This study systematically evaluates the effects of straw returning practices—specifically the timing, depth, and amount—on the occurrence of major maize diseases (northern leaf blight and ear rot), the infestation by Ostrinia furnacalis, and grain yield in dryland farming. It provides practical guidelines for tailoring straw management strategies to differentially manage airborne diseases, soil-borne pathogens, and overwintering pests.

Find how Circularization for High-throughput Analysis of Nuclease Genome-wide Effects by Sequencing Base Editors (CHANGE-seq-BE) improves finding off-targets.

Why does cancer sometimes recur after chemotherapy? Why do some bacteria survive antibiotic treatment? In many cases, the answer appears to lie not in genetic differences, but in biological noise — random fluctuations in molecular activity that occur even among genetically identical cells.

Biological systems are inherently noisy, as molecules inside living cells are produced, degraded, and interact through fundamentally random processes. Understanding how biological systems cope with such fluctuations — and how they might be controlled — has been a long-standing challenge in systems and synthetic biology.

Although modern biology can regulate the average behavior of a cell population, controlling the unpredictable fluctuations of individual cells has remained a major challenge. These rare “outlier” cells, driven by stochastic variation, can behave differently from the majority and influence system-level outcomes.