Few things are scarier to a pumpkin farmer than the letters CMV. They stand for cucumber mosaic virus, a pathogen that lays waste to entire fields of pumpkins, cucumbers, and melons. Now, researchers have found a way to quickly develop vaccines that could eventually protect crops from viral pathogens.
“This is a really neat finding,” says Anna Whitfield, a plant pathologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh who was not involved in the study. Viruses are an ever-evolving threat to global food security, Whitfield says, and the new technique might help farmers keep up with the constantly changing pathogens.
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