In wealthy countries, the richest and the aspirational well-off can afford to pay extra for food only grown using toxic pesticides they are assured are healthy for the planet, but the 99.99999% have to think about affordability.

Every time a chemical is removed due to manufactured outrage by environmental groups and the fifth columnists they get implanted inside presidential administrations, it is the poor that pay the price. Cereal crops are a staple for those worried about food security, and are the earliest victims of pathogens and pests. And then the first target for activists in a $3 billion industry devoted to scaring people about science solutions. 

To help journalists move away from political kinship and consider science when they get press releases about the latest scary claim, Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions has published 19 papers that examine both host and pathogen biology at the molecular, cellular, and genomic levels. They topics include effector function and evolution, plant receptor mechanisms, pathogen physiology, and signal transduction pathways. 


B, Sporulating lesion on a rice leaf. C, Sporulating lesions on a wheat leaf. D, Rice panicle neck infections block all grain filling above the infection points (red arrows). E, Wheat spike blast with individual directly infected spikelets. F, Wheat rachis infections kill all spikelets above the infection points. Removed spikelets show stem infection points (red arrows) with gray sporulation. G, Finger millet neck infection (red arrow) kills all fingers on the seed head. H, Leaf lesions on perennial ryegrass showing white lesion centers after spore release. Credit: B and D to H, Reproduced with permission from Valent et al. [2020]—© The American Phytopathological Society. C, courtesy J. Toledo—reproduced with permission.

Rice blast disease has been joined by blast diseases affecting wheat and Lolium ryegrass, all caused by Pyricularia oryzae, for example, and work on these pathosystems is available for any student of plant pathology.