Chenxin Li, PhD

Here is a thread showcasing my GitHub repositories: 1) Friends Don't Let Friends Make Bad Graphs. An opinionated essay on good and bad graphs. My popular one by a long shot with 6.4k stars and 248 forks. github.com/cxli233/Frie...

How do unrelated plants make the same neuroactive molecules? Here, we show how two medicinal plants independently evolved to produce alkaloids that inhibit monoamine oxidase, a historical target of antidepressants. Excellent work by @fabiolamurov.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

FACULTY POSITION: We are seeking an Assistant Professor to join our growing and vibrant Department of Microbiology at Cornell! FOCUS: Using bacteria to address 21st century challenges. (part of a cohort hire in SynBio). *please repost* academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/33098 #MicroSky

Engineering BBM cis-regulatory elements releases epigenetic repression to enable highly efficient parthenogenesis and haploid induction #research #MolecularPlant cell.com/molecular-pl...

New preprint drop! I think this fun little story on Berkson's paradox will become essential reading for computational biology/genomics, where I think it commonly occurs but is poorly known. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

💡We’re recruiting two junior postdoctoral researchers to join our growing interdisciplinary and international team working on climate resilience and sustainable crop protection! Please apply here: www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

When I talk to lay folks, I often point out that biology is really exceptionology, I.e., the science of exceptions. Today, it has become easier than ever to study “weird” phenomena. I’m a bit of two minds whether that is always good, as “exceptions often prove (only) the rule”, as the saying goes.

Jasmonates promote myrosin idioblast cell development via MYC2-mediated activation of the FAMA-bHLH090 pathway in Arabidopsis (Lijuan Zhou , Zijing Zhang , Siyuan Liu , et al) doi.org/10.1093/plph... #PlantScience @aspbofficial

VACANCY: Postdoctoral Researcher in the Berasategui Lab at TSL, Norwich, UK @berasymbionts.bsky.social Work at the interface of evolutionary genomics, plant pathology and insect symbiosis, within a world-class research environment. Application review starts 16 Nov 2026 buff.ly/WZtMcGs

🚨Preprint from our lab🚨 How and when did TADs emerge during evolution? 🐁🐟🪰 HINT: the diversification of CTCF regulation and functions enabled new mechanisms of 3D chromatin folding 🧬 With Liene Astica & @rdacemel.bsky.social Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Bluetorial 1/15👇

I noticed because there are so much AI slop online, people get tired of it very quickly. For example, on YouTube, viewers prefer their contents created by real humans who put in real efforts.

Once in a blue moon: an unexpected evolutionary route to blue floral pigmentation in orchids https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.20.760294v1

New OA Brief Comm: "Metabolically robust ratiometric autoluminescent reporters" rdcu.be/MdNALGQ53dGa In glowing plants, monitoring colour shifts instead of changes in luminescence intensity enables quantitative measurements of physiology despite changes in metabolic activity. #PlantScience

LLMs, asked to "peer" review 200 papers published this year in top science and medicine journals, either rejected or recommended major revisions 76% of the time. Telling the LLMs the paper was a revision paper made them much more generous. arxiv.org/abs/2610.31414

So what are the lessons from that? 1) Barely anybody in our society cares about understanding chemistry. You only needed to know a little chemistry to understand the problem here, but there was no critical mass. Relatedly because of this status quo there’s no market for good chemistry journalism.

Professorship Experimental Plant Biochemistry. Tübingen, Germany. #plantscijob #plantscijobs #plantsciencejob www.academics.de/jobs/w3-prof...

In the age of generative AI, the assumption that writing a paper requires doing science does not hold. This Perspective by @blekhman.bsky.social argues that the field's response to AI-generated papers should be predicated on clarity of purpose for bioresearch. 🧪 #AcademicSky plos.io/47wZsKo

Three years ago, my dad said that all fish are the same shape. Out of spite, I decided to draw all 478 families of bony fish listed in Nelson 2016. There's still some stuff I need to edit and some fish I want to redraw but, after 985 days, I finished my big dumb fish project last night.

How to prompt a person who lacks self-reflection to have more self-reflection? Asking for my parents.

My job aside, I actually do linear algebra for fun, because I play minesweeper everyday, which is just solving linear equations.

Deer in backyard. The same one from a few weeks ago judging from the antlers.

Winner winner arxiv.org/pdf/2610.27918 "AI disclosure. During the writing of this paper, we had several conversations with Claude, 55, owner of the neighborhood bar in Strasbourg. Unfortunately, none of them was of relevance to the topics of the paper."

Good one. "The author is ... not a researcher, and has no training in as- tronomy... the author has not independently checked the analyses and does not have the expertise to verify every technical detail" arxiv.org/pdf/2610.28575

This is so fucking disgusting. Imagine having a billion dollars and deciding that instead of curing disease you will torture dogs.

Wow coming from a former NSF director

Wow eye opener

One of the most-viewed PNAS articles in the last week is “The more you automate, the less you see: Hidden pitfalls of autonomous AI scientists.” Explore the article here: https://ow.ly/IkQT5100aEv For more trending articles, visit https://ow.ly/Br6s5100aEw.

This ginger sprout is already growing tiny rhizomes

Come join our fantastic department!!!

The one time this happened to me it was because the reviewer was about to publish a very similar paper and wanted to be first.

Wow. At first I thought this is some kind of anti-AI ad but reading this thread it’s a real Microsoft ad for copilot.

Are plant roots really made up of concentric layers of homogeneous, differentiating cell types? In our new study, out now in @nature.com, we show a more complex picture: two distinct cell states within root lineages, shaped in part by the environment. 🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Agrobacterium-mediated transient expression has revolutionized plant research, but is largely confined to solanaceous species. This study shows that an engineered strain allows efficient transient expression across diverse dicot crop species. 🧪 #AcademicSky #plants plos.io/3W0hqlP

The first genuinely honest ad for generative AI I've ever seen, from Microsoft / CoPilot A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks AI to *literally copy it*, and then he gets all the praise instead: www.ispot.tv/ad/SoDi/micr...

Thrilled to share my freshly "baked" Baker lab paper. We took a bottom-up approach to designing transcriptional regulators. Instead of relying on natural activation domains, we designed compact proteins that recruit specific cofactors. Activators for now, repressors to come!

An attempt to explain what this does, using a simple case. How much 'tangle' in a synteny plot comes how we chose to order chromosomes, and how much is unavoidable because it represents accurate crossings in the data? 1/

It’s been a long time coming, but now it’s here. The work was started with @kaspervangelderen.bsky.social as postdoc in my lab, and further developed by our talented PhD candidate @kyravandervelde.bsky.social

Please share! Our department has two tenure-track job ads up today. Here is the #botany job, with an open mind towards multiple subdisciplines. Fantastic facilities, perfect-sized institution, easy living. Come work here! bsu.wd12.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job... @botsocamerica.bsky.social

And now the second preprint of the lab! doi.org/10.64898/202... HY5 shoot-root movement is real and it is necessary and sufficient for the root developmental response to neighbour shading. This is a story in collaboration with the lab of @ronaldpierik.bsky.social + @kyravandervelde.bsky.social

Back to my office after teaching: "Who am I? Where am I? What am I doing?"

Job! 🤩👀👇🏽

Design of synthetic activators for programmable gene expression https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.19.760300v1