The plant that builds its poison with a bacterium's tool.
Securinine is a potent alkaloid from a shrub in the spurge family. A York team found the gene that makes it looks less like a plant gene than a microbial one — and that plants may be doing this far more often than anyone assumed.
Chorigyne cylindrica.
What looks like wreckage at the base of the spadix is the residue of an organized event — sterile threads that extended, released scent for weevils, and were let go.
Is a Vital Biodiversity Database Going Dark?
Nobody cut this — the third grant phase was written in 2021 with an end date, and it is arriving on schedule. What breaks on August 31 is a storage layer everyone treated as permanent because it kept working.