A team of scientists has developed a way to potentially thwart the spread of a disease-causing bacterium that harms more than 100 plant species worldwide, an advance that could save the nursery industry billions a year.
High-throughput analyses of small substances in Nicotiana attenuata reveal that plants re-organize their metabolism to produce highly-specific defense metabolites after insect attack
The effective management of plant diseases is of fundamental importance for forestry, food, and other plant-derived product productions, as well as for the sustainability of natural environments. Changing global climate patterns and the trade of planting materials across the borders are causing plant pathogens to rapidly move and evolve. That is plant pathogens, are changing their behavior, survival, reproduction, and mode of action in the host plants.
A new study is calling for governments to reallocate subsidies to encourage the use of lower risk control options – such as biopesticides – in the fight against the devastating maize pest fall armyworm (FAW).
The native guava is one of the first Australian plants to be pushed to the brink of extinction by a fungal plant disease which has spread rapidly across the globe, according to a new study.
Some plants, like soybean, are known to possess an innate defense machinery that helps them develop resistance against insects trying to feed on them. However, exactly how these plants recognize signals from insects has been unknown until now. In a new study, scientists have uncovered the cellular pathway that helps these plants to sense danger signals and elicit a response, opening doors to a myriad of agricultural applications.
Plants produce the hormone jasmonic acid as a defence response when challenged. This is how they ensure that their predators no longer like the taste of their leaves. Biologists want to find out whether biological precursors and other variants of jasmonic acid lead to similar or different effects. But such derivatives of the hormone have so far been too expensive for experiments and difficult to come by. Researchers have now found a method that might make the production of a biologically significant precursor of jasmonic acid more efficient and cheaper.
A new generation of gene-silencing “RNAi pesticides” are making their way through the regulatory system and will soon be available for agricultural use. However, until recently, there was no method to measure the amount of the pesticide present in the dynamic environment of agricultural soil.
Wheat is one of the most common cereal crops. Scientists all over the world are looking for ways to increase yields. In particular, attempts are being made to make wheat less susceptible to all kinds of diseases caused by adverse weather conditions – excess or lack of moisture, too high or low temperature, etc.
Diseases that devastate African communities are the focus of a brand new short animated film launched by The CONNECTED Virus Network. The network’s focus is bringing together world-class researchers to find ways of tackling crop diseases, caused by plant viruses, which devastate food crops in Sub-Saharan Africa.
