Some of the Nebraska cousins. "Barren" (no ear) maize plants are relatively common, particularly with smaller or less vigorous plants. Ears without tassels though, that's a much rarer phenotype to observe!

Remembering and grateful for the teachers and mentors who shaped me. And also thankful for my trainees, past and present, some of whom introduced me to a day set aside honor those same guides. Happy Guru Purnima!

Check out the impact of the post-pandemic surge in review paper publications. Visualization of the citation histories of seventeen plant science faculty.

Wait what? Congratulations! I know was a long road to get here but you’re gonna do great.

Just had one of those great professor moments where I needed to explain something and had the perfect ear of corn to show what I was talking about right at hand.

The days that make me appreciate living in Lincoln Nebraska.

It's finally happening! After multiple rainouts and a redesign of our whole planting workflow, our nearly 1,000 line sorghum diversity panel in going into the ground today. Big thank you to Chidu, Kyle, Jon and the UNL Agronomy farm crew.

For the first time as a prof, I’m mentoring students aiming for faculty jobs in India. I understand which factors matter the most for US and Chinese faculty hiring—but can anyone help me figure out what we should be emphasizing to be competitive at Indian universities?

Assessing the Impact of Yield Plasticity on Hybrid Performance in Maize Improving crop resilience in the face of increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather and reduced access to agricultural inputs such as nitrogen fertilizer and water will require an improved unders...

Oops and here's the link to the paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Protecting against downside risk doesn’t have to come at the expense of continued increases in the yield potential.
No evidence of a tradeoff between yield stability and maximum yield in an analysis of hybrid performance across 34 environments. New pub led by @jensinadavis.bsky.social

This is the projection. So at least a chance the final budget could still be something different. And given your interests you'd also be applying for USDA funded postdocs which are still going to be cut, but perhaps less than the NSF funded ones. But even so, yes, terrible news.

National Science Foundation's forecast for how many fewer scientists, postdocs, and graduate students we'll be able to support in 2026.

Did anyone else get a "we've been asked to pause issuance of grant funding during the transition of government" e-mail from USDA-NIFA this morning?

Just had a no cost extension request denied with only 14 days before grant funds expire. If you've been waiting months to hear back don't assume it's just the government being slow to process things and everything will ultimately work out.

Paper came back from review after seven months. The editor (not the reviewers) tells me:
1) Redo the GWAS using a different statistical model in a different software package.
2) Add a brand new RNA-seq experiment and results.
3) Please submit your revised manuscript within 14 days.
🤷

In January of 2023 Waqar Ali arrived in Lincoln with no coding background (and no winter coat). Today he published a paper using GWAS to identify genes linked to variation in how corn photosynthesizes, complete with reverse genetics validation in arabidopsis. doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...

Never got the chance. Hopefully someday.

This seems like a shockingly large effect size unless "professionally edited" is confounded with a bunch of other variables that would have a big impact on paper acceptance rates with or without the editing.

Still get excited each time I see a Waymo.

Natural variations in architectural traits. Phenotypic distribution of plant architectural traits in the Sorghum Association Panel across two growing seasons (2020 and 2021). The mean value of each trait for each growing season is depicted as dotted lines on the respective plots.

🧬🌾📊🔍 RESEARCH 🔍 📊🌾🧬

'Unveiling shared genetic regulators of plant architectural and biomass yield traits in the Sorghum Association Panel' - Singh et al. doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...

@szintri.bsky.social

#PlantScience 🧪

Transcripts and genomic intervals associated with variation in metabolite abundance in maize leaves under field conditions - BMC Genomics Plants exhibit extensive environment-dependent intraspecific metabolic variation, which likely plays a role in determining variation in whole plant phenotypes. However, much of the work seeking to use...

Students say they’ll keep working on papers after graduation. I tell them I'll understand when (not if) they don’t. Life happens. But there are exceptions. Ramesh left my lab nearly a year ago, but kept pushing. His 1st thesis chapter was just published. bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

I helped launch and run a startup commercializing technology that could identify the fields where more fertilizer wouldn't increase crop productivity and save farmers money. SBIR funding from NSF is how we made the leap from concept to product and acquisition.

Preparing 50 trays with 4,800 slots for our first large-scale sampling effort

Grateful to work at a university that has on campus cornfields. Greenhouses and growth chamber are good and all. But sometimes need something more. Our lab will be planting our first proper summer corn nursery since 2021 this year.

I'm two decades late but really entertained by the term "mFruits."

I’m still working out how to prepare properly. But preparation side it is just a cool looking vegetable!

Mapping QTL is domesticated cheese molds.

Generic bitter melon vs Indian bitter melon…

I’m pretty sure the dire scientist phenotype spontaneously evolves from other types multiple times. Dire scientists emergence is the carcinization of academia.

Spring in Nebraska. Highly recommended.