It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, January 24, 2026
New analysis disputes historic earthquake, tsunami and death toll on Greek island
Revision of the Allegedly Deadly and Tsunamigenic 1843 Earthquake at Chalke Island, South Aegean Sea, Greece
For decades, researchers thought that an October 1843 earthquake on the small Greek island of Chalke caused a powerful tsunami and led to the deaths of as many as 600 people.
But a new analysis of primary accounts of the event by Ioanna Triantafyllou at Hellenic Mediterranean University suggests the truth was much less dramatic and destructive.
As Triantafyllou reports in Seismological Research Letters, evidence from primary sources indicates that the mainshock occurred on Chalke on 17 September 1843, causing rock falls and some damage to poorly constructed houses. There were no deaths and no tsunami reported at the time.
The study demonstrates how secondhand sources of a seismic event can be used to characterize an earthquake incorrectly for years, said Triantafyllou, with impacts on seismic risk calculations for a region.
Without modern instrumentation and data collection, historical seismologists often must sift through accounts of a past earthquake to find clues that allow them to precisely locate the earthquake and estimate its magnitude and intensity.
Triantafyllou has been investigating damaging and deadly earthquakes in Greece since beginning her Ph.D. work in 2017. “I was particularly struck by the 1843 earthquake in Chalke, which remains one of the top 10 deadliest earthquakes in Greece to date. I wondered how a small island could have had 600 casualties at that time,” she said. “I began searching for primary, original historical sources to verify whether the number of victims was indeed so high.”
Previous researchers had concluded that the magnitude of the 1843 Chalke earthquake ranged from 6.4 to 6.75, and had caused a powerful tsunami. A 1848 study reported the earthquake’s death toll to be as high as 600 people.
But when Triantafyllou examined these previous studies, “most of the previous authors either had no access to primary macroseismic information sources or neglected to mention them,” she wrote.
Her search for primary accounts about the earthquake led to contemporary reports in Greek newspapers, a German newspaper, and newspapers published in Constantinople (Istanbul). Triantafyllou also used the contemporary testimony of Ludwig Ross, a German archaeology professor fluent in Greek.
“The further back in time you go, the more difficult it is to find primary sources related to earthquakes. This information can be found in newspapers, archives, church codes, and even in travelers’ writings, as in the case of Ross,” she explained. “In the digital era, the systematic indexing and digitization of relevant information helps researchers gain immediate access to the content.”
The primary sources indicated that seismic activity on the island started at the beginning of September 1843, culminating in a strong damaging earthquake on 17 September, with some aftershocks felt into early October.
“The book by Ross is a good example of a reliable author who kept a detailed diary during his travels in the Greek islands. He documented the effects of earthquakes clearly and accurately in terms of time and space,” said Triantafyllou.
“His earthquake descriptions provide appropriate information for reconstructing the earthquakes and assign macroseismic intensities based on building damage, ground failures and shaking felt,” she added.
Triantafyllou used these macroseismic intensities, or shaking strength, to calculate a new magnitude for the 1843 event, concluding that the mainshock was likely a magnitude 5.93 earthquake.
The magnitudes of historical earthquakes are included in regional earthquake catalogs, which are used to make seismic hazard assessments. “In my study the magnitude of the Chalke 1843 earthquake was drastically reduced in respect to previous estimates,” Triantafyllou explained. “Keeping all other factors equal, one may expect that reducing the magnitude will result in seismic hazard reduction as well.”
A long-standing idea in planetary science is that water-rich meteorites arriving late in Earth’s history could have delivered a major share of Earth’s water. A new study argues that the Moon’s surface record sets a hard limit on that possibility: even under generous assumptions, late meteorite delivery since about 4 billion years ago could only have supplied a small fraction of Earth’s water.
In a paper published in the Proceedings to the National Academy of Sciences titled Constraints on the impactor flux to the Earth–Moon system from oxygen isotopes of the lunar regolith, researchers led by Tony Gargano, Ph.D., at the Lunar and Planetary Institute and The University of New Mexico analyzed a large suite of Apollo lunar regolith samples using high-precision triple oxygen isotopes. Earth has erased most of its early bombardment record through tectonics, and constant crustal recycling. The Moon, by contrast, preserves a continuously accessible archive: lunar regolith, the loose layer of debris produced and reworked by impacts over billions of years.
Ever since the Apollo missions, scientists have tried to read that archive using elements that concentrate in impactors - especially ‘metal-loving’ siderophile elements, which are abundant in meteorites but scarce in the Moon’s silicate crust. But regolith is an especially challenging mixture: impacts can melt, vaporize, and rework material repeatedly, and post-impact geological processes can separate metal from silicate, complicating attempts to reconstruct the type and amount of impactor material.
“The lunar regolith, which is a collection of loose ‘soil’ and broken rock at the surface, acts like a long-term mixing layer,” said Gargano. “It captures impact debris, stirs it in, and preserves those additions for immense spans of time. That is why it is such a powerful archive. It lets us study a time-averaged record of what was hitting the Earth–Moon system.”
The new study takes a different approach. Instead of relying on metal-loving tracers, it uses oxygen - the dominant element by mass in rocks - and its triple-isotope “fingerprint” to separate two competing signals that normally get tangled in lunar regolith: (1) the addition of meteorite material and (2) isotopic effects from impact-driven vaporization. From measuring offsets in the oxygen isotope composition of regolith, the team finds that at least ~1% by mass of the regolith reservoir consists of impactor-derived material that are best explained from carbon-rich meteorites that were partially vaporized upon impact.
“Triple oxygen isotopes give us a more direct and quantitative way to approach the problem. Oxygen is the dominant element in most rocks, and the triple-isotope framework helps us distinguish true mixing between different reservoirs from the isotopic effects of impact-driven vaporization,” said Gargano. “In practice, that lets us isolate an impactor fingerprint from a regolith that has a complicated history, with fewer assumptions and a clearer chain from measurement to interpretation.”
The team translated these impactor fractions into water-delivery bounds for the Moon and Earth, expressed in Earth-ocean equivalents for scale. For the Moon, the implied delivery since ~ 4 billion years ago is tiny on an Earth-ocean scale. But tiny compared to Earth’s oceans does not mean unimportant for the Moon. Instead, the Moon’s accessible water inventory is concentrated in small, cold-trapped reservoirs, and water is the kind of resource that matters immediately for sustained human presence for important things like life support, radiation shielding, and fuel. In other words, the long-term trickle of impactor-derived water can be negligible for Earth yet still be a meaningful contributor to the Moon’s available water budget.
The researchers then extended the same accounting to Earth, using a commonly applied scaling in which Earth receives substantially more impactor material than the Moon. Even if Earth experienced roughly 20× the impactor flux and even adopting the extreme megaregolith end-member, the cumulative water delivers only a few percent of an Earth Ocean at most. That makes it difficult to reconcile the late-delivery of water-rich meteorites as the dominant source of Earth’s water, given that independent estimates yield several ocean-mass equivalents of water in the Earth in total.
“The lunar regolith is one of the rare places we can still interpret a time-integrated record of what was hitting Earth’s neighborhood for billions of years,” said Gargano. “The oxygen-isotope fingerprint lets us pull an impactor signal out of a mixture that’s been melted, vaporized, and reworked countless times. The main takeaway from our study is that Earth’s water budget is hard, if not impossible, to explain if we only consider a single, late delivery pathway from water-rich impactors from the outer solar system. Even though some meteorite types carry a lot of water, their broader chemical and isotopic fingerprints are quite exotic relative to Earth. Habitability models have to satisfy such empirical constraints, and our study adds a constraint that future theories will need to reproduce.”
“Our results don’t say meteorites delivered no water,” added Simon. “They say the Moon’s long-term record makes it very hard for late meteorite delivery to be the dominant source of Earth’s oceans.”
Gargano framed the work as part of a scientific lineage that began with Apollo. “I’m part of the next generation of Apollo scientists - people who didn’t fly the missions, but who were trained on the samples and the questions Apollo made possible,” Gargano said. “The value of the Moon is that it gives us ground truth: real material we can measure in the lab and use to anchor what we infer from meteorites and telescopes.
“Apollo samples are the reference point for comparing the Moon to the broader Solar System,” Gargano added. “When we put lunar soils and meteorites on the same oxygen-isotope scale, we’re testing ideas about what kinds of bodies were supplying water to the inner Solar System. That’s ultimately a question about why Earth became habitable, and how the ingredients for life were assembled here in the first place.”
Apollo samples also matter because the Moon preserves that impact story across deep time in a way Earth does not. The Moon does not just tell us about the Moon. It preserves an accessible record of the impact environment of the inner solar system, which helped set the boundary conditions under which Earth became habitable. There is still real wonder in that. Scientists have rocks collected decades ago, from another world, and they are still capable of changing how we think about the origin of Earth’s water and the conditions that made life possible.
“What modern techniques add to this amazing legacy of scientific exploration is precision and interpretive power. We can now resolve subtle isotopic signals that allow quantitative tests of formation and habitability models,” said Gargano. “That is why Apollo science keeps evolving. The samples are the same, but our ability to interrogate them, and the questions we can ask of them, are fundamentally better.”
In addition to his research findings, Gargano is equally proud of what scientists are doing in terms of training and outreach because it captures that same arc: taking something that feels distant and making it tangible and impactful to our lives.
“At UNM, I have been training Albuquerque high schoolers in planetary science and geochemistry, including senior Brooklyn Bird and junior Violet Delu from the Bosque School,” said Gargano. “These students are getting hands-on training in geochemistry using UNM’s unique collection of Astromaterials, and they are learning the physical craft of laboratory science: how to prepare and handle samples, how to make high-quality measurements, and how to think clearly about uncertainty and reproducibility.
“But the deeper lesson is the transformation that happens when a student realizes they can hold a piece of another world, make a measurement, and pull meaning out of it. They learn how a chemical signal becomes a geologic story, and how that story scales up into an explanation for how a planetary body evolved to become the way it is. Experiences like that change what students think is possible for themselves. They build confidence, technical ability, and a sense of belonging in a field that can otherwise feel out of reach.”
Bird and Delu will both be presenting their independent research projects at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference this spring and will also be educators to their peers and younger students through Bosque School outreach events. This is a model Gargano is excited to carry forward to other places in the country, so that more underserved students can gain access to world-class research experiences and obtain skill sets in geochemistry that open doors for them internationally.
With already thin profit margins and increasingly uncertain farm labor and other input costs, precision agriculture technology could improve New England’s small and medium-sized farms’ efficiency, productivity, and resilience. Unfortunately, factors such as up-front costs and validation of the technology’s accuracy in the region remain a barrier to adoption. A research team at UNH led by Benjamin Fraser, visiting assistant professor and director of the Basic and Applied Spatial Analysis Lab, has shown that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly used in precision agriculture, are able to provide effective surveillance of fields planted with corn, including brown-midrib (BMR) corn, an important variety for silage production.
BMR corn provides key silage advantages to dairy farmers, but it is more expensive to grow than many other varieties and is susceptible to disease late in the growing season. Monitoring BMR corn is therefore critical for the New Hampshire dairy industry, but it is also time- and labor-intensive, and field-level inspections often miss early signs of disease. A recent paper presents findings from eight weeks of UAV surveillance of New Hampshire corn fields that assessed its ability to analyze corn characteristics at field- and plot-scale levels. The paper shows that the UAV imagery can differentiate between varieties of corn and estimate crop yields with high accuracy.
“The findings demonstrate that low-cost, consumer available (or ‘off-the-shelf’) UAV sensors with limited spectral range are highly likely to produce accurate results and that the imagery can be used in several ways to inform future corn farming practices,” says Fraser.
Precision monitoring of corn
The applications for precision agriculture tools such as UAVs are varied, from monitoring for weeds and diseases to calculating yields to optimizing harvest timing and site selection, and they are used extensively on large farms in Midwest and Western states. Yet, at this time, usage of precision agriculture methods remains low, about 25%, on small Northeastern farms, largely because of the up-front investment required.
The paper adds to a growing body of research indicating that precision agriculture does provide important advantages in the long term. Overall, it promises to lower costs, particularly for labor, and deliver better outcomes for farmers, bolstering the sustainability of commercial agriculture on small farms in New Hampshire and throughout New England.
The paper, published in Agricultural Research, provides a case study for the use of precision monitoring of corn to collect field- and plot-specific data. The experiment was conducted on UNH agricultural fields planted with brown-midrib (BMR) and non-brown-midrib (non-BMR) varieties. BMR corn has been in use and studied for a century, is easily digested by dairy cows, and can improve milk production. However, BMR corn is susceptible to disease risks and grows and develops quickly, requiring frequent monitoring.
The UAV imagery data was multispectral, meaning that it was acquired across multiple color bands. Using red edge and near infrared wavelengths and a machine learning classification of corn varieties, the researchers were able to distinguish the subtle differences between BMR and non-BMR corn by field with accuracies of up to 98.7%. Narrow-band red edge image data showed high potential for estimating corn yields.
“The team explored ways that UAV imagery could inform field-specific management practices to reduce crop damage and costs,” says Fraser. “It brought many areas of expertise, including Tom Beaudry, a certified crop advisor for dairy producers in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts, Carl Majewski, a UNH extension specialist, and Peter Davis and Aaron Palmer, UNH farm managers.”
The team’s research mitigates risks for farmers looking to work with new remote crop monitoring technologies by demonstrating the accuracy and utility of UAV observations. UAVs provide farmers with an affordable, flexible tool for proactively monitoring plant pests and diseases and assessing leaf area and yield. Using the data for consistent, reliable modeling of crop health and yield also provides vital insight for food management and for improving production methods.
“Our team is planning to work with additional private farms in the upcoming field seasons,” concludes Fraser. “We’ll look to quantify direct causes and amounts of loss within corn fields using the lessons learned from this research.”
******
The University of New Hampshire inspires innovation and transforms lives in our state, nation and world. More than 15,000 students from 50 states and 87 countries engage with an award-winning faculty in top-ranked programs in business, engineering, law, health and human services, liberal arts and the sciences across more than 200 programs of study. A Carnegie Classification R1 institution, UNH partners with NASA, NOAA, NSF, and NIH, and received over $250 million in competitive external funding in FY24 to further explore and define the frontiers of land, sea and space.
Journal
Agricultural Research
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Precision Agriculture: An Exploration of Remotely Sensed Data and Methods for Monitoring Corn Varieties
Article Publication Date
16-Jan-2026
Breakthroughs for preventing pistachio hull split
UC Davis scientists offer insights into breakage, with potential benefits for fruit crops
When pistachio hulls split before the nuts are harvested, insects and fungi can get inside, damaging the nut, costing farmers money and contaminating the nuts. About 4% of the overall crop experiences hull split, but some cultivars can split as much as 40% under certain conditions.
Now, for the first time, scientists at the University of California, Davis, are seeking solutions for California’s $2-billion-a-year pistachio industry. New research reveals how the hull is built and how cell walls in certain layers break down, along with the genes and corresponding mechanisms that spark and control those changes.
Pectin, a component of cell walls, makes fruit skin strong in part by keeping cells hitched to each other. In pistachio hulls, the composition of pectin changes as the hull ripens, causing the cells to come unhitched. This leads to cracks and tears in the hull.
In the Journal of Experimental Botany, recent Ph.D. graduate Shuxiao “Susan” Zhang, a student in the lab of Department of Plant Sciences Professor Georgia Drakakaki, identified genes that control how cell walls change as the fruit ripens, leading to the hull breaking down. The research will help breeders select for traits that will make the hulls less vulnerable to tearing and cracking.
“This is the first time anyone has studied the pistachio hull at the anatomical and cellular level while also looking at gene expression and physiological data,” Drakakaki said. “Susan really got into the details of how the hull is built with different layers and how the cells in those layers are of different sizes. The layers respond differently to changes in pectin, and that causes the hull to split in different ways.”
Zhang built on the work of two more scientists in the department and their teams. Grey Monroe, an assistant professor, and Barbara Blanco-Ulate, an associate professor, assembled a reference genome of Pistacia vera ‘Kerman,’ the leading female pistachio cultivar in California. They also defined the stages of the nut’s growth and the characteristics at each stage. Their work was published last year.
A model for fruit split in a variety of crops
Over three years, the team took samples of pistachio hulls from trees in a commercial orchard near Fresno and at the Wolfskill Experimental Orchard, operated by UC Davis near Winters, Calif. They worked with the most common varieties grown in the state, including Kerman, Golden Hills and Lost Hills. They took samples from trees at different points late in the hulls’ development, stretching over several months.
Using special imaging tools and techniques, Zhang and her team measured hull thickness and cell size, and they counted hulls that were intact, tattered, cracked or both. They also measured how well cells in the hull were sticking to each other, and in each sample counted the cells that had come unhitched.
Then the team pulled out RNA from the samples to learn which genes were being expressed at different stages as the hull develops and breaks down. They found that key genes express differently as that process unfolds.
Since all hulls were intact at 91 days after flowering, Zhang and team reasoned that fruit ripening may be linked with hull split. So, the team also examined the genes – including those involved in pectin modification -- that change the cell wall as the fruit ripens. Researchers discovered that cells in the interior layer of the hull expand, while cells in the exterior layer tend to stay the same size. This, in combination with changes in the cell wall, led to different types of hull breakdown.
“This is one of the major novelty factors for our paper,” Zhang said. “Loads of people have looked at pectin in all kinds of fruits, but not many people have observed that, depending on which cell layer you’re in, the pectin, cell size and so on will change differently during ripening.”
The physics of forces operating within the cell layers and humidity also influence degradation of the hull, Zhang found.
Because pistachio hulls are the fruit of the tree, even though we eat the seed, the research has applications for many non-berry fruit crops, Zhang concluded.
The California Pistachio Board funded most of this research, with additional support from the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the James Monroe McDonald Endowment and the University of California Agricultural and Natural Resources.
Pistachios were harvested at various points during the later stages of fruit ripening, then placed in a solution to preserve them for later examination.
Pistachios, with the greenish hull still on them, are placed on a dissecting microscope to observe the different layers of the hull.
Credit
Trina Kleist/UC Davis
Cells come unhitched from each other in this image of a pistachio hull where it has split. Look at about three o’clock in this photo where it’s violet; the cells look like they're all squished together. To get this image, scientist Shuxiao Zhang took advantage of the cells’ autoflourescence and used a Zeiss LSM980 microscope with 20x objectives.
Triterpenoid saponins are key bioactive compounds responsible for the medicinal value of many plants, yet how plants regulate the balance between saponin production and sterol biosynthesis has remained unclear. This study identifies two closely related enzymes that compete for the same metabolic precursor but drive it toward distinct biochemical outcomes. By uncovering how these enzymes function, interact, and are differentially regulated, the research reveals a molecular mechanism that determines whether metabolic flux is directed toward pharmacologically valuable saponins or essential sterols. The findings provide a mechanistic framework for understanding saponin biosynthesis and offer new molecular targets for improving the quality and yield of medicinal plant products.
Triterpenoid saponins are widely valued for their diverse pharmacological activities and also play important defensive roles in plants. These compounds are synthesized through the cyclization of a common precursor, 2,3-oxidosqualene, a reaction catalyzed by the 2,3-oxidosqualene cyclase (OSC) enzyme family. Different OSCs can channel this precursor into either saponin or sterol biosynthetic pathways, but the regulatory logic governing this metabolic branching has remained poorly understood. Previous studies mainly focused on enzyme structure or downstream modifications, while gene-level regulation received less attention. Based on these challenges, it is necessary to conduct in-depth research on how specific OSC genes and their regulators coordinate saponin biosynthesis.
Researchers from North China University of Science and Technology reported (DOI: 10.1093/hr/uhaf133) on May 21, 2025, in Horticulture Research a comprehensive molecular analysis of saponin biosynthesis in Eleutherococcus senticosus. The study identified two key OSC genes that determine whether metabolic flux is directed toward triterpenoid saponins or sterols. By combining genome-wide screening, biochemical assays, promoter analysis, and transcription factor studies, the research clarifies how enzyme competition and gene regulation together shape the accumulation of medicinally important saponins.
The researchers first identified ten OSC genes in the E. senticosus genome and narrowed them down to two functionally dominant candidates through expression profiling and metabolite correlation analysis. Functional assays confirmed that one enzyme acts exclusively as a β-amyrin synthase, directing metabolism toward oleanane-type saponins, while the other functions as a cycloartenol synthase that feeds sterol biosynthesis. Both enzymes localize primarily to the cytoplasm and compete for the same substrate, creating a metabolic trade-off.
Detailed structural analyses revealed distinct conserved amino acid triplets that define the catalytic specificity of each enzyme. Site-directed mutagenesis demonstrated that even single amino acid changes could dramatically alter product profiles or abolish enzyme activity. Beyond enzyme function, the study showed that gene expression is finely regulated by light quality, DNA methylation, and multiple transcription factors. Importantly, several transcription factors were found to exert opposite regulatory effects on the two competing genes, simultaneously promoting saponin synthesis while repressing sterol formation, or vice versa. This coordinated regulation provides a molecular explanation for how plants optimize secondary metabolite production.
According to the researchers, the most significant insight of this work is the discovery of a coordinated regulatory system that controls metabolic direction at both enzymatic and transcriptional levels. They note that identifying transcription factors capable of oppositely regulating two competing biosynthetic genes is particularly striking, as such dual control has rarely been documented in plants. This mechanism allows the plant to fine-tune resource allocation between growth-related sterols and defense- or health-related saponins, offering a powerful strategy for metabolic optimization.
The findings have important implications for medicinal plant improvement and metabolic engineering. By targeting specific OSC genes or their regulatory transcription factors, it may be possible to enhance the accumulation of valuable saponins without compromising plant viability. This strategy could support the development of higher-quality herbal medicines and functional plant products. More broadly, the study provides a conceptual model for controlling metabolic branch points in plant secondary metabolism. Such insights may be applied to other medicinal or industrial crops, enabling more precise manipulation of bioactive compound synthesis through genetic and environmental regulation.
This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32470398), the Central Guidance for Local Science and Technology Development Fund Projects (236Z2501G), and Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province (H2020209033).
Horticulture Research is an open access journal of Nanjing Agricultural University and ranked number one in the Horticulture category of the Journal Citation Reports ™ from Clarivate, 2023. The journal is committed to publishing original research articles, reviews, perspectives, comments, correspondence articles and letters to the editor related to all major horticultural plants and disciplines, including biotechnology, breeding, cellular and molecular biology, evolution, genetics, inter-species interactions, physiology, and the origination and domestication of crops.
Soybean farmers around the world face a persistent and costly enemy hidden beneath the soil: soybean cyst nematode (SCN), a microscopic roundworm that attacks plant roots and drains yields. SCN is one of the most damaging pests affecting soybean production globally, resulting in significant losses every year.
Most soybean varieties grown today rely on a very narrow set of resistance genes that originated from just a few soybean lines. Over time, SCN has adapted to these defenses, making the resistant varieties less effective and leaving farmers with fewer tools to protect their yields.
To identify new sources of resistance, a research team co-led by Gunvant Patil and Vikas Devkar from Texas Tech University, along with Sushil Chhapekar and Henry Nguyen from the University of Missouri, analyzed the genomes of over 1,100 soybean accessions, including both cultivated and wild varieties. They carefully compared key regions associated with resistance, revealing several soybean accessions with unique genetic profiles that are not found in commonly used resistant varieties. Some of these plants showed strong or broad resistance to multiple SCN populations, meaning they can defend against a wider range of soybean cyst nematodes.
The study also revealed a surprising finding: Soybean lines with similar profiles of known resistance genes sometimes showed very different levels of protection against the nematode. This suggests that additional, previously unknown resistance genes are helping the plant defend against infection, thus opening doors to discovering entirely novel resistance genes and mechanisms.
One soybean line in particular, known as PI 602492, and a wild soybean line PI 522226 stood out for their consistent resistance to several SCN populations. Importantly, their resistance appears to function independently of the genes that dominate modern soybean breeding.
Speaking about these new findings, Gunvant Patil said, “What excites us most is the discovery of entirely new and underutilized genetic sources of soybean cyst nematode (SCN) resistance that work independently of the resistance used in most commercial soybean varieties today.” He added, “Identifying accessions that remain effective against multiple nematode populations offers a real opportunity to overcome resistance breakdown and build more durable protection for soybean crops worldwide.”
Beyond immediate applications, this research highlights the value of wild and exotic soybean relatives, which are often overlooked in breeding programs. These plants harbor genetic diversity that could help future-proof crops against evolving pests under conditions of increasing agricultural pressure and climate change.
Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions® (MPMI) is a gold open access journal that publishes fundamental and advanced applied research on the genetics, genomics, molecular biology, biochemistry, and biophysics of pathological, symbiotic, and associative interactions of microbes, insects, nematodes, or parasitic plants with plants.
