In our latest preprint we report the unexpected discovery of Epi-STR, an R-stereoselective ortholog of the S-selective canonical Strictosidine synthases (STRs). Found in the rather obscure plant Pogonopus specious. This work was led by my stellar student Clara Morweiser!
#natprod
#PlantScience

A collage showing on the left a picture of the bright pink closed flowers and bracts of the plant Pogonopus speciosus. On the right a scheme depicting the reaction of tryptamine and secologanic acid to vincosidic acid that is catalyzed by P. speciosus Epi-STR, an unusual R-stereoselective ortholog of strictosidine synthase.

Our funky R-stereoselective Epi-STR is now available online and open access at its permanent home @angewandtechemie.bsky.social. 🥳
This is Clara's first first-author paper, makes me extra happy!
@mpi-ce.bsky.social
#PlantScience
#natprod
doi.org/10.1002/anie...

I think that one of the main issues in academia is the university administrators being very anti-academia

As universities cut courses, spending on consultants and contractors nears $2b Consultancies have been accused of infiltrating universities and wasting scarce public funds on questionable advice about cutting courses and jobs.

I'm glad I'm not in this sector any more. Working seven days, having to fight for every cent, receiving zero support, and then they turn around and spend billions on their mates. Why should I (or anyone) burn myself out for that
www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...

If I were asked to collaborate by a person to test a hypothesis, I would be thrilled, honored even, and consider collaboration. But the framing of experimental work as just "unpublished data" to share feels...degrading. And a common theme recently.

I'm not a supporter of the "ideas are cheap" crowd, but they are definitely not the limiting factor in biology. We don't lack the capacity to generate data-driven, well-though hypotheses, we lack the resources to test them.

I just got an e-mail asking me to "collaborate with data" that offers to put my name in a publication in exchange of experimentally testing some LLM-generated statement. I will not dignify that with an answer; my blood pressure can't deal with writing the appropriate answer.

the upshot of all this is that universities shouldn't be chasing industry trends, or trends of any sort, probably.

we cede our power to *set* intellectual and cultural trends when we do that. this power demands that we always remain a bit out-of-step.

i'd give anything for us to see that.

I just had that conversation earlier this week. The college dean is deciding if they will (dis)continue the bioinformatics training program for grad students. An argument for discontinuation is that students will use GenAI to help them code, so they don’t need to learn bioinformatics.

Biosynthesis of cinchona alkaloids - Nature A combination of isotopic labelling, gene silencing, single-nucleus RNA sequencing and comparative transcriptomics reveal the genes that mediate the biosynthesis of cinchona alkaloids in plants.

Biosynthesis of cinchona alkaloids

From: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#PlantScience #SpecMet

Mystery of quinine biosynthesis solved For centuries, the process by which the cinchona tree produces its valuable alkaloids, including the life-saving quinine used to treat malaria, was shrouded in mystery. Now, a research team from the M...

The process by which the cinchona tree produces quinine has been elucidated. In a new study published in @nature.com, researchers from the @oconnorlab.bsky.social and the @universityofga.bsky.social unveil the biosynthetic pathway behind this 400-year-old secret.
www.ice.mpg.de/548102/PR_Ki...

I’ve seen ppl discuss how over 50% of their grants wouldn’t have been awarded @ current success rates. That’s an important reflection.

What about the cost of living and the benefits you received at the start of your career? Expectations are higher, and many schools aren’t even offering startup $

a snippet of a mini-comic, at top - straight line stretches from point A to B. Immediately below, same dot at A, then becomes a curving, meandering line that winds through the page and ends at a point with rays and a question mark emanating from it. Text reads: "Nothing can do this for you - for that robs you of experience and conflates answers with learning. Rather, it's all the decisions you make along the way, the mistakes, struggles, and surprises! These pathways you create - this is learning. https://spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-syllabi/

In case anyone needs it for their syllabi, my statement in gen-Ai from the minicomic I made as a syllabus for class last semester. All online and printable here spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-sy...

Postdoc of Plant Natural Product Biosynthesis or Transport | Fernando Geu-Flores 🌿 Postdoc position in Plant Natural Products 🌿 📍 Geu-Flores lab at the University of Copenhagen (DK) 🥼 Are you passionate about uncovering how plants make and transport complex bioactive alkaloids? ...

🪴 🫘 🫛

Come work with us in beautiful Copenhagen!

This is the erfect position for you, if you like:
- natural products
- working with plants
- solving complex metabolism puzzles
- having an applied impact

shorturl.at/iIjW3

Honestly, any miniprep day; I was done by noon, had to wait for until the next day for sequencing results, so I had a whole afternoon free; usually wasted reading, but sometimes with a view or a beer

I forgot to ad hashtags!! #Biosynthesis #Olive #plantscience #NaturalProducts #SecMet
I may have to repost this later this week; anyone know hashtags on natural product biosynthesis or enzyme/gene discovery?

But anyway, feel free to ask me anything on this. I noticed several mistakes in this thread that I cannot edit (including an it's that should be an its) but any other discussion on the science is more than welcome!

The method has it's limitations; by checking with known enzymes, it might have a higher false negative rate than other methods (which is hard to determine for other methods with no clear threshold) so it's not a silver bullet. But it makes use of public data, so has very low cost to implement.

And in the first batch of enzymes we found an activity! And it wasn't a p450 at all, but an oxoglutarate-dependent dioxygenase! Never before I had an activity in the first batch of candidates.

I was starting my lab in México with no starter funds, so we couldn't brute force it. So I did the usual: throw more data at the problem. Jasmine and Ash have similar metabolites, so we analized public datasets, and got a reasonable number of candidates that were coexpressed in the 3 species.

Stubbornness wouldn't let me forget the issue, and we kept testing for the activity; synGenes from different assemblies, isoforms, alleles, ID%, etc. but no activity. Until we thought that maybe it wasn't a CYP72. We decided to have an open-minded approach, but how do you select from 100s of genes?

Two bi‐functional cytochrome P450 CYP72 enzymes from olive (Olea europaea) catalyze the oxidative C‐C bond cleavage in the biosynthesis of secoxy‐iridoids – flavor and quality determinants in olive oil Olive (Olea europaea) is an important crop in Europe, with high cultural, economic and nutritional significance. Olive oil flavor and quality depend on phenolic secoiridoids, but the biosynthetic ...

A key step of the pathway is the oxidation of 7-deoxy-loganic acid to 7-epi-loganic acid, assumed to be performed by a P450, as C. roseus 7DLH. So we BLASted Cr7DLH, and found homologues in Olive; some with interesting activities we reported in 2021 (doi.org/10.1111/nph....) but no hydroxylation.

Comparative transcriptomic and co-expression analyses enable the discovery of key enzymes responsible for oleuropein biosynthesis in olive (Olea europaea) Oleuropein, an oleoside-type secoiridoid, is the major determinant of olive oil flavor and quality. This study completes the biosynthetic pathway from 7-deoxy-loganic acid to 7-β-1-D-glucopyranosyl-ol...

We're closing in on oleuropein biosynthesis in Olive! Oleuropein is the reason we can't eat raw olives, and also the "spicy" taste of olive oil. People assumed (and some wrongly reported) that the pathway was the same as in Catharanthus, but that's not entirely true! 🧵
www.cell.com/plant-commun...

A structural formula of "Lysine". Wrong one.

You know, it would really add a bit credibility to your article if you would use correct structural formula of the (well-known) compound that you are studying.

#chemsky

www.mdpi.com/1999-4923/17...

I'm intrigued...I would look for forbidden m/z values, some masses cannot exist as combinations of atoms are limited. Or check the variation of intensities and symmetry of LC peaks? I'm tempted to volunteer my time to the effort; this is scary...

A graph showing the increase of executive and management staff salaries at McGill (260%) since 2014-15 compared to full time faculty (125%). A second graph shows that academic salaries have decreased in real dollars by 4.2% while director/manager salaries have increased by 5.2%.

I like to tape these graphs next to the asbestos monitoring air pumps that have been running in my building since 2014.

Profile image of Laila P. Partida-Martínez

In #Profile: Laila P. Partida-Martínez
👇

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

#LatestIssue

There's something that breaks inside me whenever I read "human - AI collaboration" in a formal, scientific article. I don't collaborate with Excel or R anymore than I collaborare with a pipette or a mass spec. It's a marketing term that overstates capacities that editors should not allow.

Lowry! Forgot the name of the assay! I do think that it's due to the misuse in food science spam articles, rather than the protein assay, as I've rarely seen anything that is not Bradford for that.

My guess would be the Folin assay, or the paper that first uses it to estimate total phenolics. Food science has a serious SPAM issue of people throwing Folin to a random extract and publishing the results, so it must be >100k citations.