No one knows - still to be negotiated after the shutdown ends I think. House was floating something like a 20% cut, no cut proposed in the Senate. The good news is that both of those numbers are far from the 55% cut in the budget request from the White House

There is definitely a weird gap in this size range. If you can just tack on extra sequence after a restriction site, IDT eBlocks are the cheapest 300 bp option - $21 each, but minimum order is 24.

For Better Soil, Get Better Data Relying on outdated soil quality data to value farmland creates a disincentive for farmers to invest in conserving topsoil.

Side quest # TooMany of this PhD: I co-authored an article for @issuesinst.bsky.social on the need for better soil data to monitor topsoil loss, plus farmland price valuation that reflects the true quality of soil to incentivize topsoil preservation. Feedback most welcome!
issues.org/better-soil-...

MYBs are always the worst. I’ve had some luck by including a larger set of species, aligning full length proteins and trimming with ClipKIT.

Excited to share that the Zhu Lab will officially open at Texas A&M University on August 1st, 2025!

We’re a multidisciplinary group, exploring how plant roots adapt their growth to environmental stresses across scales. Actively recruiting!

Postdoc Advertisement: drive.google.com/file/d/1Gpvn...

This is a great opportunity for early career researchers! The plant single cell community is welcoming and supportive.

Come to the GRS too if you can! www.grc.org/single-cell-...

Bailey-Serres lab uses these protocols developed in Neelima Sinha’s lab. The magnetic beads mRNA prep is especially good and seems to work really consistently across species/tissues. plant-plasticity.github.io/resources/RN... plant-plasticity.github.io/resources/Br...

Want to travel to Portland, Maine and present at the Gordon Research Conference on Single-Cell Approaches in Plant Biology? Short talk submissions are open until April 30, 2025. All other applications for this conference are due July 13th. To apply: bit.ly/ApplyforGRC (submit as a poster abstract)

🙏 NSF for supporting @uf-ifas.bsky.social / UF Horticultural Sciences' trailblazing workshop 'How SynBio can *realistically* impact crop improvement & agriculture'! We brought🌱 SynBio ECRs together w/ top ag biotech & crop breeding experts to identify disconnects btwn their worlds & how to fix them⬇️

Exaptation of ancestral cell-identity networks enables C4 photosynthesis - Nature Single-nucleus RNA-sequencing and chromatin-accessibility analyses in rice (a C3 plant) and sorghum (a C4 plant) provide insight into how C4 photosynthesis evolved in bundle-sheath cells, revealing th...

Exaptation of ancestral cell-identity networks enables C4 photosynthesis www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New from the Ecker lab in collaboration with the Hibberd lab. Congrats all!