Recently, a study led by Professor Qiran Zhao from the College of Economics and Management, China Agricultural University, for the first time incorporated physical fitness tests into the evaluation system. By analyzing the implementation effect of China’s Nutrition Improvement Program (NIP) for rural compulsory education students, the study provides a new perspective for optimizing SFPs worldwide, especially in African countries. The related article has been published in Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering (DOI: 10.15302/J-FASE-2025611).

Recently, Professor Xu Tian from the College of Economics and Management at China Agricultural University, in collaboration with Mosses Lufuke from the Department of Economics at the University of Dodoma in Tanzania, uncovered the underlying reasons through data analysis. The related article has been published in Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering (DOI: 10.15302/J-FASE-2025645).

As the global population grows, producing enough food for everyone has become one of the biggest challenges in agriculture. Wheat, one of the world’s most important crops, must yield more grain from each plant to help meet this demand. A key factor in determining yield is the inflorescence architecture, the way that the plant’s flower head (or spike) is strucrured. This architecture controls how many grains each spike can produce and finally influence the yield of crops. Over the history of wheat breeding, changes in spike shape and structure have played a major role in yield improvements. In a recent study, researchers at Shandong Agricultural University explored a new way to boost wheat yield by re-engineering spike architecture. Through detailed multi-dimentional comparisons of inflorescence development among different cereal crops, the researchers identified promising directions for redesigning wheat spikes to produce more grains, which opens up an exciting path roward breaking burrent yield limits and helping secure global food supplies for the future.

Although several transgene-free gene editing methods exist, most are technically demanding or time-consuming. Li’s approach offers an efficient and practical alternative. Li’s lab and collaborators have further refined this method to achieve higher efficiency using citrus plants as a model system. These latest findings were published in Horticulture Research, a leading scientific journal in plant science.