A team led by plant biologists at the Universities of Freiburg and Göttingen in Germany has shown for the first time that mosses have a mechanism to protect them against cold that was previously known only in flowering plants. Professor Ralf Reski at the Cluster of Excellence Centre for Integrative Biological Signalling Studies (CIBSS) at the University of Freiburg and Professor Ivo Feussner at the Center for Molecular Biosciences (GZMB) at the University of Göttingen have also demonstrated that this mechanism has an evolutionarily independent origin—mosses and flowering plants use a similar mechanism that hinges on distantly related genes. Moreover, it protects the organisms against pathogens as well as cold. The moss Physcomitrella and the flowering plant Arabidopsis served as model organisms. The team has published its study in the journal Nature Plants.