A new study, led by Hirofumi Nakagami at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany, demonstrates that one of the two branches of plant immunity was likely to have evolved early during the establishment of plants on dry land. This insight into prehistoric plant immunity may have implications for breeding more resistant plant species.
 

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research shed light on how harmful fungi evade recognition by their plant hosts and aid infection.
 

Plants show enormous variety in traits relevant to breeding, such as plant height, yield and resistance to pests. One of the greatest challenges in modern plant research is to identify the differences in genetic information that are responsible for this variation. A research team led by the "Crop Yield" working group at the Institute for Molecular Physiology at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) and at Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne (MPIPZ), together with the Carnegie Institution of Science at Stanford, has now developed a method to identify precisely these special differences in genetic information. Using the example of maize, they demonstrate the great potential of their method in the journal Genome Biology and present regions in the maize genome that may help to increase yields and resistance to pests during breeding.

Together with our University partners in Cologne and Düsseldorf we train about 90 mostly international doctoral students and are inviting talented young researchers to apply for individual open positions and to our structured IMPRS programme.

Since 2019, all MPIPZ postdocs take part of a Career Development Program. This program aims to support them success in their careers.