Plants acquire essential trace elements from the rhizosphere and must adapt to conditions that can range from deficiency to excess. Knowledge of how trace elements move from root to shoot to seed is critical for agriculture and human nutrition.

The significance of plant-microbe interactions in sustainable agriculture is enormous. These interactions may be negative such as the host-pathogen interactions leading to the disease development in plants or positive likes the interaction of the plants with the beneficial soil microbiota for stimulating the plant growth, conferring biotic, and abiotic stress tolerance in plants and helping the...

Signal transduction underlies how living organisms detect and respond to stimuli. A goal of synthetic biology is to rewire natural signal transduction systems. Bacteria, yeast, and plants sense environmental aspects through conserved histidine kinase (HK) signal transduction systems. HK protein components are typically comprised of multiple, relatively modular, and conserved domains. Phosphate ...

Parasitic plants have the ability to obtain nutrients directly from other plants, and several species are serious biological threats to agriculture by parasitizing crops of high economic importance. The uniqueness of parasitic plants is characterized by the presence of a multicellular organ called a haustorium, which facilitates plant-plant interactions, and shutting down or reducing their own ...

The ability of plants to fulfill nutritional needs by parasitizing neighboring plants has originated several times in angiosperm evolution. Molecular tools are now being exploited to investigate the evolutionary origins of plant parasitism and to dissect the genetic mechanisms governing parasitic plant-host plant interactions. Investigating the nature of signal exchanges between parasitic plant...

INTRODUCTION Technology advanced rapidly during the 20th Century. One hundred years ago, 17 Dec. 1903, the Wright Brothers fl ew the world’s fi rst powered aircraft at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It was a fl ight of 37 m (120 ft) that lasted 12 sec at a maximum speed of 16 kmph (10 mph). Forty-four years later Chuck Yeager would break the sound barrier — Mach 1 at 1086 kmph (675 mph). Twenty-tw...

Diptera are one of the three largest and most diverse animal groups in the world. As an often neglected but important group of pollinators, they play a significant role in agrobiodiversity and the biodiversity of plants everywhere. Flies are present in almost all habitats and biomes and for many medicinal, food and ornamental plants, pollinating flies guarantee or enhance seed and fruit product...

For 10,000 years agriculture has been based on the strategy of conserving and enhancing genetic diversity. Humans have always this time domesticated and modified wild plants and animals, the gifts of nature’s biodiversity. According to Erna Bennett (former genetic resources expert to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN), ‘The patchwork of cultivation sown by man unleashed an explos...