As of late, many uncertainties have been sprouting up in corn production. Researchers and producers have been wondering if precision agricultural technologies can improve crop yield and quality or reduce their variability.

Researchers uncover how the molecular machinery functions that mediates cell division in developing egg cells

South Asia has witnessed a rapid growth in rice and wheat production that has defined the Green Revolution there. During the past 30 years, the Indian Punjab has transformed its agriculture through new technology that provides for high-producing plants, increased fertilization, and irrigation.

A new study has shown that increasing numbers of couples are travelling abroad for preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), and that the main reason for this cross-border movement is the legal position in patients’ countries of origin.

The first baby to be created from an egg that had been matured in the laboratory, frozen, thawed and then fertilised, has been born in Canada. Three other women are pregnant by the same process. The research was presented to the 23rd annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology today (Monday 2 July).

Human sperm cells travel up to 6 meters in their transit from testes to penis, and most of that journey occurs in the epididymis, a tightly coiled tube that primes the cells for their ultimate task: fertilization. In a paper released this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Illinois report that they have discovered a gene – and related mechanism – essential to the embryonic development of the epididymis.

Most research on sexual conflict ignores the fact that the fitness pay-offs of mating may change drastically over a short timescale, for example over a single day. In fowl, the probability that an insemination results in fertilization is lowest around midday when oviposition occurs and highest in the evening, indicating that both males and females should maximize copulation efficiency by mating in the evening.

In a survey of more than one thousand infertility patients with frozen embryos, 60 percent of patients report that they are likely to donate their embryos to stem cell research, a level of donation that could result in roughly 2000 to 3000 new embryonic stem cell lines. Researchers from Duke University and Johns Hopkins University report the startling findings in the July 6, 2007 issue of Science.

Researchers have discovered a new protein involved in the fertilization of an egg by sperm, providing useful information for scientists developing reproductive technologies and for better understanding reproductive disorders.

Brown University biologists have, for the first time, observed a critical step in membrane fusion, the process that allows for fertilization, viral infection and nerve cell communication. The research, reported in Developmental Cell, sheds new light on this essential biological process.

Muscle fibers are large cells that contain many nuclei. They begin, like all animal cells, as naive embryonic cells. These cells differentiate, producing intermediate cells called myoblasts that are now destined to become muscle. New myoblasts then seek out other myoblasts, and when they find each other, they stick together like best friends.