An international team of scientists has made the surprising discovery that a plant’s reaction to rain is close to one of panic. The research revealed complex chemical signals are triggered when water lands on a plant to help it prepare for the dangers of rain.
A nutty-flavored, starchy root vegetable, cassava (also known as yuca) is one of the most drought-resistant crops and is a major source of calories and carbs for people in developing countries, serving as the primary food for more than 800 million people. However, the crop is vulnerable to virus diseases, such as cassava brown streak disease (CBSD), which poses the biggest threat to production in East and Central Africa. To understand how cassava virus disease builds up over repeated planting cycles, a team of Tanzania-based scientists conducted experiments in coastal Tanzania, where there are two planting seasons.
Vitamin E is a potential antioxidant that could act as a sentinel in plants, sending molecular signs from chloroplast –a cell organelle- to the nucleus. This flow of information reaching the cell nucleus –retrograde signalling- is a molecular mechanism that would ease the adaptive response of plants in physiological stress situation (salinity, lack of nutrients, drought, senescence, etc.).
For a plant to thrive, it needs the help of a friendly fungus–preferably one that will dig its way deep into the cells of the plant’s roots.
A new paper shows that arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are especially helpful to the plants they colonize.
Scientists knew that plants wage chemical war against bacterial, viral and fungal infections. Now they’ve learned how to “vaccinate” tomato plants with a natural chemical to boost their defenses against a pest that makes leaves shrivel up and die.
Study may spawn ways to genetically alter and control red seaweeds. You’d think that losing 25 percent of your genes would be a big problem for survival. But not for red algae: An ancestor of red algae lost about a quarter of its genes roughly one billion years ago.
Rice is the No. 1 staple food for the world’s poorest and most undernourished people. More than half of the world’s population eats rice every day. In sub-Saharan Africa, rice is the fastest-growing food source, providing more food calories than any other crop. One dangerous threat to food security is the rice disease bacterial blight, caused by the bacterium Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo). The annual losses caused by bacterial blight are estimated at U.S. $3.6 billion in India alone. Xoo can destroy a smallholder’s entire annual harvest, putting their food supply, income and land ownership at risk.
There are over 500,000 plant species in the world today. They all evolved from a common ancestor. How this leap in biodiversity happened is still unclear. An international team of researchers presents the results of a unique project on the evolution of plants. Using genetic data from 1,147 species the team created the most comprehensive evolutionary tree for green plants to date.
A collaborative research group has succeeded in identifying an important transcription factor, GCAM1, which allows liverwort plants to asexually reproduce through creating clonal progenies. Furthermore, this transcription factor was revealed to have the same origin as those which regulate secondary bud formation in angiosperms.
The EU has published a list of 20 regulated quarantine pests qualifying as priority pests, including Xylella fastidiosa, the Japanesebeetle, the Asian long-horned beetle, Citrus greening and Citrus Black Spot, whose economic, environmental and social impact on EU’s territory is the most severe. Member States will have to launch information campaigns to the public, do annual surveys, prepare contingency plans, simulation exercises, and action plans for the eradication of these pests.
