For as long as people have farmed, it has been known that planting the same crop in the same field without change over the years leads to reduced crop yield. Decaying plant material from past harvests leaves extracellular, or free-drifting, plant DNA in the soil, that prohibits the growth of new plants of the same species. This phenomenon, known as toxicity, is responsible for a plant–soil negative feedback mechanism

Dr Annalisa Iuorio from the University of Vienna, a specialist in the mathematical modelling of dynamic systems in ecological settings, researched the effects of toxicity on vegetation distribution. They hope that their research can be applied to  other fields in biology, even including  cancer research. This research supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

Read the original article: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.29.226522