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Carminati, A., Javaux, M., Wankmüller, F. J. P. & Brodribb, T. J. (2026). Soils drive convergence in the regulation of vascular tension in land plants. Science, 391(6784), 476–479.

When soils dry, plants close their stomata to limit water loss. When exactly this happens depends strongly on the soil itself. Research by Andrea Carminati shows that soil physics sets a common hydraulic threshold for stomatal regulation across very different vascular plant species.

Medici, L. Å., Lüthi, A., Niklaus, P. A., van der Heijden, M. G. A., Walder, F. & Langer, M. (2026). Ten grassland and arable soils show variable microbial responses to realistic pesticide mixtures. Applied Soil Ecology, 223,107035.

Agricultural soils are exposed to mixtures of pesticides throughout the growing season, yet their combined effects on soil life remain poorly understood. A study shows that key nutrient-cycling functions remain largely stable, while pesticide mixtures can alter fungal communities and decomposition processes, with effects depending strongly on land-use history.

Chandra, A., Grabs, J., Meemken, E.-M., Hidayat, N. K., Dharmawan, A. H., Mardiyaningsih, D. I. & Garrett, R. D. (2026). Limited reach of zero-deforestation commitments to Indonesian oil palm smallholders. Nature Sustainability 9, 1338–1351.

Over the past decade, voluntary zero-deforestation commitments have become a central component of corporate sustainability strategies in global agricultural supply chains. These initiatives have encouraged companies to reduce forest conversion, but their effectiveness depends on whether they reach the millions of smallholder farmers who supply international markets.

Fu, Y., Schmid, M. W. & Simonini, S. (2026). CUT&Tag for High-Resolution Epigenomic Profiling From a Low Amount of Arabidopsis Tissue. Plant Direct, 10, e70161.

Mapping chromatin states shows where epigenetic regulation is encoded. A new method gives plant developmental genetics a cost-effective approach for examining chromatin states in scarce tissues and at developmental stages that were previously difficult to analyse genome-wide.

Wang, H., Li, X., Zhai, K., Rhodes, J., Sang, T., Zhao, J., Gao, Y., Ma, S., Song, B., Pan, Q., Hu, M., Xin, P., Chu, J., Wang, P., Zipfel, C. & Zhou, J.-M. (2026). A regulatory network promotes apoplastic alkalinization to prime plant immunity in tissues distal to site of infection. Cell,189,1389–1406.e19.

Plant immunity begins with the recognition of pathogens at the cell surface, but effective defence requires these signals to be amplified and coordinated across tissues. A series of studies reveals how plants can broaden pathogen recognition, and identifies changes in extracellular pH as a key mechanism linking immune perception to signalling and defence priming.