Fifty years after her death in New York, Hannah Arendt has become the most popular philosopher of our time. For good reason: Her views are just as timely as ever.

Rewilding corn with ancestral traits helps crops shape soil microbiomes, reduce fertilizer use, and supports sustainable farming.

Drought is a key factor that affects food production and represents one of the major challenges to global food security, especially with the increasing human population. One of the main strategies to...

Infiltration of Agrobacterium tumefaciens into Nicotiana benthamiana has become a foundational technique in plant biology, enabling efficient delivery of transgenes in planta with technical ease, robu...

Endosymbioses represent dynamic relationships between organisms that may involve antagonistic phases during their emergence. Here, we induced cell-in-cell interactions between the free-living bacterium Ralstonia pickettii and an endosymbiont-free strain of the fungus Rhizopus microsporus using fluidic force microscopy to investigate the early phase of endosymbiosis formation. Following the implantation of bacteria into the cytosol, the rapid proliferation of R. pickettii compromised host fitness, as evidenced by reduced fungal viability, and triggered immune responses characterized by upregulated expression of stress-related defense genes. Vertical transmission of bacteria across fungal generations enabled repeated rounds of selective passaging, ultimately resulting in transcriptional relaxation of the fungal defense response. High-throughput-imaging revealed that the propagated system accommodated higher bacterial loads within viable spores, with a corresponding reduction in fungal growth. The observed physiological changes and comparative fungal transcriptomic profiles indicated adaptive resilience and a shift from antagonism to commensalism. This transition was characterized by attenuated expression of genes involved in cell wall remodeling and reactive oxygen metabolism. Our experimental system provides insights into the early processes of endosymbiosis, supporting the hypothesis that facultative intracellular pathogens can serve as intermediates toward stable endosymbiotic relationships.

All of life encodes information with DNA. While tools for sequencing, synthesis, and editing of genomic code have transformed biological research, intelligently composing new biological systems would ...

Common mycorrhizal networks (CMNs) facilitate chemical communication between plants. Zhang et al. demonstrate the transfer of jasmonic acid via CMN from Botrytis cinerea-infected donor plants to healt...

An exploration of previously undescribed variants from the long tail of the CRISPR–Cas distribution.

Forest decline is a complex phenomenon; however, there is often a tendency to oversimplify by attributing it to a single cause, neglecting the interaction of multiple factors. Ever since the detection...

The accelerating convergence of climate change, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity represents one of the defining challenges of this century. Agri-food systems are under increasing pressure to deliver safe, nutritious, and sufficient food while limiting environmental harm, prompting the search for new scientific approaches to guide innovation. Among these, microbiome research has emerged as both transformative and integrative. In their lead article in Frontiers in Science, “Harnessing agri-food system microbiomes for sustainability and human health,” Fernández-Gómez et al. (1) highlight the pivotal role of microbial networks across soils, aquatic environments, crops, livestock, food processing, and human health. Their review provides a timely anchor for this special editorial project, positioning microbiomes at the intersection of sustainability, resilience, and the One Health framework.

Plants have both fought and cooperated with microbes for as long as they have existed, so their ability to distinguish friends from foes is an important evolutionary adaptation (Delaux and Schornack, 2021). The soil microbiome includes both pathogens and mutualistic symbiotic partners like rhizobia and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMFs). How do plants fine-tune their molecular responses to accommodate beneficial microbes while defending against invaders? Three recent publications have begun to unravel this complex puzzle (Zhang et al., 2024; Tan et al., 2025; Wang et al., 2025). Collectively, these studies present a molecular framework involving the lysin-motif-receptor-like kinases (LysM-RLKs) and cytoplasmic kinases that allow plants to precisely decode microbial messages (Figure 1).

Forest decline is a complex process rarely attributable to a single cause. Nevertheless, when widespread tree mortality occurs, management responses often focus on one primary agent. Our recent study ...

The clock is ticking for Russia’s leader – and that means Europe faces an imminent danger