Plants 'mixing Chemical Cocktails' to Resist Devastating Disease (IMAGE)
Caption
Bacterial wilt devastates major food crops world-wide, including tomatoes, potatoes, bananas and giner. So far farmers had to wait for mature plants to observe resistance to the disease. Now a new approach promises to forecast cultivar resistance much earlier than was possible before. At seedling stage, the plants are already able to "mix cocktails" of metabolic chemicals to defend themselves. In this image, the peaks show metabolites from four tomato cultivars. Ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry base peak intensity/ion chromatograms were used to produce the graphs.
Credit
Dylan Zeiss, University of Johannesburg
Usage Restrictions
None
License
Licensed content