Two complementary approaches unveil a co-evolutionary mechanism between bacteria and plants and also explain complex immune response patterns observed in the wild. Together the papers change the way scientists have been thinking about the…

Chromatin in eukaryotic genomes is broadly divided into two classes: euchromatin, which are more open regions containing expressed genes, and heterochromatin, which is more densely packed and contains non-expressed regions including transposable…

New work published in eLife, from an international team led by the Dagdas lab, has identified an evolutionary conserved protein that mediates recycling of the endoplasmic reticulum.

New work published in Nature Cell Biology from an international team led by Dr. Michael Borg, a postdoc in the lab of Dr. Frederic Berger, has uncovered the answer to a decades-old question - how do plants forget?

The new work from an international team led by Frédéric Berger and his PhD Student Sean Montgomery at the Gregor Mendel Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and by Chang Liu at the ZMBP at the University of Tuebingen was published today in…

A secret weapon used by the killer rice blast fungus to infect host plants has been discovered in new research.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short regulatory molecules that repress mRNAs, regulating development in both plants and animals. Students from the Nodine lab used high-throughput sequencing methods to profile miRNAs and their target mRNAs from developing…

Plants with deep, robust roots can store more carbon underground for longer periods of time, reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. However, the genetic and molecular mechanisms that regulate remain largely unknown. The lab of Wolfgang Busch,…

An international research team has revealed a novel mechanism for the perception of endogenous peptides by a plant receptor. The discovery of this activation mechanism sets a new paradigm for how plants react to internal and external cues.

Like humans and animals, plants defend themselves against pathogens with the help of their immune system. But how do they activate their cellular defenses? Youssef Belkhadir's lab at the GMI studies cell-surface receptor kinases, which plants use to…