In 2010, Jianxin Ma, a professor of agronomy, and his collaborators built the first reference genome for soybeans on the widely studied Williams 82 variety.

"The results of our study are part of a growing trend to integrate advanced technologies into agriculture to achieve sustainability goals," resumes Benoît Mercatoris, co-author of the study and agronomy researcher at ULiège.

She is the founder of a not-for-profit organisation to help feed those in poverty and has a PhD in agronomy.

Africa's rice imports represent about a third of the rice traded on the global market, said Shen Yuan, a professor of agronomy at Huazhong Agricultural University and lead author of the article.

He managed an NSF-funded project that brought together interdisciplinary teams of researchers in fields as disparate as agronomy, nuclear imaging, and polar science to examine barriers to data sharing.