Herbicide resistance poses a challenge to producing enough food for a growing population. Sam Caygill and colleagues at the Gregor Mendel Institute (GMI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences discovered how a large group of plants, the bryophytes, are naturally tolerant to the herbicide glyphosate – something that had only been known anecdotally from horticulture. Understanding the mechanism through which some plants are naturally tolerant to herbicides gives researchers an important starting point for tackling the problem of herbicide resistance in agriculture.