed architecture are also detailed