The cultivation of vanilla in Madagascar provides a good income for small-holder farmers, but without trees and bushes the plantations can lack biodiversity. Agricultural ecologists have investigated the interaction between prey and their predators in these cultivated areas.
Recently discovered interactions between plant and viral proteins open up new avenues for making plants resistant to viruses, thus safeguarding crop yields in changing climate conditions.
Grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) is a crop of great economic and agricultural value throughout the world. In 2019, the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) reported that over 7 million hectares are dedicated to the cultivation of this crop, resulting in the global production of about 78 million tonnes of grape and 292 million of hectolitres of wine. However, a production of this magnitude is possible thanks to the massive use of pesticides to counteract various diseases that can affect grape yield. Indeed, pesticide applications are at the basis of intensive agriculture, as they guarantee protection from pathogens, pests and weeds. In absence of pesticide applications, farmers could experience up to 40% of production losses in a single year.
A new field of research in microbiology is transforming the way scientists see fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms. Microbiome research is so promising that it has drawn attention from funders and industry as well as scientists. In the United States alone, the market for microbiome-based agricultural products is expected to be worth more than $10 billion by 2025. Research on the human microbiome has surpassed $1.7 billion in the past decade.
Bacteria recently isolated from walnut (Juglans regia L.) buds in Portugal has been identified as a new species of Xanthomonas. Interestingly, this new species baptised as Xanthomonas euroxanthea includes both pathogenic and non-pathogenic strains on walnut, constituting a unique model to address the emergence and evolution of pathogenicity in Xanthomonas.
Widespread fungal disease in plants can be controlled with a commercially available chemical that has been primarily used in medicine until now. In a comprehensive experiment the team has uncovered a new metabolic pathway that can be disrupted with this chemical, thus preventing many known plant fungi from invading the host plant.
Plants are able to keep growing indefinitely because they have tissues made of meristems–plant stem cells–which have the unique ability to transform themselves into the various specialized cells that make up the plant, dividing whenever appropriate and producing new cells of whatever type as needed. Meristems exist at the tips of all plants, allowing them to grow new stems or new roots, and, in trees, also in the trunk, where they add extra girth.
Scientists have led the first assessment of naturalised, invasive and potentially invasive plant species present in Laikipia County, Kenya, which hosts the highest populations of endangered large mammals in the country.
Researchers have discovered a link between defensive responses in plants and the beautiful but devastating crop parasite witchweed. The new study shows that both parasitic and non-parasitic plants can detect and react to a class of organic compounds called quinones. While parasitic plants sense quinones in their prey and use it to invade, quinones trigger defensive responses in non-parasitic plants that can protect them from bacteria and other microbes.
A team of researchers has discovered that strigolactones, a class of novel plant hormones, mediate the fine-tuning of the production plant defensive substances in the stem of plants of the wild tobacco species Nicotiana attenuata.
