Category

Plant Science

Jun 08
2

​​Mapping Citrus Microbiomes: The First Step to Finding Plant-Microbiome Treasures ​

By | Agriculture, Fruits and Vegetables, News, Plant Health, Plant Science

Due to their complexity and microscopic scale, plant-microbe interactions can be quite elusive. Each researcher focuses on a piece of the interaction, and it is hard to find all the pieces let alone assemble them into a comprehensive map to find the hidden treasures within the plant microbiome. This is the purpose of review, to take all the pieces from all the different sources and put them together into something comprehensive that can guide researchers to hidden clues and new associations that unlock the secrets of a system.

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Jun 07
1

Scientists uncover how resistance proteins protect plants from pathogens

By | News, Plant Science

In plants, disease resistance proteins serve as major immune receptors that sense pathogens and pests and trigger robust defense responses. Scientists previously found that one such disease resistance protein, ZAR1, is transformed into a highly ordered protein complex called a resistosome upon detection of invading pathogens, providing the first clue as to how plant disease resistance proteins work. Precisely how a resistosome activates plant defenses, however, has been unclear.

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Jun 02
8

The legume family tree: massive molecular study uncovers clues to the evolution and diversification of essential plant family

By | Agriculture, Botany, News, Plant Science

The most comprehensive study of the family tree for legumes, the plant family that includes beans, soybeans, peanuts, and many other economically important crop plants, reveals a history of whole-genome duplications. The study also helps to uncover the evolution of genes involved in nitrogen fixation—a key trait likely important in the evolutionary spread and diversification of legumes and vital for their use as “green manure” in agriculture.

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May 24
0

Unlocking herbaria biodiversity using a QR code sampling-to-sequencing workflow

By | Botany, News, Plant Science

Within the past decade, next-generation sequencing technologies have revolutionized the way in which genetic data are generated and analyzed. In the field of phylogenetics, this has meant that researchers are rapidly reconstructing the tree of life, a goal that biologists have been working toward since Darwin sketched the first phylogeny in his notebook in 1837.

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