Plant Virus Spreads By Making Life Easy For Crop Pests
Monday, November 10, 2008 - 00:21
in Biology & Nature
In 752, Japanese Empress Koken wrote a short poem about the summertime yellowing of a field in what is thought to be the first account of a viral plant disease. More than 1,250 years later, scientists concluded that the virus Koken described was part of the particularly insidious geminivirus family that continues to decimate tomato, tobacco and cotton crops worldwide.