RA position working on Marchantia reproductive development in the Penfield group at JIC. Deadline is August 18th!

John Innes Centre@johninnescentre.bsky.social · 2d ago

VACANCY - We’re looking for a Research Assistant to join the Penfield Group, working to understand the effects of temperature on plant reproductive development. https://okt.to/Yx9K5e Deadline - 18 August 2026 Contract - Until 7 August 2029, full-time

Ever had issues with contamination in #Marchantia or #liverwort tissue culture? We've developed a protocol that is simple and low-effort (albeit slow) to get rid of fungi and bacteria: dx.doi.org/10.17504/pro.... Work led by Isaac Coven and supported by Chetan Pandey, myself & @dromius.bsky.social.

📣 New preprint! 🧵 Fantastic work led by @antonkraege.bsky.social Fact: Cerato-platanins are everywhere in fungi. Found across the fungal kingdom, implicated in everything from development to virulence to immune activation. But what do they *actually* do? We finally found the answer 👇

I've signed @zero-hour.bsky.social's petition calling on Andy Burnham to Secure Our Future—to meet the UK's climate and nature commitments, pass the Nature + National Security Bill, and reject all new oil and gas. Please join me. www.zerohour.uk/andy

Secure Our Future For Us

Andy Burnham has a chance to Secure Our Future. Will you tell him not to waste it? Sign below.

zerohour.uk

This is really bad. I had a glimpse of hope for Labour, but that’s gone if they will actually announce such a foolish plan.

James Bullock@jmbecologist.bsky.social · 3w ago

From new hope to no hope before you can blink www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It's back live! Check out my week at TSL 🌱

Tatsuya Nobori@tatsuyanobori.bsky.social · 3w ago

A week as a pre-doc at TSL youtu.be/44DTxVhboTA?...

Preprint! How do "friendly" rhizobia build a legume nodule? @albinteulet.bsky.social found that some may carry hidden transcription factors - proteins that mimic DNA-binding folds to enter the plant nucleus and rewrite its developmental program. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (1/6)

Professorship Plant Biochemistry. Bielefeld, Germany. #plantscijobs #plantscijob #plantsciencejob www.uni-bielefeld.de/uni/karriere...

What a fun day at #BOTANICON where we celebrate all things plant science and connect with other plant researchers in #Cambridge. All organised and run by us ECRs! @slcuplants.bsky.social @niab-uk.bsky.social @cropscicentre.bsky.social @camplantsci.bsky.social @cubotanicgarden.bsky.social

Happy to share some of the auxin Marchantia research we've been working on for a while with @fromani.bsky.social and @jimhaseloff.bsky.social. We confirm long standing suspicions that stem cells in Marchantia exist in an auxin concentration/signalling minimum, and potentially a cytokinin maximum.

Marchantia stem cell maintenance and re-establishment are controlled by MpPIN1-mediated auxin transport and ARF signalling

Meristem organization in land plants depends on coordinated auxin distribution, transport and response, yet how these processes are integrated during vegetative growth of the gametophyte of non-seed p...

biorxiv.org

Paying for #peer-review increases speed and quality: www.nature.com/articles/d41... Great to have data supporting what most academics already know. I hope other journals take this up. So far reviewing remains largely unpaid labor layered onto already undercompensated #academic work.

Why paying peer reviewers works, according to a journal’s editor-in-chief

A biology journal that paid peer reviewers found that the approach cut the time to a first editorial decision by 85% and maintained high-quality reviews.

nature.com

++BREAKING++ Leading climate scientists in the UK have written to senior editors in broadcast media - and OFCOM and IPSO: "To express our concern about recent media coverage of extreme weather, climate change and net-zero and to urge you…to inform public audiences of the scientific links"

Since October I’m doing a #botany course @cubotanicgarden.bsky.social. It‘s massively changed how I interact with the greenery. I look closer and am more fascinated by the magical diversity. E.g.: Tillandsia usneoides (Spanish moss) doesn’t have roots and relies on its scales to capture water 🤓

Excited to share that our work on single-nucleus RNA-seq of the shoot apical meristem — the shoot stem cell niche — has found a home. #Plantascience #scRNAseq #stemcells www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Single-nucleus transcriptomics resolves multiple fate dynamics between inflorescence meristem and primary stem

snRNA-seq reveals shoot stem cell heterogeneity and traces their differentiation into primary stem cell types.

science.org

I’ve never seen such high overnight temperatures modelled. It looks like we’ll be transported to Jarkata in SE Asia, incredibly oppressive. The warmest minimum temperature of all-time at #London Heathrow is 22.6C set on 20 July 2016 the Euro has 27C on Thursday morning. Out of this world. (1/2)

📣 We are hiring! In the collaborative research center 'Plant Ecological Genetics' @teamthomma.bsky.social searches a PhD candidate to study the role of plant-associated microbiota in plant density responses and inter-plant competition. See project A07: sl1nk.com/b7z0doc Deadline July 10!

Happy to announce our study that has just been published from work done during my PhD at the University of Bristol working in Prof. Jill Harrison's lab. It's about WOX genes and sporophyte development in the model moss, Physcomitrium patens. Take a look 🧵👇

🌺 How does a hibiscus flower pattern its petals? A new computational model reveals hidden "boundary" cells can spontaneously emerge during flower development, helping to create stable petal patterns. Prediction confirmed experimentally! 🔗 www.slcu.cam.ac.uk/news/how-hib... #PlantsInTheSpotlight

For years I've tracked billionaire excess. Each year I show students a chart that blows their minds. This year I had to redraw it for a trillionaire: Elon Musk, $1.32T. Depressing that we're here. Silver lining: couldn't have happened to a less deserving person, proof that wealth ≠ merit.

Elon Musk's $1.32 Trillion, to Scale

The first trillionaire's fortune, one pixel per $1,000 — scroll past every dollar, and see what a fraction of it could do instead.

stanford.edu

VACANCY - Group Leader in Fundamental Biology of Legumes Closing date: 1 September 2026 Salary: competitive Contract: six-year tenure track or direct appointment, depending on experience Apply now: www.jic.ac.uk/vacancies/gr...

Big opportunities for researchers 🌍 We are investing nearly €400 million to help researchers share their work and collaborate with the best scientific teams across the EU. The 2026 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships are now open. More: link.europa.eu/PNxpxw

When did liverwort oil body cells originate? Here, Susan and I provide quantitative evidence that they emerged by at least the Middle Devonian (~390 Ma!), shedding light on a key anti-herbivory defense mechanism of early land plants!

New Phytologist@newphyt.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Homology of the dark cells of Paleozoic liverworts with the specialized oil body cells of modern liverworts (Marchantiophyta) Tremblay and Mercadal nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/BWYYSE...

April and May were very dry in #Cambridge (UK): 2.1 & 14.9 mm total, resp. So, @esiragher.bsky.social and I wanted to check if there is a trend towards drought. We used over a century of local weather data and vibecoded a dashboard with Claude.ai to check: dariuskos.github.io/Cambridge_Cl...

#PlantSciJobs 🌱 Postdoctoral Research Associate (x2) and Research Assistant (x2) Dr Edwige Moyroud is seeking 2 Postdocs and 2 Research Assistants to join her team investigating petal patterning Applications close: 5 June: Research Assistant bit.ly/4a32ffK 17 June: Postdoc bit.ly/4dT2LOC

🌱🌾🌍🌺🌳🌲🌿🐡🌴🖌️Not often moss & fungus feature on BBC News. Heath-star moss, Campylopus introflexus & fungus Bryoscyphus granulosus that causes moss to die back. Work by group including George Greiff, who competed in the earliest Botanical University Challenges! #BUC2026 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Killer fungus discovered that destroys UK invasive plant

A newly discovered species raises hope that some native British habitats could be restored.

bbc.co.uk

Dear #plantscience friends, we're looking to recruit a new colleague at @uni-freiburg.de @biologyunifreiburg.bsky.social: a Professor in Plant Biotechnology. 🌱🧪 The @dompsfr.bsky.social community is truly fantastic. Interested? Please share far and wide and join us! uni-freiburg.de/en/job/00005...

SPLICECRAFT v1.0 IS LIVE!!!!!!!!!!!! Open your terminal and type in "pipx install splicecraft" if you want to try it out, then spam "splicecraft update" often as I push updates frequently. A labor of love for the community I adore. Enjoy! 💚

Huge congratulations to Beverley Glover & Uta Paszkowski on being elected Fellows of the @royalsociety.org - a wonderful recognition of their significant contributions to plant sciences! 🎉 Read more: tinyurl.com/3vetucr4 @beverleycubg.bsky.social @paszkowskilab.bsky.social 🧪

Preprint Alert 🚨 @philcarella.bsky.social lab stepping into TIR-ritory!! Project started by me but finished by talented PhD student @ebkennedy.bsky.social (Please follow her), with contribution from Zhao He and @jonathandgjones.bsky.social We investigated EDS1-dependency of TIR domain. See thread👇

Elenor Kennedy@ebkennedy.bsky.social · 3mo ago

@khongsamchia.bsky.social Extremely excited to share the first pre-print from my PhD project in the Carella lab, co-first authored with @khongsamchia.bsky.social 🎉 (Thread below ⬇️) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Huge thanks to all co-authors and the #CarellaCapybaras for all the support 😊

@khongsamchia.bsky.social Extremely excited to share the first pre-print from my PhD project in the Carella lab, co-first authored with @khongsamchia.bsky.social 🎉 (Thread below ⬇️) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Huge thanks to all co-authors and the #CarellaCapybaras for all the support 😊