Plant pathogens often succeed not by brute force, but by subtly rewiring host developmental programs. Ustilago maydis, the basidiomycete fungus responsible for maize common smut, exemplifies this strategy by inducing tumor-like galls on aerial organs of its host. Although the U. maydis genome encodes…

Recently, a team of agricultural economists (Pardey et al.) released a powerful commentary about the state of agricultural research funding, which they say is insufficient. They observe that, fueled in part by the changing climate, food prices are rising everywhere, but they are forecast to rise…

Many factors contribute to global hunger, but progress in many sensible directions such as lowering waste and improving distribution has been negligible; furthermore, the ever growing challenges of climate change continue to hinder food production. Photosynthesis is a critical yet inefficient process…

Reading this review brought to mind some well-known lyrics starting “You don’t know what you’ve got …”  Joni Mitchell followed with “till its gone,” whilst Blink-182 suggested “till it’s almost gone”. A major challenge for plant scientists today is to find out what we have before…

Plants are the quiet architects of life on Earth, sustaining the ecosystem through their ability to capture energy, cycle nutrients, and adapt to extreme environments. Their remarkable plasticity allows plants to thrive on non-arable land such as mountains, deserts, and floodplains, but whether this…

Plant development depends on the precise regulation of cell wall mechanics, largely controlled by the methylesterification status of pectin. Although pectin remodeling is known to influence cell expansion and tissue integrity, how its modification is spatially and temporally regulated during cell division…

Agrobacterium tumefaciens, through its natural capacity to deliver foreign DNA into plant genomes, has enabled efficient transformation across many plant species and cultivars. Despite these advancements, persistent challenges remain, including genotype-dependent recalcitrance, potential off-target DNA…

Distant hybridization is an important route for crop improvement, enabling the transfer of disease resistance and stress tolerance from wild relatives, but in Brassicaceae it is strongly restricted by stigma-based interspecific incompatibility. While self-incompatibility (SI) signaling via SCR–SRK…