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By Serina Taluja, Texas A&M University 

Products derived from the cotton plant show up in many items that people use daily, including blue jeans, bedsheets, paper, candles and peanut butter. In the United States cotton is a US$7 billion annual crop grown in 17 states from Virginia to Southern California. Today, however, it’s at risk.

Cotton plants from fields in India, China and the U.S. – the world’s top three producers – all grow, flower and produce cotton fiber very similarly. That’s because they are genetically very similar.

This can be a good thing, since breeders select the best-performing plants and cross-breed them to produce better cotton every generation. If one variety produces the best-quality fiber that sells for the best price, growers will plant that type exclusively. But after many years of this cycle, cultivated cotton all starts to look the same: high-yielding and easy for farmers to harvest using machines, but wildly underprepared to fight disease, drought or insect-borne pathogens.

Breeding alone may not be enough to combat the low genetic diversity of the cultivated cotton genome, since breeding works with what exists, and what exists all looks the same. And genetic modification may not be a realistic option for creating cotton that is useful for farmers, because getting engineered crops approved is expensive and heavily regulated. My research focuses on possible solutions that lie at the intersection between these tools.

How to retool cotton

In a perfect world, scientists could change just a few key components of the cotton genome to make plants more resilient to stresses such as pests, bacteria, fungi and water limitations. And the plants would still produce high-quality cotton fiber.

This strategy isn’t new. Some 88% of the cotton grown in the U.S. has been genetically modified to resist caterpillar pests, which are expensive and hard to manage with traditional insecticides. But as new problems emerge, new solutions will be required that will demand more complex changes to the genome.

Recent advances in plant tissue culture and regeneration make it possible to develop a whole new plant from a few cells. Scientists can use good genes from other organisms to replace the defective ones in cotton, yielding cotton plants with all the resistance genes and all the agriculturally valuable genes.

The problem is that getting regulatory approval for a genetically modified crop to go to market is a long process, often eight to 10 years. And it’s usually expensive.

But genetic modification isn’t the only option. Researchers today have access to a gigantic amount of data about all living things. Scientists have sequenced the entire genomes of numerous organisms and have annotated many of these genomes to show where the genes and regulatory sequences are within them. Various sequence comparison tools allow scientists to line up one gene or genome against another and quickly determine where all the differences are.

Plants have very large genomes with lots of repetitive sequences, which makes them very challenging to unpack. However, a team of researchers changed the game for cotton genetics in 2020 by releasing five updated and annotated genomes – two from cultivated species and three from wild species.

Having the wild genomes assembled makes it possible to start using their valuable genes to try to improve cultivated varieties of cotton by breeding them together and looking for those genes in the offspring. This approach combines traditional plant breeding with detailed insights into cotton’s genome.

We now know which genes we need to make cultivated cotton more resistant to disease and drought. And we also know where to avoid making changes to important agricultural genes.

Analyzing cotton hybrids

These genomes also make it possible to develop new screening tools to characterize interspecific hybrids – the offspring of two cotton plants from different species. Before this information was available, there were two primary forms of hybrid characterization. Both were based on single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs – differences between species in a single base pair, the individual building blocks that make up DNA. Even plants with small genomes have millions of base pairs.

SNPs work well if you know exactly where they are located in the genome, if there are no mutations that change the SNPs, and if there are plenty of them. While cotton has SNPs that have been identified and verified in specific regions of the genome, they are few and far between. So characterizing cotton hybrids by focusing exclusively on SNPs would result in incomplete information about those hybrids’ genetic composition.

These new genomes open the door for developing sequencing-based screening of hybrids, which is something I’ve incorporated into my work. In this approach, scientists still use SNPs as a starting point, but they can also sequence the surrounding DNA. This helps to fill in gaps and sometimes discover new, previously undocumented SNPs.

Sequence-based screening helps scientists make more informed and robust maps of the genomes of hybrids. Determining which parts of the genome are from which parent can give breeders a better idea of which plants to cross together to subsequently create better, more productive cotton in every generation.

What cotton needs to thrive

As the world’s population rises toward a projected 9.8 billion by 2050, demand for all agricultural products will also rise. But making cotton plants more productive is not the only goal of genetic improvement.

Climate change is raising average global temperatures, and some important cotton-producing regions like the U.S. Southwest are becoming drier. Cotton is already a crop accustomed to heat – our research plots can thrive in temperatures as high as 102 degrees Fahrenheit (39 C) – but one cotton plant requires about 10 gallons (38 liters) of water over the course of a four-month growing season to achieve its maximum yield potential.

Researchers have started to search for cultivated cotton that can tolerate drought at the seedling stage, and also in hybrid lines and genetically modified lines. Scientists are optimistic that they can develop plants that have higher drought resilience. Along with many other cotton breeders around the world, my goal is to create more sustainable and genetically diverse cotton so that this essential crop can thrive in a changing world.

About the Author:

Serina Taluja, Ph.D. Candidate in Genetics and Genomics, Texas A&M University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By Christopher Decker, University of Nebraska Omaha 

The U.S. economy added more jobs than expected in June, signaling the labor market remains strong even as the Federal Reserve tries to weaken it to tame inflation. The July 8, 2022, jobs report also showed the unemployment rate remained at a 70-year low of 3.6%.

Does this mean the U.S. will avoid a Fed-induced recession?

We asked Christopher Decker, an economist at the University of Nebraska Omaha, to explain the numbers and what they mean for the Fed and the economy.

What did we learn in the June jobs report?

The report showed that the economy added 372,000 jobs in June. While this figure is down from a revised increase of 384,000 in May and is much lower than other recent gains, it’s still very good by historical standards.

Gains were across the board with all key sectors adding to the total increase in nonfarm payrolls.

Generally speaking, people continue to be pulled back into the labor force, largely by higher wages as well as the rising cost of living, which makes it harder for families to go without a steady income stream. For example, the number of people employed part time for economic reasons declined by 707,000 in June. This seems to suggest that there is increased desire for, and an ability to secure, a higher-paying, more stable full-time job.

The female labor force participation rate declined slightly to 56.8% – which is over a percentage point below what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. This figure is worth watching closely and may be because women are hesitant to reenter the workforce or are struggling to find child care.

So does this mean there won’t be a recession?

That’s the big question.

June gains were strong, but the job market is clearly cooling off. And there’s evidence the broader economy is weakening – two signs the Fed’s recent aggressive efforts to reduce inflation by choking off growth are working.

The housing market is a case in point. Average 30-year mortgage rates shot up to a 13-year high of 5.8% in June after the Fed lifted rates by 0.75 percentage point, which has had a chilling effect on home purchases.

And now we’re seeing the effect in residential construction jobs, which declined for the first time in a year as higher borrowing costs dampened demand. This is a sector I like to look at closely to help determine if what the Fed is doing is taking root in the economy.

In addition, in May, retail sales unexpectedly declined and a forward-looking economic index fell for a second straight month – both signals of a slowing economy.

Can a recession be avoided?

It may seem strange that the U.S. central bank is trying to actually hurt economic growth, but that just shows how important policymakers think it is to fight soaring inflation, which is currently the highest in over 40 years.

The problem of rising prices is of major concern to the Fed, as it is a key component of its “dual mandate” to control inflation and maintain healthy job growth.

Runaway inflation is cancerous to any economy. When price growth outpaces that of income, consumers have to curb spending. Production declines and people lose their jobs. The Fed’s only means of reducing inflation is to curb demand by reducing the supply of money and increasing interest rates. This, however, also curbs economic growth. So the Fed is trying to manage a “soft landing” – which means reducing inflation without hurting growth so much that it causes a recession.

There are some early signs the Fed is succeeding. The economy is slowing, though June jobs show underlying strength in the labor market. At the same time, inflation appears to be easing as well, in part thanks to falling global demand for oil. U.S. gasoline prices – the most visible price consumers see every single day – has come down in recent weeks after peaking at a record US$5 in June.

But executing a soft landing is a delicate dance for the Fed. The central bank can reduce demand for things via interest rates, but it can’t do much about supply. The primary reason energy and food costs have been skyrocketing in recent months is not high demand but the war in Ukraine.

Sanctions on Russia, the world’s second-largest crude oil exporter, and reduced shipments from Russia to parts of Europe have disrupted energy markets and driven up global oil prices.

And Ukraine, a key producer of food and other agricultural goods, is struggling to export corn, wheat and other products because Russia is blockading key ports.

Continuing shortages of energy and food mean inflation could stay elevated no matter what the Fed does. And that could result in the Fed’s having to lift interest rates a lot and cut growth to the bone to have a meaningful effect on rising prices.

This makes the Fed’s current dance the most delicate it has attempted since the 1980s, and it must be executed flawlessly for it to succeed. The June jobs report is good news, but the economy isn’t out of the woods yet. Data in August and September will be crucial to knowing in which direction the economy is heading – toward recession or not.

About the Author:

Christopher Decker, Professor of Economics, University of Nebraska Omaha

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By Craig Mark, Kyoritsu Women’s University 

Japan is reeling from the assassination of its longest-serving former prime minister, Shinzo Abe. He was campaigning for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party for the Upper House elections due on Sunday, in the city of Nara in western Japan, when he was shot from behind with an apparently home-made sawn-off shotgun.

The alleged assailant, reportedly a 42-year old local man, was arrested at the scene. There is no known motive at this time, but there are reports the suspect is a former member of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces.

Abe was seen lying bleeding on the ground, before being taken by helicopter to a nearby hospital where he was later pronounced dead.

Political violence, and gun violence in general, is extremely rare in postwar Japan, so this incident has deeply shocked the Japanese public. Gun ownership is tightly regulated, and mostly restricted to registered hunters.

There have been occasional shootings by organised crime groups, typically targeting each other, but Japan has consistently had low rates of violent crime.

Far-right groups have been responsible for a few attacks on politicians in the postwar period: in 1990, the then mayor of Nagasaki, Hitoshi Motoshima, was shot and wounded; and in 1960 Inejirō Asanuma, leader of the opposition Japan Socialist Party, was stabbed and murdered.

In the pre-war era, democratic politicians found themselves subject to frequent attacks and intimidation by militarists. Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was murdered by Imperial Navy officers in an attempted coup on May 15 1932.

Abe’s political legacy

Abe, 67, is the grandson of former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, and was a scion of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, which has been in government for most of the postwar era. His first stint as prime minister lasted roughly a year, from 2006 to 2007, before he resigned due to ulcerative colitis following his party’s poor performance in the 2007 Upper House elections.

He made a remarkable political comeback in 2012, reclaiming the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party and winning the general election that December. Abe won national elections in 2014 and 2017, entrenching his power over the weak and divided opposition parties.

He introduced his signature economic policy, “Abenomics”, based on massive deficit spending, quantitative easing and attempts at structural reform. However, twice raising the consumption tax undermined these attempts to lift the Japanese economy out of its decades-long stagnation.

A member of the ultranationalist lobby group Nippon Kaigi, Abe carried out a far-reaching transformation of Japanese foreign and defence policy, reinterpreting the pacifist Article 9 of the Constitution, to allow greater overseas deployment of the Self-Defense Forces.

His government increased defence spending annually, and in 2015 the Diet (the Japanese parliament) passed controversial security bills that allowed the Self-Defense Forces to participate in collective defence operations with allied countries, particularly the United States but potentially also Australia, India and the United Kingdom.

Abe originally raised the concept of the Quad security partnership between Japan, the US, Australia and India, and in 2016 formalised the phrase “free and open Indo-Pacific” as Japan’s main foreign policy goal to preserve the US-led rules-based liberal order in international relations.

His longevity in office saw him become one of the most experienced world leaders, and he used his foreign policy experience to steadily manage the US alliance, handling the erratic President Donald Trump through “golf diplomacy”.

Abe was able to maintain fairly stable relations with neighbouring China, Japan’s largest trading partner, despite the long-running territorial dispute over the Senkaku Islands (claimed as the Daioyus by China). Relations with South Korea remained poor, however, due to disputes over historical issues stemming from Japan’s colonial rule of Korea.

A member of the largest conservative faction in the Liberal Democratic Party, Abe’s dominance over the party and Japanese politics began to erode when the ruling coalition lost its two-thirds majority in the 2019 Upper House election. A long-running series of nepotism scandals also dented his public standing; investigations by public prosecutors led to charges against some of Abe’s associates and political staff, although Abe himself was never indicted.

While Japan coped fairly well with the COVID pandemic, largely due to cooperation with recommended health measures by the public, Abe’s government came under increasing criticism for a series of inept pandemic responses as the economy went into a sharp recession. Abe’s ill-health returned, and he resigned in August 2020, replaced the following month by his former chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga.

Abe remained in the Diet, and last year became the leader of the Hosoda faction, after backing his former foreign minister and current prime minister Fumio Kishida in the race to become the party’s leader.

Situation still developing

In response to this tragedy, the Liberal Democratic Party has requested that its candidates cease campaigning, and opposition party politicians have also announced they will suspend campaign activities.

Kishida has returned to the prime minister’s office to monitor the situation, but at the time of writing, there has been no announcement about voting arrangements for the Upper House election, due to proceed on Sunday July 10.

In pre-election polling, the Liberal Democratic Party was expected to win a comfortable majority, in partnership with its junior partner, the Komeito party.

The 2022 Upper House election will now remain under the shadow of one of the most disturbing events in Japan’s modern political history.

About the Author:

Craig Mark, Professor, Faculty of International Studies, Kyoritsu Women’s University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.