Dynamic co-existence of bacteriophages and their hosts in the Arabidopsis thaliana phyllosphere www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

What brown algae taught me about the importance of jumping genes for genome evolution

Behind the scenes!
go.nature.com/4bYY8BM

How diverse is bacterial immunity ?

We report in @science.org how language models allowed us to predict 2.4M antiphage proteins spanning >23K novel potential systems.
👏 @emordret.bsky.social, @alexhv.bsky.social & al doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Explore them here defensefinder.mdmlab.fr/wiki/refseq_...

We have been cooking up this story for a while and we are excited to finally be able to share!

Read on if you're interested in whole plant regeneration WITHOUT the application of hormones!

How much protein diversity can Life on Earth actually generate?

With DIAMOND DeepClust, we show how billions of proteins across the tree of life can be clustered at low-identity for downstream analytics tasks.

📚Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
💻Code: github.com/bbuchfink/di...

Or have been fed carotenoids

Basically the same with any GO term

I love it when you're reading serious papers and then come across some humanity sprinkled in-between all the seriousness

Really nice design!

1/11 🔥 New preprint alert 🔥
We wanted to know what plants in the wild really care about. So we asked them 🎤.
Here is what we learned: “Biotic-response networks are an important organizer of the transcriptome in wild Arabidopsis thaliana populations”
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

One of those stories you can't help getting excited about every time you hear it presented. Great work from everyone involved ! #PlantScience

eLife Fallout When a prestigious journal scrapped accept-reject decisions on submitted papers, some scientists rebelled, and the editor-in-chief was fired.

This account of the eLife saga will provoke much debate. One aspect isn't accurate: eLife wasn't "designed as an experiment in removing gatekeepers". The original intent was to publish "outstanding papers" but have the gatekeepers be academic not professional editors 1/2 nikomc.com/2026/03/05/e...

Use superfi polymerase and most pcr issues are gone forever

Nuclear speckles enable processing of RNA from GC-rich isochores Nuclear speckles are key subnuclear structures that regulate gene expression in GC-rich regions. This work shows that the evolution and expansion of core speckle proteins were crucial for the increase...

The function of nuclear speckles is revealed! This is an incredibly important paper with absolutely beautiful data! Wow! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Yeah, I think science in itself was better/more open back in the day of patronage and job security 😅

Yeah, world would be a better place without scooping. Just collaborate if you want to work on a topic, jeez. People need first/last authors for career, middle contributions don't matter in many people's eyes.

Postdoctoral position in biology (m/f/d) (2/2026) Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry (Halle) offers a Postdoctoral position in Biology

Please share! We are looking for a postdoctoral scientist (2 years, extension possible) starting from 01/05/2026 at
@ipbhalle.bsky.social! The project focuses on plant immune receptor biochemistry and structural biology.
Deadline 09/03/2026.

Apply at: ipb-halle.mhm.jobs/11-postdocto...

Arboviruses manipulate rice’s volatile emissions, protecting insect vectors from natural enemies in the field Rice viruses modify plant volatiles to protect insect vectors from natural enemies.

You can find the original article in Science Advances: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
4/4
#PlantScience

🧵 Just out in Cell after more than 10 years in the making!

🎓 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Plants and animals evolve radically different body plans.

Do they also operate under fundamentally different molecular evolutionary constraints during organ formation?

@cellpress.bsky.social

bioRxiv: An ancient alkalinization factor informs Arabidopsis root development (2025) The power of hydrogen (pH) regulates virtually all cellular activities. In both plants and animals, cell-to-cell variations in pH correlate with key developmental transitions1–5, yet the underlying regulators and associated functions remain elusive. Here, we report that members of the REMORIN (REM) protein family function as inhibitors of the H+-ATPases thereby promoting extracellular pH (pHe) alkalinization. This, in turn, regulates various cell surface processes, including steroid hormone signaling, and coordinates developmental transitions in the Arabidopsis thaliana root. Inhibition of H+-ATPases by REMs represents an evolutionary innovation that predates the origin of the root system itself. This study thus uncovers an ancient alkalinization mechanism co-opted by the root developmental program and infers that pHe patterning may have shaped morphogenesis evolution.

New Preprint: An ancient alkalinization factor informs Arabidopsis root development (2025)
https://www.tsl.ac.uk/publications/161540

How can genome sequencing training foster more equitable global science? 🌍
An interview with doctoral researcher Catarina Lino on a hands-on plant genomics workshop in Zimbabwe - and what it means for North–South collaboration.
👉 tinyurl.com/9knhj92v
#PlantGenomics #ScienceCollaboration #maxplanck

Could be that it is misannotation so you could blast it, try to reannotate or try to predict terminator activity without the leftover sequence. Though sometimes the RNA structure is needed for proper termination too.

Can we tune a plant’s epigenetic toolkit to disrupt plant homeostasis in ways that enable phenotypic innovation?

🌱Check out our new Opinion Paper with @thanvisrikant.bsky.social discussing this topic in @cp-trendsplantsci.bsky.social!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Seconding this, works great :)

Thanks!!

CC-NLRs exhibit diverse conformations in the resting state. Figure depicts different NLR resting and activated states. While ZAR1 exists as a monomer bound to its guardees in its resting state, several forms have been observed for the NRC2 helper, including dimers, tetramers, and filaments. While filament-like structures were observed via confocal microscopy for NRC2 upon overexpression in planta, these structures were not detected for its paralog NRC4, suggesting a potentially different resting state configuration for NRC4. Our work suggests that the Pik CC-NLR pair forms a hetero-complex bound to the plasma membrane in its resting state. How effector binding to the integrated domain (ID) of the Pik-1 sensor leads to the activation of the complex remains to be determined.

Excited to share our latest work on plant immune receptor biochemistry! @kamounlab.bsky.social @hsuanpai.bsky.social @mpcontreras.bsky.social Jose Salguero Linares @danielluedke.bsky.social @adnroide.bsky.social @jiorgoskourelis.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Have you ever wondered how it is possible that systemically infected plants produce (a certain percentage of) healthy progeny? 💚

Check out the first preprint of the @incavirus.bsky.social lab and first preprint of my postdoc! 🍀

We'd be very happy about feedback and discussions!

New preprint: 🚀🧬 Starship in the genome of the lichen fungus Xanthoria. Discovery of giant transposons Starships challenged what we thought we knew about fungal genomes. But what about Starships in #lichen fungi? Let us present Tangerine! 🖥️ 🧪 🦠 🧫 #SymbioSky doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Clearly shows how irrelevant this journal is lmao

🧬🛡️How are new immune mechanisms created?

We show how Lamassu antiphage system, originated from a DNA-repair complex and evolved into a compact and modular immune machine, wt Dinshaw Patel lab in @pnas.org.
👏 @matthieu-haudiquet.bsky.social, Arpita Chakravarti & all authors!

doi.org/10.1073/pnas...