Excited to share our latest work! 🍅 Two evolutionarily distinct immune receptors recognize the same viral target, yet differ in their recognition spectra. A fascinating example of convergent evolution in plant immunity!

Jogi Madhuprakash@jmadhuprakash.bsky.social · 4d ago

🍅 Tomato brown rugose fruit virus spread worldwide. For >60 years, one resistance gene protected tomatoes. This virus broke through. A second gene confers resistance. The same viral target? Convergent evolution? Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #EvoMPMI #NLRbiology (1/9) 🧵

A new plant-bacteria immunological connection in the first preprint of our group at @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social @plantevolution.bsky.social! Straight from the top of Mt. Olympus ⛰️🦅 Led by Eirik @eiriklag.bsky.social, in collaboration with @geminiteamlab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Cover image alert 🎨🚨👇🏼 - check out the amazing drawing of Sophia Zimmermann from our group in Nature Microbiology @natmicrobiol.nature.com ! Fun fact: Sophia initially drew it as a present to Dorentina @humollidorentina.bsky.social when we celebrated her recent paper on TnSeq with phages 🥂😊.

Dorentina Humolli@humollidorentina.bsky.social · 6d ago

We wrote a short “Behind the Paper” post about our HIDEN-SEQ journey together with @aharms485.bsky.social. Check it out: go.nature.com/4yBHsdy Special to share it with the @natmicrobiol.nature.com cover, featuring the amazing art of the great scientist and artist Sophia Zimmermann from our lab!

Our lab's first preprint! The antiphage protein Tiamat is an ATPase and DNase with homologs across the tree of life. What started as undergrad Shirley Yuan's summer project grew into a paper and a collaboration with @jpkbravo.bsky.social's group. Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Very excited to share the first preprint from my PhD with the community! This is also the first paper from the Plant Immunogenomics group with @galofir.bsky.social, so stay tuned for more! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/n 🧵

NO VEIN is an ancestral immunity protein involved in plant-virus interaction

The conservation of immune systems from prokaryotes to eukaryotes can guide discovery of immunity genes across the tree of life. Most studies to date have focused on metazoan systems, while the extent...

biorxiv.org

Now out! Together with Kenneth Berendzen, Yu Zhou et al., in a commendable team effort, set up a FANS-FAPS protocol for the isolation of plant Cajal bodies @zmbp-tuebingen.bsky.social — revealing kingdom-specific protein composition: academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Proteome profiling of plant Cajal bodies uncovers kingdom-specific components

Abstract. Membraneless organelles (MLOs) in eukaryotic cells, such as the nuclear Cajal body (CB), have been notoriously difficult to biochemically isolate

academic.oup.com

Super happy to finally share our preprint with the community! 🎉 Fungal extracellular vesicles deliver RNA cargo into host cells - but how do they get through the plant cell wall? This question puzzled us and the field for years… 🧵 1/6

Had lots of fun presenting my work at #SoapboxSciene Tübingen yesterday. I talked about natural diversity, plant immune genes and how I use the former to find the latter. Explaining my research to the public was definitely an exciting challenge. Huge thanks to the organizers and all the helpers! 💜

New paper from the Yasin Dagdas (@plantophagy.bsky.social) group, this time in @science.org, on how plant cells cope with viral infection and how selective autophagy delays cell death to give plants a chance to survive. Chapeau and congratulations to all the authors! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Selective autophagy fine-tunes plant immunity to promote cell survival during viral infection

RNA viruses co-opt host endomembranes to form replication complexes, often triggering cellular stress and immune responses. Here, we show that Arabidopsis thaliana activates selective autophagy to res...

science.org

Day 1 of the Mendel Early Career Symposium! 100 international researchers gathered for networking, engaging talks & posters, keynote by @emmanuellebayer.bsky.social, & workshop on ChimeraX/AlphaFold. Thanks to the sponsors for supporting expanding horizons in #PlantBiology. #Mendel_ECR_26

I am thrilled to share our last work on the evolution of plant antiviral immunity @cragenomica.bsky.social !. Please, let us know what you think! biorxiv.org/content/10.648 98/2026.05.18.725958v1 🧵

Amazing protein name, good job!

eLife@elife.bsky.social · 5mo ago

The olfactory receptor SNIF-1 mediates foraging for leucine-enriched diets in <i>C. elegans</i>

Born from the collaborative spirit of #TRR356, I’m excited to share my first first-author project! 🪴🦠 What started as a side project with @kbuhrman.bsky.social led us to discover that KAR/KL and SL signalling fine-tune the strength and timing of plant defense responses in a conserved manner!

bioRxiv Plant Bio@biorxiv-plants.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Karrikin and strigolactone signalling affect pattern-triggered immunity and resistance to specific pathogens https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.05.722863v1

Fantastic paper led by Matthew Davis from @grey-monroe.bsky.social, on genome degradation in long-term walnut tissue culture: Somatic embryogenesis increases mutation rates >30x, with aneuploidy, large deletions, somatic recombination, and elevated #TE activity. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🎉Excited to share our new preprint! TIR domains from diverse animals, including human TLR4, are catalytically active and produce cyclic ADP-ribose (cADPR). This enzymatic activity is widespread in animals and conserved across the tree of life. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Dynamic co-existence of bacteriophages and their hosts in the Arabidopsis thaliana phyllosphere https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.14.718382v1

Behind the scenes! go.nature.com/4bYY8BM

What brown algae taught me about the importance of jumping genes for genome evolution

go.nature.com

How diverse is bacterial immunity ? We report in @science.org how language models allowed us to predict 2.4M antiphage proteins spanning >23K novel potential systems. 👏 @emordret.bsky.social, @alexhv.bsky.social & al doi.org/10.1126/scie... Explore them here defensefinder.mdmlab.fr/wiki/refseq_...

We have been cooking up this story for a while and we are excited to finally be able to share! Read on if you're interested in whole plant regeneration WITHOUT the application of hormones!

How much protein diversity can Life on Earth actually generate? With DIAMOND DeepClust, we show how billions of proteins across the tree of life can be clustered at low-identity for downstream analytics tasks. 📚Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 💻Code: github.com/bbuchfink/di...

I love it when you're reading serious papers and then come across some humanity sprinkled in-between all the seriousness

1/11 🔥 New preprint alert 🔥 We wanted to know what plants in the wild really care about. So we asked them 🎤. Here is what we learned: “Biotic-response networks are an important organizer of the transcriptome in wild Arabidopsis thaliana populations” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

One of those stories you can't help getting excited about every time you hear it presented. Great work from everyone involved ! #PlantScience

The Sainsbury Laboratory@thesainsburylab.bsky.social · 7mo ago

New Preprint: Plasma membrane nanoscale dynamics of Arabidopsis leucine-rich repeat receptor kinase complexes (2026) https://www.tsl.ac.uk/publications/164874

This account of the eLife saga will provoke much debate. One aspect isn't accurate: eLife wasn't "designed as an experiment in removing gatekeepers". The original intent was to publish "outstanding papers" but have the gatekeepers be academic not professional editors 1/2 nikomc.com/2026/03/05/e...

eLife Fallout

When a prestigious journal scrapped accept-reject decisions on submitted papers, some scientists rebelled, and the editor-in-chief was fired.

nikomc.com

The function of nuclear speckles is revealed! This is an incredibly important paper with absolutely beautiful data! Wow! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Nuclear speckles enable processing of RNA from GC-rich isochores

Nuclear speckles are key subnuclear structures that regulate gene expression in GC-rich regions. This work shows that the evolution and expansion of core speckle proteins were crucial for the increase...

cell.com

Please share! We are looking for a postdoctoral scientist (2 years, extension possible) starting from 01/05/2026 at @ipbhalle.bsky.social! The project focuses on plant immune receptor biochemistry and structural biology. Deadline 09/03/2026. Apply at: ipb-halle.mhm.jobs/11-postdocto...

Postdoctoral position in biology (m/f/d) (2/2026)

Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry (Halle) offers a Postdoctoral position in Biology

ipb-halle.mhm.jobs

You can find the original article in Science Advances: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 4/4 #PlantScience

Arboviruses manipulate rice’s volatile emissions, protecting insect vectors from natural enemies in the field

Rice viruses modify plant volatiles to protect insect vectors from natural enemies.

science.org

🧵 Just out in Cell after more than 10 years in the making! 🎓 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... Plants and animals evolve radically different body plans. Do they also operate under fundamentally different molecular evolutionary constraints during organ formation? @cellpress.bsky.social

New Preprint: An ancient alkalinization factor informs Arabidopsis root development (2025) https://www.tsl.ac.uk/publications/161540

bioRxiv: An ancient alkalinization factor informs Arabidopsis root development (2025)

The power of hydrogen (pH) regulates virtually all cellular activities. In both plants and animals, cell-to-cell variations in pH correlate with key developmental transitions1–5, yet the underlying regulators and associated functions remain elusive. Here, we report that members of the REMORIN (REM) protein family function as inhibitors of the H+-ATPases thereby promoting extracellular pH (pHe) alkalinization. This, in turn, regulates various cell surface processes, including steroid hormone signaling, and coordinates developmental transitions in the Arabidopsis thaliana root. Inhibition of H+-ATPases by REMs represents an evolutionary innovation that predates the origin of the root system itself. This study thus uncovers an ancient alkalinization mechanism co-opted by the root developmental program and infers that pHe patterning may have shaped morphogenesis evolution.

doi.org

How can genome sequencing training foster more equitable global science? 🌍 An interview with doctoral researcher Catarina Lino on a hands-on plant genomics workshop in Zimbabwe - and what it means for North–South collaboration. 👉 tinyurl.com/9knhj92v #PlantGenomics #ScienceCollaboration #maxplanck