Many plants produce chemicals to protect themselves from being eaten. But how do they protect themselves from these chemicals? To understand this, researchers studied a chemical (diterpene glycosides) produced by wild tobacco plants. They found that these substances were stored in a non-toxic form inside the plant and when the insect feeds on it, the non-toxic molecule cleaves off and the chemical turns toxic.
Garnet sand beach on Goodenough Island, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. (Photo credit: Professor Paul Fitzgerald)
History written in sands
One particular type of rice plant grown in Zhejiang,China was found to be resistant to the plant pathogen
Burkholderia plantarii. But how and why? Researchers who studied the seed of the plant found that a bacteria called
Sphingomonas meloni that lived inside the seed helped the plant gain this resistance. The bacteria produce an acid called anthranilic acid which inhibits the pathogen thus saving the crop.
Pocket-sized DNA sequencer
Minion device. Credit: https://nanoporetech.com/
Weighing just 450gm and measuring 14cm, Oxford Nanopore Technologies’ MinION device has helped sequence DNA on the go. Now, using special molecular tags, a team from the University of British Columbia has reduced the error rate to less than 0.005%. “A beautiful thing about this method is that it is applicable to any gene of interest that can be amplified.it can be very useful in any field where the combination of high-accuracy and long-range genomic information is valuable, such as cancer re