News by Subject Biology

Combining economics, psychology and studies of fertilizer application, researchers find that plants nearly follow an "equal pay for equal work" rule when giving resources to partner microbes - except when those microbes underperform.

A recent collaboration between scientists in Michigan and Massachusetts as well as South Korea resulted in the development of a novel and broadly applicable molecular assay that used a model fungus to investigate how plant fungal pathogens circumvent the bioactivity of SDHIs. Through this analysis, they were able to successfully validate known mechanisms of fungicide resistance in several agriculturally important fungal pathogens.

A new study from researcher at Whitehead Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a way to more efficiently produce biofuels from woody plant materials such as corn residues and some grasses.

A beetle bores a tree trunk to build a gallery in the wood in order to protect its lay. As it digs the tunnel, it spreads ambrosia fungal spores that will feed the larvae. When these bore another tree, the adult beetles will be the transmission vectors of the fungal spores in another habitat. This mutualism among insects and ambrosia fungi could be more than 100 years old, more than what was thought to date.

Oregon State University research has identified the oldest known specimen of a fungus parasitizing an ant, and the fossil also represents a new fungal genus and species.

Climate warming plays a larger role than plant genes in influencing the number and identity of fungal species on oak leaves, especially in autumn. Recently published in the journal New Phytologist, this research by ecologists sheds light on how warming and tree genes affect the dynamics of fungal communities across the season.