For organisms to grow and develop, they must produce tissues with distinct functions, each one made up of similar cells

Streptomyces produce the majority of clinically useful antibiotics, yet we don’t fully understand how they grow

The flush of flowering of poppies in a field makes the point very visually – the control of flowering time is a tightly regulated process

A new technique will allow plant breeders to introduce valuable crop traits even without access to the full genome sequence of that crop

Many plant and animal pathogens deploy effector proteins as part of their ‘molecular arsenal’ to facilitate infection and colonisation of their hosts. New research has revealed the structure of a bacterial effector molecule bound to its target protein in the host

Dr Saskia Hogenhout, in collaboration with the Dr Eduardo Bejarano from the University of Malaga (Spain) and Dr Ian Bedford, will pursue an innovative global health and development research project

A new centre of excellence for plant and microbial research is planned in China following a joint symposium in Shanghai between researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the John Innes Centre

Barley grown in Scandinavian countries is adapted in a similar way to reindeer to cope with the extremes of day length at high latitudes

The use of new genomic techniques and increased sequencing power promise to help breeding crops, but for wheat the pipeline from the laboratory to the field is held up by wheat’s complex genome and the lack of the kind of detailed genome sequence available for simpler plants