A newly discovered stem cell signaling pathway could boost yields from corn and other staple crops by up to 50 percent in the very near term, according to a paper published Monday in Nature Genetics.
In essence, it's an intraplant communications channel that acts as a "braking" mechanism to be triggered by the relatively old cellular members of a plant existing in its leaves and far-flung extremities telling the plant to stop producing totipotent stem cells.