Winter 2023
Food for a changing climate
Washington State University researchers adapt livestock and crops such as potatoes, apples, and wheat to feed a more crowded, warming planet. » More ...
Wheat
Winter 2023
What’s a bushel? Wheat research, facts, and history
Spring 2019
Giving rust a rest
Ubiquitous in wheat-growing regions, stripe rust spores can ride the wind for miles upon miles and, when conditions are right, it grows quickly, sucking water and nutrients out of the leaves and crippling wheat’s ability to produce healthy seeds. Washington State University wheat breeders research and develop new wheat varieties resistant to rust. » More ...
Fall 2018
Modernist Bread
By Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya
The Cooking Lab: 2017
For millennia, bread baking has been more craft than science. Even the current trend in artisan bread rejects much of what modern science has wrought: the advances of manufactured yeast, dough conditioners, added preservatives and the overall industrialization of wheat and bread production.
“The bread zeitgeist is about being ancient, primitive, natural, and pretty much anything but modern,” writes Nathan Myhrvold in his recent 2,642-page … » More …
Winter 2017
Briefly noted
Untold Stories: Forty Years of Field Research on Root Diseases of Wheat
By R. James Cook
American Phytopathological Society Press: 2017
Throughout the compelling stories and personal experiences shared by Jim Cook, a retired research plant pathologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service and emeritus professor of plant pathology at Washington State University, readers can find practical crop management techniques and other beneficial information that can be used in the field and the lab. Cook also chronicles many of his insightful experiences—and imparts his philosophy, wisdom, and practical guidance.
Living on the Edge: Adventures of a Hunter
By Shannon L. … » More …
Spring 2016
Green for all seasons
The quirks of Pullman weather can make gardening tough. It was only a few years ago that it snowed in June. But in the greenhouses scattered around campus, researchers and students can keep growing and studying plants in adverse weather. Even visitors to campus can enjoy vegetables, holiday poinsettias, and flowers long before they’ll thrive on the Palouse.
The latest addition to the greenhouses on campus, a two-story building that resembles a glass apartment complex with glowing sodium lights, sits behind the Lewis Alumni Centre. The research facility allows scientists to raise up to three generations of wheat, barley, and other grains every year, says … » More …
Fall 2015
How do you make the best chocolate chip cookies in the universe?
Dr. Universe visits the wheat quality lab to learn about the properties of flour. » More ...
Summer 2015
Billions to be served
Scientists and chefs at the WSU Mount Vernon Research Center’s Bread Lab study local grains and traditional baking techniques to make a better loaf.
» More ...
Winter 2013
Of mice, men, and wheat
Although varieties abound, wheat can be more simply considered as either hard or soft, hardness being a measure of the kernel’s resistance to crushing.
All wheat originally was soft-kerneled. And there is, so far as we know, no evolutionary advantage to either the hard or the soft trait.
But clearly, somewhere along the line, that section of genetic material that determines the hardness of the kernel underwent a random mutation. Specifically, the Puroindoline a or Puroindoline b genes, which have long been a focus of Craig Morris’s research.
In order to understand the hard/soft divide, Morris, a plant physiologist, suggests that we consider the … » More …
Winter 2011
Wheat: A 10,000-year relationship
A while back, George DePasquale visited the ancient Italian city of Pompeii, not far from his ancestral home of Sorrento. Looking at a 2,000-year-old oven, DePasquale could easily imagine how its baker prepared and baked bread much as he does today at Seattle’s Essential Baking Company. He could feel he was part of a long, human continuum, “a river of history,” with “bazillions of people behind me, bazillions of people to come.”
But even the oldest rivers change, forming new channels, and sometimes doubling back on themselves.
… » More …