Micronutrient malnutrition is a serious threat to the developing world’s human population, which largely relies on a cereal-based diet that lacks diversity and micronutrients. Besides major cereals, millets represent the key sources of energy, protein, vitamins, and minerals for people residing in the dryland tropics and drought-prone areas of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Millets serve as multi-purpose crops with several salient traits including tolerance to abiotic stresses, adaptation to diverse agro-ecologies, higher productivity in nutrient-poor soils, and rich nutritional characteristics. Considering the potential of millets in empowering smallholder farmers, adapting to changing climate, and transforming agrifood systems, the year 2023 has been declared by the United Nations as the International Year of Millets. In this review, we highlight recent genetic and genomic innovations that can be explored to enhance grain micronutrient density in millets. We summarize the advances made in high-throughput phenotyping to accurately measure grain micronutrient content in cereals. We shed light on genetic diversity in millet germplasm collections existing globally that can be exploited for developing nutrient-dense and high-yielding varieties to address food and nutritional security. Furthermore, we describe the progress made in the fields of genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and phenomics with an emphasis on enhancing the grain nutritional content for designing competitive biofortified varieties for the future. Considering the close genetic-relatedness within cereals, upcoming research should focus on identifying the genetic and genomic basis of nutritional traits in millets and introgressing them into major cereals through integrated omics approaches. Recent breakthroughs in the genome editing toolbox would be crucial for mainstreaming biofortification in millets.

The edible oil of Elaeis guineensis Jacq., oil palm, is crucial in filling the demand gap and meet the growing need for edible oil worldwide. Although all precautions have been taken to minimize the introduction of pest populations along with seed sprouts from importing countries, some pests are still found to invade crops and cause production losses. Most of these populations have been found to come from other Arecaceae palms such as coconut, palmyrah and betel nut that may be commonly found around oil palm fields. It has been estimated that the above pests reduced oil palm yield by 20–30%, persisted for several years after attack, depending on cultivation methods, and returned to previous yield levels within a few years of attack. The minor pests of coconut, palmyrah, and maize, psychid and slug caterpillar were discovered to be very invasive on oil palm, resulting in output losses of up to 50%. The presence of favorable conditions such as low temperature and high humidity within oil palm plantations may possibly be the reason for migration. The production losses caused by these migratory pests affect the sustainability of the produce and thus agriculture, so it is important to apply the good management practices.

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Background: Herbicides are classified either by toxicity or by mechanism of action, based on the chemical nature of the compound. Herbicides fall into two categories. Contact the herbicide and the transferred herbicide. Herbicides have been selected because they are highly toxic to plants and less toxic to animals and humans, but the main concern is the direct toxic effects of herbicides on animals. Since ketol acid reductoisomerase (KARI) is considered an acceptable target for most amide herbicides, this study conducted an in-silico analysis of KARI from Staphylococcus aureus against eight amide herbicides, obsessed with investigating by performing virtual molgro molecule docking. Materials and Methods: The ilvC gene encoding KARI from Staphylococcus aureus was amplified and its sequence and chimera were checked using the GenBank project`s CHIMERA CHECK program. It uses the BLAST algorithm and the GenBank database to compare the environment sequence with the GenBank sequence to find evolutionary relatives. Homology modeling of Staphylococcus aureus ketol acid reductoisomerase (KARI) was performed because its threedimensional structure revealed by either X-ray crystallography or NMR studies was not available. The generated model was used to repeat the energy minimization cycle many times using SPDBV software, and the final model was also used to perform docking analysis against the amide herbicide used in the inhibitor study. Results: The amplified DNA fragment containing 1005 base sequence BLAST hit, shows an absolute open reading frame encoding the Staphylococcus aureus protein KARI. PROSITE method shows active site residues Gln28,