Agricultural Research

President Bush presented the Congressional Gold Medal to agriculture scientist Norman Borlaug, whose work on high-yield, disease-resistant varieties of wheat is credited with starting the "Green Revolution" and alleviating starvation in India and Pakistan in the 1960s.

Manuel Jimenez walks through the steamy greenhouse, pushing past leaves of papaya, guava and litchi. "Do you smell that?" he asks, referring to the trees' fragrant blossoms. "That's a new smell to the Central Valley." Jimenez is nowhere near the tropics, yet the hot-weather plants he's cultivating at the University of California's Kearney Agricultural Center may soon mean that crops currently being imported can be bought fresh from California farmers.

Pity the poor raisin. It starts life as a middle-class grape and never attains the social status of its cousins: Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and others destined to become fine wine. But it may soon get a boost. University of California researchers taste-tested the sun-dried delights and asked consumers whether they preferred those dried traditionally on paper trays to those dried on the vine.

A team of scientists has found a way to boost the protein, zinc and iron content in wheat, an achievement that could help bring more nutritious food to many millions of people worldwide. Led by UC Davis researcher Jorge Dubcovsky, the team identified a gene in wild wheat that raises the grain's nutritional content. The gene became nonfunctional for unknown reasons during humankind's domestication of wheat.

Seeds from the cotton plant have been made safe to eat and could someday meet the protein needs of half a billion people a year, according to a new study. Normally, a chemical called gossypol makes the seeds inedible for humans, but researchers at Texas A&M University genetically modified the plant to produce seeds with little or no gossypol. The results were reported in Tuesday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It tastes pretty good," said lead researcher Keerti Rathore.

Potatoes originated from a single domestication, not from multiple domestications throughout the hemisphere as researchers previously believed, U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Comparing DNA markers from 261 wild and 98 cultivated strains of potatoes, the team concluded that the plant was first cultivated more than 7,000 years ago in southern Peru.

Monsanto Co. plans to invest $17.2 million in GeneTrace Systems Inc., a closely held gene research company, to speed Monsanto's development of genetically enhanced crops. The agreement gives Monsanto exclusive license to technologies that probe the genetic structure, or genome, of plants and animals. Monsanto initially plans to apply Menlo Park-based GeneTrace's method of determining a species' genetic makeup to crops such as corn and soybeans. The alliance comes as St.

Rewriting the history of agriculture in the Americas, researchers have discovered a surprisingly large farming village in northwestern Mexico that was inhabited at least 3,000 years ago--2,000 years earlier than any other site of such scale in the region--the scientists announced Thursday. The archeological evidence from the site, called Cerro Juanaquena, supports a new view of how humans first adopted farming as a way of life in Central and North America, experts said.

UC Berkeley finalized a $25-million deal with Novartis, a pairing that will give the Swiss drug maker first crack at certain scientific innovations developed by Berkeley faculty. The university, which dismissed criticism that it was selling out, will continue to own all patents arising from the research and collect royalties.

Government researchers are testing a fungus they believe will kill narcotics plants without harming other crops or animal life, a potential breakthrough aimed at cutting foreign production of illegal drugs headed for the United States. Congress has approved $23 million for further research into what are known as "mycoherbicides," soil-borne fungi capable of eradicating plants that provide the raw material for drugs.