Microbial natural products continue to be an unparalleled resource for pharmaceutical lead discovery, but the rediscovery rate is high. Bacterial and fungal sequencing studies indicate that the biosynthetic potential of many strains is much greater than that observed by fermentation. Prodding the expression of such silent (cryptic) pathways will allow us to maximize the chemical diversity avail...

The WRKY33 transcription factor was reported for resistance to the necrotrophic fungus Botrytis cinerea. Using microarray-based analysis, we compared Arabidopsis WRKY33 overexpressing lines and wrky33 mutant that showed altered susceptibility to B. cinerea with their corresponding wild-type plants. In the wild-type, about 1660 genes (7% of the transcriptome) were induced and 1054 genes (5% of t...

Unlike animals, which breathe through airways lined with pathogen-trapping defenses, plants get air through tiny pores in their leaves that all but invite bacteria to sneak in. How, then, do plants keep them out? They slam their pores, or stomata, shut. Stomata are flanked by guard cells that swell when triggered by bacteria, thus closing the pores. Besides being fascinating in its own right, t...

Recent studies on plants genetically modified in jasmonic acid (JA) signalling support the hypothesis that the jasmonate family of oxylipins plays an important role in mediating direct and indirect plant defences. However, the interaction of two modes of defence in tritrophic systems is largely unknown. In this study, we examined the preference and performance of a herbivorous leafminer (Liriom...