Blogs
Plant breeding innovations
Climate adaptation and mitigation
Over millennia, natural selection and humans have systematically adapted the plant species that provide food and other vital products, changing their physical and genetic makeup for enhanced productivity, nutrition and resilience. Plant breeders apply science to continue improving crop varieties, making them more productive and better adapted to climate extremes, insects, drought and diseases.
New direction in research for advancing gender-responsive maize breeding
Capacity development
Research on gender and maize looks to move beyond trait preferences at seed demand more broadly.
New research highlights opportunities to deepen engagement with private sector for increasing impact from cereal breeding
Capacity development
Contributions reflect the breadth of perspectives and expertise within CGIAR and beyond, calling for more demand-oriented variety development and seed delivery.
International scientists awarded grants supporting the HeDWIC-FFAR project to boost climate resilience in wheat
Climate adaptation and mitigation
Projects will focus on developing new breeding technologies, screening tools and novel traits to improve wheat in the face of heat and drought.
New CIMMYT maize hybrids available from Eastern Africa Breeding Program
Innovations
CIMMYT is offering a new set of improved maize hybrids to partners, to scale up production for farmers in the region.
Wheat titan honored posthumously by India
Climate adaptation and mitigation
Sanjaya Rajaram, former CIMMYT Wheat Program Director, has been recognized with the Padma Bhushan Award for his contributions to wheat improvement worldwide.
New publications: Genome-wide breeding to curtail wheat blast
Environmental health and biodiversity
Researchers evaluate the use of genomic selection in wheat breeding against deadly fungal disease.
How interactions among hidden enemies and drought effects grain yield and disease severity in bread wheat
Environmental health and biodiversity
CIMMYT scientists in Turkey investigated the effect of soil borne diseases individually and in combination with drought on morphological and physiological traits in wheat germplasm.
Climate change slows wheat breeding progress for yield and wide adaptation, new study finds
Climate adaptation and mitigation
Increasingly unpredictable weather poses challenges for breeding widely-adapted wheat lines, but stress tolerance breeding is boosting wheat’s hardiness under rising temperatures.
Fruits and vegetables are essential, but there are three reasons why it takes cereals to feed the world
Climate adaptation and mitigation
In addition to macronutrients and micronutrients, staple cereals are important sources of bioactive food components.
Meet The Indian Researcher Helping To Solve The Deadly Aflatoxin Puzzle
Nutrition, health and food security
Source: Forbes (29 Dec 2022)
Pooja Bhatnagar-Mathur, a Principal Scientist at CIMMYT, says aflatoxin, a toxin produced from soil fungus and found in groundnuts like peanuts, is a serious public health and food safety problem around the globe.
Agricultural research fights global food shocks
Nutrition, health and food security
Source: Newsweek (30 Dec 2021)
The best protection is actually reducing food system risks by building food system resilience against shocks.
New grafting technique could combat the disease threatening Cavendish bananas
Innovations
Scientists find novel way to combine two species of grass-like plants including banana, rice and wheat, that allows disease resistance and other beneficial characteristics to be added to the plants.
High-yielding staple crops improve health and prosperity in developing countries
Nutrition, health and food security
New research uncovers long-term impacts of Green Revolution era productivity, points out lessons for today.
State-of-the-art maize doubled haploid facility inaugurated in India
Innovations
The facility will offer maize doubled haploid production services to public and private sector partners in South Asia.