Viruses are incapable of reproducing without the help of a host, whose cells copy their genetic material and fabricate the building blocks of new virus particles.
Plants may trick bacteria into attacking before the microbial population reaches a critical size, allowing the plants to successfully defend the weak invasion.
In discovering their shared ancestry, a distantly related animal geneticist and plant pathologist find a common thread in their work on immune receptors.
There are many ways that epigenetic effects regulate the activation or repression of genes. Here are a few molecular tricks cells use to read off the right genetic program.
Epigenetic events regulate the activities of genes without changing the DNA sequence. Different genes are expressed depending on the methyl-marks attached to DNA itself and by changes in the structure and/or composition of chromatin.