Revealing how a potato disease takes hold

Late blight is an economically devastating disease for potato farmers worldwide, causing tens of billions of dollars worth of damage each year. Phytophthora infestans, the causal agent of late blight, has evolved to overcome ...

Can CRISPR feed the world?

As the world's population rises, scientists want to edit the genes of potatoes and wheat to help them fight plant diseases that cause famine.

Fire-blight resistant apples

Researchers from ETH Zurich and the Julius Kühn Institute in Germany have created the first fire-blight-resistant apple. With the aid of so-called cis-genetic engineering, they transfered a resistance gene from a wild apple ...

Modern DNA techniques applied to nineteenth-century potatoes

Researchers led by Professor Bruce Fitt, now at the University of Hertfordshire, have used modern DNA techniques on late nineteenth-century potatoes to show how the potato blight may have survived between cropping seasons ...

Prevent tomato late blight next growing season

(PhysOrg.com) -- Across the northeast, home gardeners expecting the usual bumper crop of tomatoes this season were dismayed to find their plants affected by late blight, the same fungus that caused Ireland's potato famine ...

Storing seeds for a rainy day -- or in this case, a fire

As mountain pine beetles march across the forests of western North America, these insects may kill millions of pine trees during a single outbreak. A rise in overall temperatures over the past several years has increased ...

Does hotter mean healthier?

Phytophthora blight, caused by Phytophthora capsici, is a major plant disease that affects many crop species worldwide, including chile peppers in New Mexico. Farmers' observations suggested that Phytophthora capsici caused ...

page 2 from 7