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Factories can retool to support the demands of conflict during times of war. Assembly lines switch from producing washing machines to aircraft engines, or from creating vehicle parts to machine guns. According to Xinnian Dong, a professor at Duke University, plants can also change their production from peacetime to wartime. Microbes, such as bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens, frequently damage crops and other plants. A plant modifies the chemical stew of proteins, the life's mainstay components, inside its cells when it detects a microbial incursion. Dong and her research team have been piecing together how they accomplish it over the past few years. Dong and lead author Jinlong Wang describe the essential elements in plant cells that reconfigure their protein-making machinery to fight disease in a new study that was just published in the journal Cell. Bacterial and fungal diseases reduce crop productivity by about 15% annually, costing the world economy over $220 billion. For...