My journey to Seville, where tomorrow’s sunflowers grow

Anyone who has ever stood beside a sunflower knows the quiet astonishment of being matched, petal for head, by a flower. Now imagine weaving your way through tens of thousands of stems at eye level, each one tethered to the transparent ceiling by a white cord, as if suspended between earth and sky. Overhead stretches a vision in perfect symmetry: thousands of threads rising in parallel, anchoring a forest of blossoms veiled like brides at the altar, their vivid yellow only just shimmering through the gauze. It could be a contemporary art installation, but this is the greenhouse of the world’s most advanced sunflower research center. We are not at the Venice Biennale nor at Documenta in Kassel, but just outside Seville, at the Centro Tecnológico de Investigación de La Rinconada.

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CRISPR vines make their field debut in Italy

Testing of Chardonnay edited to resist downy mildew starts today near Verona, while the prosecco variety awaits its turn in the greenhouse

The president of the influential farmers’ association Coldiretti, Ettore Prandini, formerly very hostile to GMOs, as he plants an edited vine with his own hands in the Verona experimental field on Sept. 30, 24
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