• Straw­berry Fields For­ever

    by Me­chas Zam­brano and Roberto — Close your eyes for a mo­ment and imag­ine your­self in front of a plate full of freshly picked, bright red, fra­grant, ripe, and sweet straw­ber­ries. For most of you, that should be a truly "mouth wa­ter­ing" ex­pe­ri­ence. If you do en­joy straw­ber­ries, you are part of a long and wide­spread plea­sure that goes back mil­len­nia through the eat­ing of wild straw­berry species...

  • Plant Pathogen Si­lences Host's Im­mune Genes

    by S. Mar­vin Fried­man — As more and more in­for­ma­tion be­comes avail­able, one mar­vels (and also frets) at the so­phis­ti­cated strate­gies that pathogens have evolved in or­der to evade their hosts' de­fense mech­a­nisms. Many pathogens of plants and an­i­mals de­liver ef­fec­tors into their hosts in or­der to sup­press im­mune re­sponses. To date, the vast ma­jor­ity of…