An international research team led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside and the La Jolla Institute for Immunology has found that malaria parasite genomes are shaped by parasite-specific gene families, and that this genome organization strongly correlates with the parasite’s virulence. Study results appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...

IIGB's Hailing Jin has secured a four-year grant aimed at halting the spread of a deadly bacterial disease that continues to spread among California’s citrus trees. The award of nearly $4 million, which comes from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, will help cure citrus trees affected by...

A team led by plant pathologist, Hailing Jin has identified a regulatory, genetic mechanism in plants that could lead to better strategies for protecting crops. Working on Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant widely used by biologists as a model species, Jin’s research team found that Argonaute protein, a major core protein in the RNA...

Mutualisms, which are interactions between members of different species that benefit both parties, are found everywhere — from exchanges between pollinators and the plants they pollinate, to symbiotic interactions between us and our beneficial microbes. Natural selection — the process whereby organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring —...