Category: articles

It’s grey and rainy days like this November in Berlin that make you very aware of your immune system and how it works, perhaps not always successfully, to fends off all kinds of pathogens. Plants are in a similar situation, their immune response has to constantly be ready to fight off fungi, bacteria or viruses. Recently, researchers gained new understanding of the workings of a key part of the plant’s immune response.… Read more

Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease that affects hundreds of millions of people each year, and kills over 500,000. Worldwide, the chosen treatment for malaria is artemisinin combination therapy (ACT), a medicine that relies on the drug artemisinin that happens to come from a plant…… Read more

Pseudomonas syringae is a gram-negative bacteria that can have a devastating effect on a range of crops. From tomatoes, to beans, to tobacco, to kiwifruit – P syringae can destroy them all (or at least heavily maim them, resulting in crop losses). So what’s the answer? Recent research suggests that bacteriocins might be a suitable weapon in the battle against the bacteria.… Read more

We’ve sung their praises before, and we’ll do it again: plants make the oxygen we breathe, the food we eat, the fibres that form our clothing, our fuel, and our shelters. Plus they’re just so darn pretty. But one of the things we mention perhaps less often, is that these glorious greens are not only there for us in the good times, they’ve also got us covered in the bad. Today we’re starting a new series, where we discuss some of the amazing (scientifically supported) medicines that have been developed from planty products.… Read more

You’ve all seen the news on CRISPR. The fantastic new technology that seems to get more impressive each day, and which by now seems capable of answering almost any biological question we can ask. But CRISPR technology, and the things we can do with it, is only useful if we can actually get the CRISPR inside the species we want to study. And, as it turns out, there are many species which can’t be transformed- species that we can’t efficiently get CRISPR-encoding sequences into in the first place.… Read more

Natural light is a challenge for plants. It’s far from constant and it changes not only in intensity but also in quality, shifting between blue-ish and red-ish hues, depending on the time of the day. Here’s a tale of how plants rise to the challenge of change, by fine-tuning their light collectors in response to the light. … Read more

Heading into the future, we have to solve some extremely complex problems. Take agriculture for example: we want to feed an ever increasing population, protect the local environment, reduce carbon emissions and have a sustainable long-term production pipeline.

Today, we’re looking at one of these problems and discussing potential solutions.… Read more

The outside world can be harsh – and I’m not only saying that because I am sitting at home with a cold, looking at the dull grey sky through the window. Too much of any of the elements- wind, rain, cold, heat- can cause us all stress. And they can stress plants, too. Today we’re talking about how plants feel when raindrops keep falling on their leaves…

drip

drip

drip… Read more

Welcome to the Spooky Season!

Earlier in the week we shared a list of the scariest plants, including some that are dangerous, some that are deadly, and some that just have really cool names and backstories.

Today, we’re talking about our favourite plant genes, proteins and mutants with sufficiently spooooky names.

Let us know in the comments if you think we’ve missed any!… Read more

Welcome to Halloween Week!

We thought we could stick to the spoooky theme this week, and present our favourite scary plants. Just as a disclaimer – we are well aware of (and a little bit sad about) the fact that some people will hear ‘scary plant’ and immediately thing ‘GMO’. But that’s not at all what this is about.

Instead, we’re focusing on the devious, the dangerous, and the deadly… a well as a couple of plants that just plain old smell like dung.… Read more