Tagged: drought tolerance

Why Rooibos Has Been So Hard to Sequence, and Why the Ministry Wants It Done

Rooibos carries a genome roughly a billion base pairs long, packed with the same tannin-like compounds that make its tea, and those compounds fight every attempt to read its DNA. Here is what scientists have found so far, and why a finished genome matters for a crop already running short on stress tolerance.

Rooibos Has Never Been Irrigated. That Is Starting to Change.

The red bush has grown on Cederberg winter rain alone for a century, no hose, ever. Here is the underground trick that makes that possible, and the one farm now breaking the rule.