The African Orphan Crops Consortium, or AOCC, launched with a lofty goal in 2013: to help local scientists develop more nutritious, productive and resilient varieties of commonly used but rarely studied crops to improve public health.

The Department of Plant Sciences welcomes Imtiyaz Khanday as an assistant professor of plant reproductive biology and as an assistant agronomist for the Agricultural Experiment Station in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the University of California, Davis.

DAVIS, Calif. — Innovators at the University of California, Davis, are receiving financial support to advance their research and technologies toward commercialization.

Researchers accelerate crop breeding to keep pace with changing climate

Variable weather is creating extreme challenges for crop breeding in California. How do you develop crops that will thrive under certain conditions when you can no longer predict what those conditions will be?

Arabica coffee genome sequenced.
The first public genome sequence for Coffea arabica, the species responsible for more than 70 percent of global coffee production, was released today by researchers at the University of California, Davis.

Funding for the sequencing was provided by Suntory group, an international food and beverage company based in Tokyo.

Carrots connection to orange, nutrition, and dinosaurs.

Sometimes, the evolutionary history of a species can be found in a fossil record. Other times, DNA and genetic fingerprints replace rocks and imprints.

That is the case for the carrot, the richest crop source of vitamin A in the American diet, whose full genetic code has been deciphered by a team led by the University of Wisconsin–Madison in collaboration with the University of California, Davis.