New Brief Communication: "Cell-based CRISPRa screen identifies a papillae-specific receptor kinase mediating broad-spectrum fungal resistance in rice" rdcu.be/ZZFv8dTuRi8a A RK that positively regulates fungal resistance via silicon-mediated physical & biochemical defences. #PlantScience

The Stowers Institute partnered with Google DeepMind on AlphaGenome Atlas, a new AI-powered resource mapping predictions for 9+ billion possible single-letter DNA changes. 🧬 Stowers’ @juliazeitlinger.bsky.social Ph.D., helped guide its development and demonstrate its potential. bit.ly/4r4Bn6C

Job opportunity! 🌱 At KWS Einbeck (Germany), we have an exciting opening for a Group Lead for Molecular Trait Analysis & Genomics. 👉 Read more & apply online: jobs.kws.com/job/Einbeck-...

How do transcription factors bind DNA strongly, and in a switch like manner, while remaining sequence specific? Our new paper on a canonical plant TF suggests the answer is a previously underappreciated assembly state: transcription factor nanoclusters. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Nanoclustering of a plant transcription factor enables strong yet specific DNA binding

Transcription factor nanoclusters balance the DNA binding trade-off between weakly binding oligomers and nonspecific condensates.

science.org

"(...) plasmids are chromatinized in an organized, sequence-dependent manner and adopt a heterogeneous and incomplete chromatin architecture relative to nuclear-encoded chromatin fibers" www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

Chromatin architectures underlying plasmid-based assays for regulatory variant effects

Mallory et al. develop plasmid Fiber-seq to map chromatin architecture along individual transfected plasmids at near-nucleotide resolution, which reveals that plasmids adopt heterogeneous chromatin pa...

cell.com

🚨 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...

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/

Changelog

tidypolars.etiennebacher.com

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 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.19.689271v1

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...

Targeted genetic manipulation and yeast-like evolutionary genomics in the green alga Auxenochlorella

Auxenochlorella, green algae shaped by evolutionary forces acting on vegetative diploids, are amenable to discovery research and bioengineering via efficie

academic.oup.com

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...

Beware giving this site your unpublished data

Users noticed the website had fake testimonials and a domain name registered seemingly overnight.

open.substack.com

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 🧪 🧶🧬 🌾 🌍

Martin Jonikas@mjonikas.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Algal pyrenoids—condensates that mediate ~1/3 of Earth’s CO2 fixation—change size and number as cells divide. Our data suggest a simple control mechanism: a kinase that continuously ejects material from the condensate! ☀️🌍🔬💧 #Biophysics #Photosynthesis www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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...

TEtrimmer: a tool to automate the manual curation of transposable elements - Nature Communications

Transposons are repetitive DNA sequences that are hard to identify and map accurately. TEtrimmer automates key manual steps, enabling faster and more reliable annotation of transposable elements in any genome.

nature.com

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

F1000Research Article: Sustainable data analysis with Snakemake.

Read the latest article version by Felix Mölder, Kim Philipp Jablonski, Brice Letcher, Michael B. Hall, Peter C. van Dyken, Christopher H. Tomkins-Tinch, Vanessa Sochat, Jan Forster, Filipe G. Vi...

f1000research.com

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

Conserved language of plant gene regulation

Imagine your cell as a smart home where genes are like appliances that need to be turned on or off at the right times. This regulation is mediated by trans

doi.org

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!

Antonio Camargo@apcamargo.bsky.social · last yr.

A BLAST update adding support for compressed files and csv output with headers is a Good Friday night surprise! blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/doc/blast-ne...

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.

Research Associate-Fixed Term - East Lansing, Michigan, United States

Position Summary The Li lab in the Department of Plant Biology is recruiting a postdoctoral research associate to work on project(s) in plant molecular biology, biochemistry, and/or genomics. The idea...

careers.msu.edu

Our department (Berkeley PMB) is hiring an asst. prof. in Plant Resilience to Climate Change! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05049

Assistant Professor - Plant Resilience to Climate Change - Department of Plant and Microbial Biology

University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

aprecruit.berkeley.edu