In the 1980s it was discovered that some relatives of the bacterium Burkholderia cepacia (formerly Pseudomonas cepacia) were able to form close relationships with plant roots, and also make a range of antimicrobials capable of killing plant pathogens. Several US pesticide companies exploited this bacterium... click to read more

Our group together with an international team of scientists successfully recovered and analyzed ancient DNA from Egyptian mummies dating from approximately 1400 BC to 400 AD, establishing ancient Egyptian mummies as a reliable source for genetic material to study the ancient past. The study, published... click to read more

DNA is the core-element of life as we know it. It can be imagined as a long helical double strand composed of sequences of information written with four chemical "letters" called nucleotides. Determinate sequences of letters delineate stretches of DNA called genes, which in turn... click to read more

While many people remember the wonderful flavor of a garden-grown heirloom tomato, this flavor is not found in modern commercial tomatoes. Modern tomato breeding has focused on disease resistance, yield, shelf-life and firmness for shipping. While these traits are essential for large scale year-round production... click to read more

Diabetes, infertility, cancer, allergies, Alzheimer's disease - the key to one day preventing or even curing such afflictions and diseases (both infectious and genetically driven) may be locked in our own genetic code and the code of microorganisms that inhabit our bodies. Genomics, the study... click to read more