Greenhouses are an integral part of U.S. agriculture. Nearly $200 million of food is produced in domestic greenhouses each year, and the facilities play a vital role in producing seeds and transplantable vegetation. Understanding how to keep greenhouse plants healthy can translate to increased revenue for producers.

Researchers have discovered that grazing animals such as deer and rabbits are actually helping to spread plant disease – quadrupling its prevalence in some cases – and encouraging an invasion of annual grasses that threaten more than 20 million acres of native grasslands in California.

How a bacterium overcomes a tomato plant's defences and causes disease, by sneakily disabling the plant's intruder detection systems, is revealed in new research out in Current Biology.

A WHEAT disease that could destroy most of the world’s main wheat crops could strike south Asia’s vast wheat fields two years earlier than research had suggested, leaving millions to starve. The fungus, called Ug99, has spread from Africa to Iran, and may already be in Pakistan.

Plant leaves and surfaces are teeming with microbial life, yet the insects that feed on plants lack adaptive immune systems to fend off any intruding microorganisms they eat along with their greens. Now research published in the online open access journal, BMC Biology shows how food-borne bacteria affect an insect’s immune system.

Disease resistance genes from three different grass species have been combined in the world’s first ‘trigenomic’ chromosome, which can now be used to breed disease resistant wheat varieties.

The full weight of a consortium of world-leading scientists – including those who helped decode the entire human genome – is being thrown at a parasitic worm less than 1mm long.

Scientists have made a key discovery into the genetics of the bacteria that causes blackleg, an economically damaging disease of potatoes, that could lead to new ways to fight the disease.

At least, that’s the picture being painted in the first waves of data being reaped from the genome sequence of the fungal plant pathogen, Fusarium graminearum. The sequencing has provided scientists a road map to someday combat a fungus that infects wheat and barley crops, rendering them unusable.

Botanists at Oregon State University have discovered that a single plant gene can cause resistance to one disease at the same time it produces susceptibility to a different disease – the first time this unusual phenomenon has ever been observed in plants.

Enjoying your August vacation? Well, (as they say in the summer movies) there’s a killer in the woods. Its strike has been consistently quiet, sudden, and deadly. Unknowingly, we have all been playing into its hands… But put down that rock -- you personally are not in any danger. It’s the woods themselves that are getting axed and you may be an accomplice.

The first all-African genetically modified crop plant with resistance to the severe maize streak virus (MSV), which seriously reduces the continent’s maize yield, has been developed by scientists from the University of Cape Town and PANNAR PTY Ltd, a South African seed company.