Maize pest exploits plant defense compounds to protect itself

The western corn rootworm continues to be on the rise in Europe. Why attempts to biologically target this crop pest by applying entomopathogenic nematodes have failed, can now be explained by the amazing defense strategy ...

Microbial resident enables beetles to feed on a leafy diet

An international team including researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology has described a bacterium residing in a species of leaf beetles which has an unexpected feature: it provides the beetle with the ...

Plant roots in the dark see light

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, and Seoul National University, South Korea, were able to show for the first time that roots react directly to light which is transmitted from ...

How stick insects handle indigestive food

Plant cell walls are comprised of many complex polymers that require multiple different enzymes to fully break down, such as cellulase to digest cellulose and xylanase to digest xylan. For decades scientists thought only ...

page 6 from 21