If journalists had any integrity and courage, they would boycott the White House Correspondents Dinner. It should be as empty as a TPUSA event.

Spring evening in #Tübingen

"The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet a lifetime is often not enough to rebuild. They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing and devastation, yet the resources needed for healing, education and restoration are nowhere to be found." -Pope Leo XIV

Invitation to our next DSSS talk to be held on Monday next week. We welcome speaker Dr. Jarrett Gray Camp coming to us from the Institute of Human Biology in Basel. Please join us.

▶️More info: tinyurl.com/5hbs2n2z
📆: Monday 20th April at 2pm
📍: MPH lecture hall, Max-Planck-Ring 6
#DSSS

Congrats @striga_steve!

👀 👀 cool picture prompts new discovery--one of my favorite kinds of science 🧪

8/8 Big thank you 🙏 to @sheilaroitman.bsky.social for leading this with extraordinary rigor and energy. Thanks to all co-authors and collaborators. Please read the preprint 📄 and let us know what you think www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

7/8 What does this mean? Phages may be continuously shaping who survives on the leaf — without crashing the microbiome. This has real implications for understanding plant health, and for anyone dreaming of using phages to engineer microbiomes. 🔧

6/8 In wild populations, phages were ubiquitous and abundant throughout the growing cycle. But rather than destabilizing the community — they exerted ongoing selective pressure. Kill-the-winner without killing the party. A dynamic, stable co-existence. ⚖️

5/8 What do phages actually DO to bacterial communities in the wild? In our controlled experiments, phages killed Pseudomonas — expected. But the bacterial community bounced back. Resilient. And across the season, bacteria were MORE dynamic than the phages infecting them. 🤔

4/8 But first, you need phages. So we went and found them — isolated from wild A. thaliana leaves. Meet the PhC collection. All tailed phages. All strikingly diverse. All isolated from local Pseudomonas strains. We characterized them morphologically and genomically

3/8 We focused on Pseudomonas — common, ecologically important, sometimes pathogen, sometimes commensal. And we tracked the phages infecting it across three setups of increasing wildness: 🧪 in vitro 🌱 controlled in planta 🌍 wild A. thaliana populations

2/8 The leaf surface — the phyllosphere — hosts millions of bacteria. We know a lot about which bacteria live there. But what about the phages that infect THOSE bacteria? Phages are everywhere, yet in plant 🌿 microbiomes, they're almost completely dark matter.

1/8 🔥 New preprint dropped: Dynamic co-existence of bacteriophages and their hosts 🦠 in the Arabidopsis thaliana 🌱 phyllosphere
Work led by the indomitable @sheilaroitman.bsky.social‬
#plantscience #microbiome #holobiont
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

FDA panel will meet to discuss allowing broader access to certain peptides The FDA will convene an outside panel of advisers to discuss whether to allow compounding pharmacies to manufacture certain peptides

On this Peptide Panel at FDA
My input: "“I just hope the committee does the right thing and does not lift the ban on these peptides for compounding in the U.S. given their vacuous data for safety and efficacy,."

www.statnews.com/2026/04/15/p...

Alternative routes to allopolyploid origin.

Somatic genome-doubling is the most parsimonious route to allopolyploidy

#TansleyInsight by Burns et al. @robinburns.bsky.social @alisondawnscott.bsky.social @pnovik.bsky.social

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

#plantscience

Repeatedly we get stories about how groups like pollinators, fungi or top predators are critical for ecosystems

All species functional groups are important, through their roles in the ecosystem and interactions with other groups

From personal experience, Plant genetic variation creates information knots that cause problems with compression approaches. I hope that I am wrong as a solution would be great.

Wouldn’t any real Christian call this blasphemy? What’s the punishment for that?

Trump TS post featuring an illustration of himself as a Christian faith healer

I’m not sure it has broken through to the general public that the president is a megalomaniac crazy person. Hopefully posts like this help.

I’m a Nobel Prize-winning immigrant. I can no longer recognize this country. Attacks on science and immigrants are destroying America.

Thank you #NobelLaureate Jack Szostak for sharing these thoughts, which many US scientists and physicians resonate with

newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-a-nobel...

Nice 😊

That is great to know!

Hungary has chosen Europe.

Europe has always chosen Hungary.

A country reclaims its European path.

The Union grows stronger.

2/2 A couple hundred complete Arabidopsis genomes have already been published. We’ll soon be releasing a dataset of 400+ curated long-read assemblies (see www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...). Phenotypes at arapheno.1001genomes.org.

Natural allelic variation underlying a major fitness trade-off in Arabidopsis thaliana - Nature Here, a combination of forward genetics and genome-wide association analyses has been used to show that variation at a single genetic locus in Arabidopsis thaliana underlies phenotypic variation in ve...

1/2 Not sure what you mean with “sufficiently large”. For adaptive alleles, often fewer than 100 individuals are more than enough for very strong hits (one of the earliest examples www.nature.com/articles/nat...). So datasets don’t have to be large.

This sounds great but does it work on organisms other than humans?

(Human genomes are almost identical to each other, while species with a longer evolutionary history, such as most wild species and especially plants, have much more diverse genomes.)

Fredrick the Great paying close attention to a farming couple and their #potatoes.

German History Museum, Berlin.

This is an incredible paper, chock full of neat results and very nice data visualization. A few of my reactions:
- Correlation between synanthropy and research effort, LOL
- Spillover associated not just with trade but illegal trade, yikes
- Wait we eat HOW many species in the Carnivora?