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Making crops colorful for easier weeding - EurekAlert


<p>To make weeding easier, scientists suggest bioengineering crops to be colorful or to have differently shaped leaves so that they can be more easily distinguished from their wild and weedy counterparts. This could involve altering the crops&rsquo; genomes so that they express pigments that are already produced by many plants, for example, anthocyanins, which make blueberries blue, or carotenoids, which make carrots orange. Then, they say, weeding robots could be trained to remove only the weeds using machine learning. The authors outline their proposed strategy on April 17 in the journal <em>Trends in Plant Science.</em></p>

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