Seeds Content

Grant to Expand Self-Cloning Crop Technology for Indian Farmers

Andy Fell — January 27, 2026 - 9:40am

Venkatesan Sundaresan, a Distinguished Professor of plant biology and plant sciences at the University of California, Davis, has been awarded a Gates Foundation grant to develop self-cloning crops for Indian farmers.

Rice Plants That Reproduce as Clones From Seed

Andy Fell — December 12, 2018 - 1:21pm

Plant biologists at the University of California, Davis, have discovered a way to make crop plants replicate through seeds as clones. The discovery, long sought by plant breeders and geneticists, could make it easier to propagate high-yielding, disease-resistant or climate-tolerant crops and make them available to the world’s farmers.

The researchers published their findings Dec. 12 in the journal Nature.

Native Wildflowers Bank on Seeds Underground to Endure Drought

Katherine E Kerlin — March 01, 2018 - 4:15pm

Native wildflowers were surprisingly resilient during California’s most recent drought, even more so than exotic grasses. To see this resilience, 51�ԹϺ�� Davis researchers of a new study had to look underground to the seed bank. Native wildflowers increased the seeds they stored underground by 201 percent during the drought.