Agriculture and forestry

Invertebrates such as flying insects play a key role in the freshwater ecosystem: they filter water, transport nutrients and break down organic material. These abilities have long made them an indicator of water quality. In a long-term study, an international team of researchers has investigated how species diversity has developed in European rivers.

Photosynthesis is by far the most important metabolic process on earth. Without it, there would be no life. With the help of sunlight, plants, algae and also some bacteria can convert water and carbon dioxide (CO2) into sugar and oxygen. Plants need CO2 to generate the necessary energy and thus biomass for their growth. As a result of increasingly frequent droughts, however, the photosynthetic behavior of plants has changed within the day, as an international study by researchers from South Korea, the USA and Germany shows.

Every year, fungal diseases cause major yield losses in cereals worldwide. At the molecular biological level, there is a constant arms race between plants and their pathogens. Fungi use certain molecules, known as effectors, to trick the plant's immune system. The plant, in turn, learns to recognize these effectors and still activate its defenses. The fungi then change their effectors, and the plant must again develop immune receptors to recognize them. And so the game goes on and on.

Paper or packaging usually consists of pulp obtained from wood. However, paper production is very energy-intensive. Moreover, wood grows only slowly and demand has increased in recent years, as the raw material has long since become an important source for sustainable products such as bio-based plastics. But there are alternatives: Cellulose can also be obtained from other plants such as grass.

According to the United Nations, up to 150 million tons of plastic end up in the world's oceans every year. A sad testament to the scale of pollution are the five giant plastic islands floating on the surface. The gradual breakdown of plastics into microplastics is a global problem and increasingly endangers the lives of marine life. However, the pollution of the environment by plastic waste no longer affects only seas and oceans.

Wheat is one of the most important foods in Germany. According to the Federal Statistical Office, 22 million tons of winter wheat were harvested in Germany last year - around five percent more than the year before. But the grain is sensitive to environmental influences, as the past heat years have shown. In Hesse alone, a third of the harvest was lost to heat and drought in 2018. Technology, fertilizers and artificial irrigation also reached their limits.

Humans, animals, plants and single-celled organisms use small biomolecules as signaling substances to send messages or trigger reactions. "Microorganisms produce a variety of such substances, and we are just beginning to understand this language," says Axel Brakhage, director of the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology and professor at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He and his research group have found that representatives of the bacterial genus Streptomyces are particularly capable of communication.

Already to be found in some supermarkets: glass mini-farms in which lettuce or herbs grow on several floors in a special nutrient solution without pesticides under LED light and are sold freshly harvested directly on site. This controlled and resource-conserving plant cultivation in so-called vertical farms is not only sustainable, but the yields are also significantly higher, according to experts. For companies in the food industry, urban plant cultivation thus opens up entirely new opportunities.