Wild tomatoes resist devastating bacterial canker

Many New York tomato growers are familiar with the scourge of bacterial canker—the wilted leaves and blistered fruit that can spoil an entire season's planting. For those whose livelihoods depend on tomatoes, this pathogen—Clavibacter ...

Study gets to root of rice's resilience to floods

Climate change is increasing both the severity and frequency of extreme weather events, including floods. That's a problem for many farmers, since rice is the only major food crop that's resilient to flooding. A new study, ...

Pioneering biologists create a new crop through genome editing

Crops such as wheat and maize have undergone a breeding process lasting thousands of years, in the course of which mankind has gradually modified the properties of wild plants into highly cultivated variants. One motive was ...

Virus attracts bumblebees to infected plants by changing scent

Plant scientists at the University of Cambridge have found that the cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) alters gene expression in the tomato plants it infects, causing changes to air-borne chemicals - the scent - emitted by the plants. ...

Breeding wildness back into our fruit and veg

Wild tomatoes are better able to protect themselves against the destructive whitefly than our modern, commercial varieties, new research has shown.