Once upon a time, scientists thought genetics and genomes were fairly straightforward. A gene encodes a protein and that protein carries out the actions that cause physical, metabolic effects and even phenotypic effects visible to others. It was a direct and simple system, a functional way for something formed through natural selection to be built. […]
Tracking plant pathogens is no simple matter. Due to their possible environmental hidey holes being in the soil, the air, other plants, or the host plants themselves lying dormant, any and every possibility must be accounted for. And the triggers that begin active pathogenicity and harm to the plant is connected to a convoluted system […]
When it comes to growing niche products, any sort of harm to the plants could prove disastrous to the overall yield itself. This is especially so if that plant is only grown in certain regions due to soil and weather requirements. That is the case for the subject of chocolate, a billion dollar industry that […]
From the start of things, science has always relied on the organisms that can be made to be a representation of more complex systems. They were a model for either humans themselves or to show in their own simplicity how life builds up to larger formations of cells and processes. That has long been the […]
The health of plants is paramount for farmers, gardeners, and scientists alike. They not only provide the food we need to survive, but their overall well-being is a marker for the strength of the environmental conditions around them. And there are many things, much like with us humans, that can be a cause for alarm. […]
Properly breeding a plant for the traits you want is hard. It requires hundreds of plants and hundreds of cross-breeding attempts between them to obtain desired traits, isolate them, and cross them into more vigorous cultivars with other wanted traits. That was how it was done for most of human history and it’s a long, […]
The diseases out there in the world seem limitless. Every new nook and cranny we uncover shows new lifeforms and new diseases they cause or that are subjected upon them. The Earth is just a melting pot of infection (and parasitism) of every species trying to take advantage of every other. Due to their ubiquity, […]
When dealing with plants in a lab, in a garden, or in an agricultural field, we often forget that there was originally a whole biome that those plants were involved in in the wild. We often try to simulate those conditions to the best of our capabilities, but there is still so much knowledge we […]
The arms race in the plant world is a brutal competition for dominance where failure means death. As scientific understanding of genetics has broadened over the decades, we’ve also come to realize that the organisms in nature have been utilizing even the most complicated of these mechanisms for their advantage in order to survive. Any […]
Sudden death syndrome is, as the name would suggest, a devastating disease. It first emerged in Arkansas in 1971 and has since spread across the US and even into South America by the 1990’s, causing heavy fatalities. The fungus that causes it, Fusarium virguliforme, can be considered the root of one of the most deadly […]
