How ethanol helps plants survive heat and drought
In February 2022, I wrote about plant geneticists in Japan working to help crops survive drought conditions. A new study was released this month in Plant Molecular Biology by a team at RIKEN, a Japanese research institute. The study identified the genetic mechanisms that allowed ethanol to make plants more heat and drought tolerant. When plants were pre-treated with ethanol, they turned on a stress-marker gene. This led to a molecular change called “unfolded protein response.” Because scientists understand how ethanol works, they can target treatments more effectively.
Catching green crabs when they’re edible
In April 2021, I wrote about efforts to find culinary uses for invasive green crabs. A new technique is being used in Maine to sort out which of the crabs are edible. Green crabs are small, so it’s too much effort to pick the meat out of their hard shells. That means they are best eaten in their softshell phase. The problem is that it’s hard to find softshell crabs among the many hardshell crabs. So people catch a huge number of green crabs and put them into mesh wells in a tray to keep them from eating each other. The trays stay in the water until the crabs molt. This makes fishing for softshell green crabs a “numbers game.” Only three or four percent of the crabs in a catch are ready to molt. But at least now there’s a good sorting method.