My mom worked at the bubble school in the upper right!

Do you want to know how to build an organ from a single cell?

Check out our paper about phyllid development in moss by Weney Lin @irbv.bsky.social

Colaboration with Yoan Couder @ensdelyon.bsky.social and and Richard Smith @johninnescentre.bsky.social

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

It looks like there will be an open postdoc position in my lab soon. I'll be looking for someone with substantial wet-lab experience in microbiology / microbial ecology / evolution / physiology. If everything goes well, an ad will be coming. But if you know someone, ask them to reach out already.

The last gel in the long history of the Estelle lab just became the penultimate gel when I got distracted and ran it too far.

Thermosensory reconfiguration of the auxin transcriptional pathway to drive root cell growth Nature Communications - While auxin typically inhibits root cell growth, elevated temperatures reconfigure the auxin transcriptional pathway to promote elongation. This study reveals how plants...

🚨📢 Excited to share our back-to-back publications in @natcomms.nature.com! 🧬🌡️ In a fantastic collaboration between @casallab.bsky.social and @luciastrader.bsky.social, we’ve showed how plants "re-tune" the auxin pathway to regulate growth in response to warmth. 🌡️🌱 🧵 rdcu.be/fayYC, rdcu.be/fay0X

Leaf That Came Out Too Early Cold As Shit

Leaf That Came Out Too Early Cold As Shit

I’m waiting for the late showing right now

Previously on @biorxiv-plants.bsky.social now in final published version: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Okay, I’ll probably list v3/v6/v7 IDs for genes in these papers for now.

As far as I know, the v7 assembly and annotations are only available to download for local BLAST databases and genome browsers. Am I missing a server?

I'm going through and updating my moss genes' GeneIDs to the Ppv7 annotations. After all of the gaps in v3 and the occasional sequence jumbles in v6, v7 is perfect as far as I can tell! I only wish it was more easily available.

⚠️⚠️

@jacquet-chris.bsky.social and I are organizing the 2nd "non seed plant" French meeting.

As for the one in 2025, the goal is to better structure our emerging community across French institutes.

It will take place in Toulouse, June 24th-25th.

Registration 🔽

nonseedplants26.sciencesconf.org

All the windows in our building—except in faculty offices—start at 2m from the floor so that workers are not distracted by being able to look outside

Near-equiprobable binary branching decisions underlie filament patterning in the moss Physcomitrium patens www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...

Chromatogram from Azenta whole-plasmid sequencing showing a position with 63% "T" and 37% "G" reads but called "G"

Ugh, whole-plasmid sequencing was supposed to SAVE time.

We've been burned by an oddly optimistic base caller. Almost two-thirds of the reads had a GGA → TGA nonsense mutation, but it called it GGA. Of course, we did our experiment with a TGA colony. @genewiz.bsky.social

Look for a preprint on the 14th of his nar mutants cloned, nar21—one of Neil’s and my favorites—coming soon.

They turned out to be much more useful than merely auxin-response controls. Using clues in Neil’s 1979 paper and later papers, I found the causal mutations of 13 of the 17 mutants in candidate genes in the span of less than a month leading to our joint Current Biology paper in 2010.

My career would have had a very different trajectory without him. When starting my auxin-in-moss project in Mark’s lab, I thought the nar mutants Neil published in 1979 would be great positive controls. After a cold email, the next thing I know, I received a package from Neil with 17 nar mutants.

Neil William Ashton Obituary | 2025 - 2025 | Regina Leader Post Remembering View Neil William Ashton's complete obituary, share memories, and explore 6 tribute posts from the community.

I was saddened to belatedly learn last week of the passing of another moss great last year. Neil Ashton was the original moss auxin-mutant guy, and I am heavily indebted to his generosity and correspondence for the last two decades.
leaderpost.remembering.ca/obituary/nei...

PCR genotyping gel for 16 CRISPR'd moss transformants showing bands indicating ~5900 bp deletions (top comb) and bands indicating a still-intact gene (bottom comb). 7 of 16 plants appear to have clean full-gene deletions.

Bittersweet milestone: I think I wrapped up my last ever set of moss DNA preps/genotyping PCR.
Nice note to end on; I got a great efficiency—44% of the transformants appear to have clean deletions of the entire gene that was targeted (5.9 & 6.8 kb deletions).

I cold-emailed Ralph as a second-year grad student: I wanted to work on moss but had no idea what I was doing. He invited me to spend weeks in his lab, joined my committee, and supported me throughout my PhD - my thesis project would 100% not have been possible without his generosity and kindness

Ralph was incredibly generous when I wanted to start working on moss. He invited me to visit his lab for a day and talk to/shadow people in his lab.

Tuned in to the Czechia v Korea baseball game from the Tokyodome, and saw a UCSD grad hit a home run.

1/ ✨ New preprint alert ✨

It is my pleasure to share:
"Stepwise evolution of the developmental and symbiotic functions of DELLA in land plants"

Here we investigated the role of the single GRAS transcription factor DELLA in #MyMarchantia

doi.org/10.64898/202...

#PlantScience
A thread...

This is over a week old

One of THE BEST rhododendron songs, in my opinion, and this live version is - chefs kiss 😘 - outta sight!

The lyrics speak to the big mysteries of rhododendron and give a sense as to why the plants have been so special to humans for millennia

Im delighted they chose it for their live album!

How should I keep spores of Marchantia polymorpha subsp. ruderalis? Although I have kept them at -30˚C for 1-2 months, they don't germinate so far.

No, I haven’t checked

One of its columns seems to bind the pigmented poly-something of moss fairly irreversibly. Last time, I got nervous and added an extra 1/5-volume wash before eluting. With that, I got all 48 samples’ 260/280 ratios 2.17 ±0.02 and 260/230 ratios 2.38±0.03. (That’s the full range, not SE.)

I have a hunch it would work. The only time I tried was when I purified RNA from a combined sample with half gametophores and half protonemata. (I needed to RT-PCR/clone some 6-7.5 kb cDNAs and wanted a mix of cell types.)