Team Thomma

📣 New preprint! 🧵 Fantastic work led by @antonkraege.bsky.social Fact: Cerato-platanins are everywhere in fungi. Found across the fungal kingdom, implicated in everything from development to virulence to immune activation. But what do they *actually* do? We finally found the answer 👇

Very happy to see our work on RAM1 and RAD1 in Lotus japonicus published in New Phytologist. Many thanks to all co-authors who contributed to this work, and to the editor and reviewers who helped improve the manuscript.

Two similar GRAS factors coordinate shared and separate genes to regulate arbuscular #mycorrhiza Priority report by Tian Zeng, et al. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... @tianzeng77.bsky.social @carogutj.bsky.social #PlantScience

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

A Blast Fungus Effector Targets a Tubby-like F-box Protein to Suppress Plant Immunity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.15.759101v1

Beetles secrete jelly to embed & sustain symbionts with impossibly tiny genomes🪲 But what is this jelly made of? And how does it help maintain a partnership that has lasted over 62 million years? Thrilled to share our latest, out now in @natcomms.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hey mycology community, Can you please email / DM me nominations of speakers that I can pass along to the organisers. They been made aware of the issue and let's turn this into a teaching moment. And thanks @mcmomany.bsky.social for sharing this list: fungalgenomes.org/wrifo/direct...

🔬Postdoc position available! Interested in uncovering the molecular mechanisms underlying host-endosymbiont interactions? Join our group and help us explore these fascinating biological partnerships! Deadline: 29. Oct Details & application: karriere.hhu.de/index.php?ac... Please spread the word!

The archaeon Sukunaarchaeum mirabile, associated with dinoflagellates, has a genome of only 238 kbp🧬🤯 #archaea #symbiosis #eukaryotes #protists #MicroSky @currentbiology.bsky.social www.cell.com/current-biol...

How do "friendly" rhizobia build a legume nodule? @albinteulet.bsky.social found that Type III effectors of symbiotic Rhizobia include diverse predicted transcriptional and post-transcriptional modulators. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... Now @plosbiology.org More information below.

PRESS RELEASE - Can this biotech innovation halt the destructive march of a cereal killer? 🌾🦠 A UK-led research collaboration has taken a significant step in the global effort to protect crops from the devastating wheat fungus pathogen

Symbiotic #rhizobia form nitrogen-fixing partnerships with #plant roots. This study by @albinteulet.bsky.social & @dromius.bsky.social uses structural modelling to predict how secreted proteins may mimic plant factors in a strategy shared with pathogens. 🧪 #AcademicSky #symbiosis plos.io/4j6bWj0

Starting my bluesky with this super exciting new! New preprint from Di Pietro's Lab www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... How do fungal pathogens maintain dispensable chromosomes without losing them in clonal evolution? Here's a thread 🧵

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...

🌱🦠 Excited to share part of my PhD work @mpipz.bsky.social with @hotvegetables.bsky.social as co-first, in collab with @leibnizipk.bsky.social and @ceplas.bsky.social. We found that Arabidopsis and its microbiota work together to adapt iron acquisition to soil pH. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... 🧵

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 🧵

🎉 We are excellent The #UniCologne has succeeded with its proposal “Neue Universität: Continuous Change – Successful Renewal” and has been awarded the status of a ‘University of Excellence’ as part of the Excellence Strategy of the Federal and State Governments ➡️uni.koeln/SWUK7

🎉 Wir sind exzellent Die #UniKöln konnte mit ihrem Antrag „Neue Universität: Continuous Change - Successful Renewal“ überzeugen und hat im Rahmen der Exzellenzstrategie des Bundes und der Länder den Status einer Exzellenzuniversität erhalten. Mehr dazu ➡️ uni.koeln/Q5JR6

Great to present a major update to our manuscript: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... In collaboration with @grandpahiro.bsky.social, @sara-stolze.bsky.social, Matthieu Platre & the teams of Götz Hensel & Gunther Döhlemann we demonstrate that….. (1/x)

Thank you MibiNet & friends @mibinet.bsky.social for a wonderful International Symposium on "Microbial Networking - from organelles to cross-kingdom communities"!! It was impressive to see the vivid exchange, excellent talks and and poster discussions. @dfg.de; @hhu.de; @fz-juelich.de

I just published: How do we recognize world-class science? Not by the journal it appeared in What I told early-career researchers about prediction, rigour, failure, priors — and the tyranny of bar graphs. kamounlab.medium.com/how-do-we-re...

How do we recognize world-class science? Not by the journal it appeared in Science predicts. Pseudoscience doesn’t. Twenty-nine years How to science, and how not to What’s a failed experiment? Death by statistics Ditch the bar graphs Get credit for all of it kamounlab.medium.com/how-do-we-re...

Cologne | Köln. Take 2 🇩🇪

Cologne | Köln 🇩🇪

Looking forward to spending a couple of days with @ceplas.bsky.social catching up with colleagues at @UniCologne @Team_Thomma and having some fun with the ECRs! They picked Theme 2 from my smörgåsbord of ECR discussion topics 👍🏼 😎👇🏼 www.ceplas.eu/en/about-us/...

Talks for early career researchers kamounlab.dreamhosters.com/KamounLab_EC...

Happy to share that our study of the interaction between the MAX effector AVR-Pia and rice HMA domain-containing proteins has been published (as the cover article!) in PLOS Pathogens. journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

Another step in the #Starship story - they move via a circular intermediate. Helps explain how these elements horizontally transfer and means that we can modify them into transformation vectors (starmids). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Details and microscopic images.

Nectriopsis lecanodes, a lichenicolous fungus on Peltigera (in this case P. praetextata). #lichen #fungifriends

A valuable and inspiring two-day retreat of the MadFungi research group in Bad Breisig. The retreat provided a great opportunity to step back from our daily work, exchange ideas, reflect on our research, and strengthen collaboration within the group. 🍄

@madfungi.bsky.social (For5682) Retreat in beautiful Bad Breisig! great get together, great talks and science, super useful discussions with @algazuccaro.bsky.social @teamthomma.bsky.social @effectomics.bsky.social, Döhlemann and Requena and Hensel teams. Cool stuff and great Progress in sight!

New preprint! There have been quite a few papers about RLP and RLK receptors, but none of them have a truly reproducible annotation pipeline (including my own...)... We finally made such a pipeline and look more systematically at RLPs within tomato. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#BSPP26 Ryohei Terauchi @ryoheiterauchi referring the most famous @johninnescentre.bsky.social alumni JBS Haldane and William Bateson #CelebratingAlumni

“It's unhelpful to draw a sharp line between applied and basic research” Cristobal Uauy @cristobaluauy.bsky.social Director of the John Innes Centre @johninnescentre.bsky.social #PPATH2026 #BSPP26

#BSPP26 Presidential Address: Saskia Hogenhout @saskiahogenhout.bsky.social - Building resilience to insect-vectored plant pathogens #PPATH2026 😎#plantsci #microbiology

Vivianne Vleeshouwers @VivianneTwit on how NLR and PRR immune receptors work together to resist the potato late blight pathogen, Phytophthora infestans. 🥔🦠🌱 #BSPP26 #PPATH2026 #PlantHealth

📣...and now for something completely different: no plant pathogens, no Verticillium, but lichens! Driven by our lichen king🤴@ciarankelly.bsky.social with help of a.o. @hroevenich.bsky.social @usadellab.bsky.social @vivienrosenthal.bsky.social Watch for more in future! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our new preprint is out! 🍄 Decoupled evolution of antimicrobial repertoires in lichen-forming fungi We compared many lichen-forming fungal genomes to ask how different photobiont associations relate to their antimicrobial repertoires.

Decoupled evolution of antimicrobial repertoires in lichen-forming fungi https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.03.749242v1

A beautiful piece of detective work by @honour.bsky.social + colleagues revealing the origins of Ralstonia disease of bananas on Martinique. As so often, ICEs (ICERs!) prove to be extraordinary capacitors for evolutionary change. Evolution for evolution's sake 🤔 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...

A new preprint from the lab! 📄 We solved a long-standing question: how mechanistically the PTM AMPylation of glutamine synthetase controls the activity of one of the most important enzymes on Earth. 🌎 w/ beautiful cryoEM structures @hhu.de & @sfb1381.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Super excited of obtaining a ERCstg to support our project MORPHEUS 🎉🎉 Receiving this grant is a pivotal moment for my lab at @zmbp-tuebingen.bsky.social as will allow to extend the scope of our research in cellular reprogramming using ribosome dormancy as entry point 😴🌱❄️🔬 @erc.europa.eu

📣 Please share! We’re recruiting to build predictive models of gene regulation in plants. We’d love to hear from anyone with strong foundations in regulatory genomics or ML and fluency with coding agents. Any career stage; no plant background needed. noborilab.org 1/5

I'm excited to share that my newly funded #ERCStG FRONTERA is recruiting two postdoctoral researchers at @ipbhalle.bsky.social 🌱🔬 If you are passionate about plant immunity, proteolysis, membrane proteins, or proteomics, I'd love to hear from you. 🧵 Please RT/share!

🦠 Die Leopoldina ehrt Mikrobiologin Regine Kahmann für ihr Lebenswerk mit der Cothenius-Medaille. Herzlichen Glückwunsch! ✨

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

An important question in plant pathology still lacks a coherent model—a striking example of how bad science can bring an entire field to a standstill: How do filamentous pathogens deliver effector proteins into plant cells? dx.doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Two PhD positions in the Feldbrügge Lab at HHU Düsseldorf within nEXt-RNA: 🔬 DC1: Live-cell imaging of RNA transfer and function 📦 DC10: Mechanisms and applications of RNA delivery RNA biology, fungi, extracellular vesicles and advanced imaging. www.mikrobiologie.hhu.de/en/

📣 Metabolomics expert position at @ceplas.bsky.social part part of the CEPLAS Academic Expert Career Programme (tenure-track). karriere.hhu.de/index.php?ac...

Now accepted: Haplotype-phased assemblies of the two poplar rust fungi species: Melampsora larici-populina and Melampsora allii-populina academic.oup.com/g3journal/ar...