Algae in the DISCO! (AI generated image before it was cringy to do that)
🚨 New Preprint! 🚨
For my PhD, I investigated an over 20-year-old mystery in photosynthesis: What does the highly conserved but enigmatic protein cytochrome c6A actually do?
We found: c6A helps algae stayin' alive in the "DISCO". 🪩
See the thread below & read the preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202...
Ad banner: germinating plant, Utrecht University, VACANCY: Postdoc position in Experimental & Computational Plant Biology
I am excited to announce that we have two open positions on our recently funded MYBstery M-WEAVE (NWO-DFG) project!
1) Postdoc in my team at Utrecht University (NL). www.uu.nl/en/organisat...
2) PhD in the team of @lauraragni.bsky.social at University of Freiburg (DE). (See thread)
Very nice talk from Sanja Zenker (Bielefeld university) on the dissection of specificities in transriptional Regulation!
Pangenomes, really?
Most early “pangenomes” = oligogenomes (oligo, Gr., few).
More recent “pangenomes” generally = poligenomes (polis, Gr., many).
True pangenomes (pas, Gr., every/all) would be rare indeed.
🙏🏼 @zbao.bsky.social for pointing out his review.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🚨Two fully funded PhD opportunities in Australia!
Improving C4 photosynthesis in vegetation models.
Supervised by Dani Way (ANU, Canberra) and myself (UTS, Sydney).
1. Lab- and field-based project at ANU – see flyer below
2. Modelling project at UTS – www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
CEPLAS starts a number of new projects, and we are looking for 12 Postdocs ❗
CEPLAS projects are always highly collaborative, that means postdocs working with us will always closely interact with several CEPLAS research groups. Find all postdoc openings here: www.ceplas.eu/en/training-...
I'm super happy to share my new preprint reporting a study in collaboration with the Seebeck (Basel) and Sasso (Leipzig) labs: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We discovered that ovothiol A, a thiohistidine, is a major antioxidant in the green alga Chlamydomonas. (1/4)
#rstats tidypolars 0.17.0 is available!
tidypolars provides the tidyverse syntax while using polars for better perf.
In this release:
- support new functions from dplyr 1.2.0 (filter_out, when_any...)
- pivot_wider with lazyframe
- bug fixes
and more
News: tidypolars.etiennebacher.com/news/
New preprint! The same TFs can drive distinct regulatory programs depending on where they bind.
TSS → rapid stress responses
Intronic & upstream → cell-type programs
Enhancer-like CRMs → embryo/meristem programs
Coding-sequence binding → repression
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Calling all OrthoFinder users!
We’ve just released GLADE, a tool to infer gene gains, losses, duplications, and ancestral genomes across a phylogeny.
GLADE runs directly on OrthoFinder results.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
github.com/lauriebelch/...
(1/10)
‼️Please RT: The CEPLAS Graduate School call for 2026 is now open! Detailed info on our website: bit.ly/4q19JWk
@hhu.de @unicologne.bsky.social @mpipz.bsky.social @fz-juelich.de @leibnizipk.bsky.social @plantsciencedbg.bsky.social
PlantCV v4: Image analysis software for high-throughput plant phenotyping www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11....
Excited to introduce Auxenochlorella as a new algal reference organism for fundamental plant science and bioengineering. A paper in two parts: a genetic toolkit for site-specific genomic manipulation, paired with the most unusual genome I’ve ever worked on
academic.oup.com/plcell/artic...
PSA: Many of you may have noticed a website floating around called formatmypaper(dot)com. People rightly noted something was fishy. I dig into what happened here:
open.substack.com/pub/ubadah/p...
The KEY🔑 to regulating Rubisco phase separation in the Chlamydomonas algal pyrenoid. Beautiful work by Shan He, @mjonikas.bsky.social, and friends. #PhaseSeparation #CO2 #PlantScience 🧪 🧶🧬 🌾 🌍
Thrilled to share that our TEtrimmer paper has just been published in Nature Communications! A big thank you to all collaborators — the article is now online ;)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
BIOL 220 Autism has known causes and tylenol use is not one of them Dear Students One thing we as biologists can do is help our friends and families navigate complex biomedical issues. As we'll discuss later this term, autism is a complex set of different disorders lumped under a single label. 30 years ago its causes were unknown, but as we'll see, remarkable advances in human genetics have given us key insights. We also know, based on experiment, what does NOT cause autism. Large epidemiological studies have been done to test proposed causes. Here is an gold standard example: "Acetaminophen use during pregnancy was not associated with children’s risk of autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability in sibling control analysis." https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2817406 Links to an external site. We're now at the point where people with very responsible jobs are spreading lies about disease causation. It's our job to counter with facts. Mark Peifer
As scientists and educators, we can help our students and their families wrestle with complex issues. I just send this message to my Genetics class, and the relevant link to the study
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
Version 3 of the Snakemake rolling paper is now pulbished on @f1000publishing.bsky.social: f1000research.com/articles/10-...
We have updated the presented features and the design patterns.
#sciworkflows #reproducibility
Our department of Plant Molecular Biology at the University of Lausanne @unil.bsky.social is recruiting a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the field of Plant-Organism Interactions 🌱🐛🦠🍄! Application before November 30, 2025. See the official job ad for more details: tinyurl.com/mtxdcz6p
Our tool #vembrane has a new homepage, providing a high level summary of all the things you can do with it to transform VCF/BCF files via simple Python expressions: vembrane.github.io
Filter, tag, annotate, sort, and flexibly convert to CSV/TSV, JSON, JSONL, YAML and FHIR via a unified syntax.
Saddened to hear about the passing of Steve Long. His work had a profound impact on plant science. A true loss to the scientific community. @ripeproject.bsky.social
emails.illinois.edu/newsletter/4...
NEWS & VIEWS: Conserved language of plant gene regulation (Neeta Lohani) doi.org/10.1093/plph... #PlantScience
It's actually amazing how long I've been waiting for this. No more guessing which column has the querycovperc!
Plus, gzipped fastas for makeblastdb! Finally!
MSU is great place to do plant science research. My lab will be a great place to develop new expertise in genomics and plant molecular biology.
Application instruction and link: careers.msu.edu/jobs/researc...
Please email me if you have any questions.
Our department (Berkeley PMB) is hiring an asst. prof. in Plant Resilience to Climate Change! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05049
The August issue is now fully online, with a beautiful cover that might be a nostalgia trigger for some of us (young people can find an explanation in the Editorial):
www.nature.com/nplants/volu...
Our "Joshua tree is CAM" paper is finally out: nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Data collection started back in 2021, when we saw weird results in some RNAseq that made me stop and wonder if Joshua trees, long thought to be C3, were actually...CAM!
Small DNA elements can act as both insulators and silencers in plants (Tobias Jores , Nicholas A Mueth , Jackson Tonnies , Si Nian Char , et al) doi.org/10.1093/plce... #PlantScience
Beautiful tribute to Joanne Chory on @scifri.bsky.social!
www.sciencefriday.com/segments/be-...
Regulation of Crassulacean acid metabolism at the protein level in Kalanchoë laxiflora (Katharina Schiller , Saskia Janshoff , Sanja Zenker , Prisca Viehöver , James Hartwell , Jürgen Eirich , Iris Finkemeier , Andrea Bräutigam) doi.org/10.1093/plph... #PlantScience