“It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people doesn’t add up to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” Humphrey Bogart famously said in the movie Casablanca. For the farmers and breeders around the world growing the common bean, however, ensuring that there is an abundant supply of this… [Read More]

Citrus is the world’s most widely cultivated fruit crop. In the U.S. alone, the citrus crop was valued at over $3.1 billion in 2013.  Originally domesticated in Southeast Asia thousands of years ago before spreading throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas via trade, citrus is now under attack from citrus greening, an insidious emerging infectious… [Read More]

In the Lewis Carroll classic, Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty states, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” In turn, Alice (of Wonderland fame) says, “The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things.” All organisms on Earth use a genetic code, which is… [Read More]

Despite its name, the Dead Sea does support life, and not just in the sense of helping visitors float in its waters. Algae, bacteria, and fungi make up the limited number of species that can tolerate the extremely salty environment at the lowest point on Earth. Some organisms thrive in salty environments by lying dormant… [Read More]

The game where one has to guess how many jelly beans or marbles can fill a jar should never be played with the cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus. By some estimates, in a single liter of water as many as 100 million cells of this tiny bacterium can be found. These important organisms serve as the base of… [Read More]

For soil microbiology, it is the best of times. While no one has undertaken an accurate census, a spoonful of soil holds hundreds of billions of microbial cells, encompassing thousands of species. “It’s one of the most diverse microbial habitats on Earth, yet we know surprisingly little about the identities and functions of the microbes… [Read More]

Duckweed is a tiny floating plant that’s been known to drive people daffy. It’s one of the smallest and fastest-growing flowering plants that often becomes a hard-to-control weed in ponds and small lakes. But it’s also been exploited to clean contaminated water and as a source to produce pharmaceuticals. Now, the genome of Greater Duckweed… [Read More]

Ocean sponge-dwelling bacteria have hidden talents. The kidney-red coral reef sponge, Theonella swinhoei, is a source of several anti-fungal and anti-cancer drug candidates. These compounds aren’t produced by the sponge itself, but by symbiotic bacteria that live inside it. The compounds in question are called polyketides, secondary metabolites that happen to be made by just two… [Read More]

Amborella trichopoda, a sprawling shrub that grows on just a single island in the remote South Pacific, is the only plant in its family and genus. It is also one of the oldest flowering plants, having branched off from others about 200 million years ago. Now, researchers from Indiana University, with the U.S. Department of… [Read More]

Glomeromycota is an ancient lineage of fungi that has a symbiotic relationship with roots that goes back nearly 420 million years to the earliest plants. More than two thirds of the world’s plants depend on this soil-dwelling symbiotic fungus to survive, including critical agricultural crops such as wheat, cassava, and rice. The analysis of the… [Read More]