PlantEvolution 🌱🌾

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.

Half a century ago, King & Wilson proposed that humans differ from chimpanzees mainly through changes in gene regulation. In our new preprint, we used AlphaGenome to map such changes genome-wide, across tissues of the human body! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This looks very interesting to clean up alignments: academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Viruses have parasites too. Our new preprint shows how phages use VIPR to silence parasitic satellites, and how the satellites fight back with its own decoy VIPR RNAs that redirect VIPR to DNA REP elements in the host genome!! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

11 points and 4 pages of comments (!) from a reviewer after the revision. Who does this ? If you want to kill the paper just tell the editor it is not important enough. It would be nicer than forcing us to spend 1 year bogged down in revisions

With all the deserved uproar over AI-created deep-fake images, I found this story about deep-fake plant species created by Herbarium collectors in the 1800s a fun parallel 🧪 www.kew.org/read-and-wat...

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

Huge congratulations to @vivzhong.bsky.social, @michaelajonesphd.bsky.social and team on the publication of their work in Nature Biotechnology today! They engineered plants to produce a non-canonical amino acid that regulates gene expression in engineered microbes! 🌱 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Less than 5% chance!!! Come on @erc.europa.eu We need to find a solution. Otherwise, we will lose a generation of young researchers.

Very excited to be part of the 2026 #PackardFellows from the Packard Foundation @packardfdn.bsky.social This will enable us to pursue bold studies of rapid evolution in plants, from the Arabidopsis plant to neotropical rainforests! www.packard.org/2026fellows ls.berkeley.edu/news/mois%C3...

Don’t miss the deadline (Oct 31) if you want to apply for a faculty position in Evolutionary Biology in my department! facultypositions.stanford.edu/jobs/assista...

I deny the fly Is good for studying TEs; I disavow the cow Has much heritability. I spurn the worm As an ecological tool, But the primate I repudiate: A model for the fool

SCOOP: 'Tommy' from the now-viral exchange with Abdul El-Sayed is Thomas Teepell, a former staffer for Republican Senator Josh Hawley with close ties to Christian Nationalist Sean Feucht. He's the son of a former Bobby Jindal staffer whose consultant work was instrumental in getting Hawley elected.

“Don’t use real-world locations,” ChatGPT told the shooter, later adding: “You can still be twisted. Just be clever about it.” Our investigation uncovers how OpenAI's chatbot fed a school shooter’s violent fantasies and planning for a massacre

Barack Obama just delivered a blistering rebuke of Trump's actions against Ilhan Omar. This is worth reading in full.

First, Thomas Teepell is not a voter. He lives in a different state. He was a political plant. Or, if you will, a paid protester. He is an agitator. Second, Abul El-Sayed responded with more patience than most people could muster. Calling him an angry, overly defensive jerk is you projecting.

a norwegian on Threads posted this and i just don’t know how much more clearly we can emphasize how much Americans are being ripped off by our system which is built to concentrate wealth at the top

There is much to admire in Abdul El-Sayed's response to the GOP plant in his audience. But one of the most deft things he did was to point out (twice) that our Constitution protects our right to follow *no* religion, thereby casting Christian nationalist Tommy as the actual religious extremist.

42% of Americans with cancer deplete their life savings within two years. Breaking Bad was a documentary

Big AI is spending big against me, because I'm for taking them on.

A study in the South China Sea found that a deep-sea mining trial significantly disrupted the microbial ecosystem, altering nutrient cycling and energy flow. 🌊

IMO the paper of the year in the gene regulation field - such a clean and clear study, showing how promoter-enhancer contacts mediate transcriptional activation. www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

This is Tommy. Tommy had a question about my allegiances. Listen to the end to hear about his.

Wait, wait, what !!!!! Regulation of target gene expression by chromatin-associated protein-coding transcripts in plants 686 protein-coding transcripts that mediate cross-locus chromatin interactions in Arabidopsis www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Have been very tempted to send in the following review: “This paper does a lot and reports a lot for the benefit of future LLM analyses. But it does not find anything. If they did, they don’t tell us what they found, why it’s new, or why it’s important. I refuse to play “Where’s Waldo” sorry.”

When you’re in Japan 🇯🇵 and suddenly think you’ve been teletransported back to Germany 🇩🇪

Online now: Back to seedlings: rethinking the slow–fast continuum across tree life stages

Delighted to share this new article where we propose our view for the next generation of human genetics. We argue a need for "Trait Causal Models" linking genetics to effects at all levels of biological structures, and talk about how to get there using gwas, perturbations and observational omics

One of the first things I was taught as a youngster when contributing to hefty papers was that it's not about convincing the critical reviewer, but wearing them out. A war of attrition packed into endless polite sentences, additional analyses and distractions masking as triangulation 😐

Our transient expression system for diverse crops is now published in PLOS Biology! Check it out and see if we tested your favourite species... 🌱 doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Saw this cool work in a recent seminar by @harmitmalik.bsky.social "Mst77F protects the D. melanogaster X chromosome from a killer-target meiotic drive system in a dosage- and sequence-dependent manner."

Very excited to share the first preprint from my PhD with the community! This is also the first paper from the Plant Immunogenomics group with @galofir.bsky.social, so stay tuned for more! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/n 🧵

A new plant-bacteria immunological connection in the first preprint of our group at @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social @plantevolution.bsky.social! Straight from the top of Mt. Olympus ⛰️🦅 Led by Eirik @eiriklag.bsky.social, in collaboration with @geminiteamlab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Now, the next chapter! Our lab at the Institute of Molecular Biology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, is fully up and running. We are actively recruiting passionate researchers at all levels to tackle bold ideas in cell biology, chromosome architecture, and evolution: sites.google.com/view/ecg-lab...

🧵 on why you should not be coy about pitching new ideas to prospective postdoc advisors (even if you have to tell them you have a better idea than they do)

Organization and evolution of the virosphere and the replicator space comptes-rendus.academie-sciences.fr/biologies/it...

NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:

In today’s random thoughts. Just because a gene controls a conserved process does not suggest or even support that the gene is conserved. Lots of family specific genes input into or control highly conserved processes.

For the last 34 years I have been on the faculty of the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Biology and have never regretted that decision. This year we are hiring TWO new Assistant Professors in the broad area of Molecular, Cell, Developmental Biology 1/n bio.unc.edu

Open science for plant breeding 🌱 Researchers successfully used OpenCRISPR-1, and AI-designed open-source editing system, in soybean. Tools with broader access could mean faster innovation 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Are you looking for a postdoc exploring the cell biology of development, defining how cells change shape and move? Do you want to develop a research program & teaching skills preparing you for a position at a college or small University? Our new NIH grant will support those goals 1/n Please share

Wir brauchen ein Wort für die seltsam verquere Freude, in einem Text Holprigkeiten oder Fehler zu finden, weil es uns zeigt, dass er nicht von einer verdammten AI geschrieben wurde.

Cool new work from @thanvisrikant.bsky.social & @kbomblies.bsky.social: Chromosomes in #Arabidopsis thaliana neo-polyploids break preferentially at fragile sites that correspond to ancient genome rearrangements #plantscience www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Good morning #Tübingen