A botanist searches for the seeds of the rare Death Valley Sage For more than 15 years, botanist Naomi Fraga has been trying to collect seeds from the rare Death Valley sage, for safekeeping in a vault of native California seeds.

For more than 15 years, botanist Naomi Fraga has been trying to collect seeds from the rare Death Valley sage, for safekeeping in a vault of native California seeds. n.pr/4ttOsq4

Finally encountered wild Arabidopsis thaliana!! I’ve known this plant well for 5 years now, and we happened to stumble upon it on the last day of Moi’s field course in Yosemite!
🌱🏔️

Our new experimental evolution study across 30+ locations using the plant Arabidopsis thaliana —— we direct "see" adaptation and extinction to different climates at the genetic as it happens!

Read it in Science
dx.doi.org/10.1126/scie...

@ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social
@hhmi-science.bsky.social

Flowering desert lily underneath yesterday's spectacular sunset lenticular clouds. The lily sits on bare compact soil with rocks.

Flowering desert lily underneath yesterday's sunset lenticular clouds (Photo: Sicco Rood).

California spring in foothills with scarlet fritillaries (Fritillaria recurva). #BloomScrolling

This is the coolest thing!!!!!!

Thanks, Brian!

Simulated climate change magnifies genetic vulnerabilities from mutation load and maladaptation As climate change intensifies, the genetic diversity and composition of natural populations will become critical for adaptation and survival. Standing genetic diversity within populations differs acro...

Thanks, Seema! And yes, here is a working link:
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Simulated climate change magnifies genetic vulnerabilities from mutation load and maladaptation As climate change intensifies, the genetic diversity and composition of natural populations will become critical for adaptation and survival. Standing genetic diversity within populations differs acro...

Updated link:
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Yay to spending time with plant nerds! Thank you for the tour and specimen viewing at @stanfordjrbp.bsky.social

Very proud to present our first paper from the Moi Lab Carnegie common garden! @mexpositoalonso.bsky.social

In A. thaliana and other plant systems, local adaptation is stronger closer to the equatorial edge and load is highest farther from the equator, which highlights a critical vulnerability: under strong selection, these high mutation load and low local adaptation populations may be the most at risk.

We monitored these populations for 3 years, and found that population growth rate decreased as the treatments became more stressful. Further, "high risk" populations (either high load or low local adaptation scores) had a higher stochasticity for recovery after a single year of water stress.

Crucially, we found a significant interaction between load and local adaptation, which grew stronger as the environment became more stressful. This suggests a synergistic decay of fitness resulting from locally adaptive variants, globally maladaptive load, and high water stress environments.

We found that populations with a low number of local adaptation alleles or high mutation load had decreased fitness in our highest drought stress environments.

By using data from other A. thaliana common gardens and genomic prediction tools, we created synthetic experimental populations of A. thaliana that varied in their abundance of locally adaptive alleles and also in their mutational load.

Synthetic experimental populations of Arabidopsis thaliana with differing genetic backgrounds planted in a 14-level precipitation alteration common garden.

Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧵👇

Crucially, we found a significant interaction between load and local adaptation, which grew stronger as the environment became more stressful. This suggests a synergistic decay of fitness resulting from locally adaptive variants, globally maladaptive load, and high water stress environments.

We found that populations with a low number of local adaptation alleles or high mutation load had decreased fitness in our highest drought stress environments.

By using data from other A. thaliana common gardens and genomic prediction tools, we created synthetic experimental populations of A. thaliana that varied in their abundance of locally adaptive alleles and also in their mutational load.

We are searching for a technician in Next Generation Sequencing!

Come to our lab University of California, Berkeley Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)

See ad:

careerspub.universityofcalifornia.edu/psp/ucb/EMPL...

Apply for our PhD program on Evolution Ecology Organismal Biology (Integrative! Biology)

Dec 1 2025 deadline

Check out the Flyer below for more information on our #MOILAB!

Link to Flyer
docs.google.com/document/d/1...

@ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social
@hhmi.org

congratulations! can't wait to read it!

Human-mediated land-use and climate change occur simultaneously, but how do they interact to shape adaptive dynamics? Super excited to share the first paper from the Kreiner lab, led by postdoc extraordinaire @rpineau.bsky.social

1/5 ✨Proud✨ to see our review with Katie Peichel as featured content in Trends_Ecol_Evo, with my beloved alpine lineages of Arabidopsis arenosa on the cover. Hope that you find it interesting! doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2023.11.007

Super excited to release a huge evolution project on the works for many years:

Evolution experiments synchronized across climates to understand rapid adaptation

Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025...
All data available: www.grene-net.org/data

#MOILAB
@ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social
@hhmi.org

🧵👇

An update: fully cracked, over easy.

Brewer's jewelflower (Streptanthus breweri) growing on barren serpentine soil in Lake County, California, USA.

Undescribed species diversity in Brewer's #jewelflower illuminates potential mechanisms of diversification associated with serpentine endemism

New #AJB research by Kyle Christie, N. Ivalú Cacho, Jacob Macdonald et al.

doi.org/10.1002/ajb2... #botany #plantscience #biodiversity #Brassicaceae

Today is the last day to oppose the gutting of the Endangered Species Act, I just did and it’s not hard:

A fried egg poppy in that “just cracked” stage 🥚

(Matilija poppy or Romneya coulteri)