Recent funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture is being used to further understanding of cotton plant development and purchase a laser microdissection system.

The Milpa Agricultural Placemaking Project will include developing a multilingual oral history archive on food and agriculture in North Texas and a new UNT seed library, which will produce and distribute free vegetable plant seedlings to the public.

The award will support the investigation of a fungal endophyte that grows naturally on corn.

This first-of-its-kind study will establish a new concept for producing valuable fungal products and may ultimately lead to medicines that can be delivered in plant seeds, eliminating downstream processing.

Researchers in Richard Dixon’s lab have been studying C-lignin, a type of fiber in the seed coats of certain exotic plants, since his team member Fang Chen discovered it in 2011. Helping plants produce C-lignin could lead to crops that are useful for creating an economically feasible plant-based jet fuel, among other applications.

Kent Chapman and Mina Aziz, researchers at UNT’s BioDiscovery Institute, have received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to look at how plants talk to their neighbors -- specifically the role of fatty acid amide hydrolases, which exist broadly in plants, in communication between plants and microorganisms.

A team of researchers in the BioDiscovery Institute are working to reduce damage to cotton plants from aphids and Fusarium fungal infections after having received a National Institute of Food and Agriculture grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Lately, Phil Samson has been pouring over scientific research papers from scholars in UNT’s College of Science. Though the studio art graduate student in the College of Visual Arts and Design has no background in science, he’s found the research to be quite an artistic muse.

Kent Chapman, Regents Professor of biological sciences and director of UNT’s BioDiscovery Institute, was recently awarded the 2021 Fellow of ASPB Award by the American Society of Plant Biologists.

A UNT College of Science professor has moved researchers across the globe closer to understanding how to make condensed tannins in forage crops such as alfalfa, not only making food more nutritious for animals, but potentially improving food supply and limiting global warming.

A UNT researcher is working to knock out a crop fungus that could improve food availability for future generations. Jyoti Shah, chair of the biological sciences department, and his team are working to identify genes in the wheat plant that may make it susceptible to Fusarium head blight. Reducing activity of these genes makes the wheat plant more resistant to the disease.

Kent Chapman, Regents Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, and Ashley Cannon, a former UNT postdoctoral scholar and research molecular biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, are illuminating how heterotrimeric G-Proteins are involved in N-Acylethanolamine (NAE) signaling in plants — findings that could have major implications for the future of agriculture.

New discoveries in the laboratory of Richard Dixon could help develop biomass crops better suited for processing into products such as aviation fuel, plastics and other industrial products.

Jantana Keereetaweep (’15), an assistant biochemist in the biology department at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, won the Paul K. Stumpf Award, given to early career scientists, from the International Symposium on Plant Lipids.

A new study co-led by Rajeev Azad, associate professor of bioinformatics, looks at how plants respond to different types of stress at the same time — something that previously has not been studied in depth. A better understanding could help develop more resilient plants, which is much needed as climate change continues to accelerate.

Biological Sciences Professor Kent Chapman has spent 27 years as an educator and researcher exploring the intricacies of plant biochemistry, specifically lipids. Jantana Keereetaweep spent seven years researching with Chapman while earning her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UNT.

Researchers at UNT in conjunction with scientists at the Huazhong Agricultural University in China, recently developed a complete map for the genome of the jojoba tree.

Distinguished Research Professor of biological sciences Richard Dixon and an international team of scientists have found that these thousand-year-old trees aren’t programmed to die.