Sharpshooters have a rather peculiar diet, which consists solely of xylem sap, a water fluid they suck out of plants. The problem is that xylem sap is basically 95% water with very few nutrients.

“By using this microbial cell factory, you can bypass extracting tons of xylem sap and thus destroying dozens of trees to discover the molecules important for the physiology of plants,” said Li in a ...

Guttation is a process by which plants release water, nutrients and minerals in the form of xylem sap. This sap is often mistaken for plain water and is most common in certain varieties of plants ...

Water in the plant is under a negative water potential, or in common terms, under tension. In the winter, when deciduous trees have no leaves, the water pressure in the sap becomes positive. A flow ...