Yori Dola
@gene-boy.bsky.social
Plant gene editor 🧑🔬🌿🧬🔧 Making plants resistant to diseases 🦠🔨 Former hippy 🌺, now a scientist 🧪 Postdoc at the Jonathan Jones Lab, TSL
Japan has now joined Horizon Europe. Japan’s researchers can now partner with teams across the EU. Together, we will advance global research in health, digital technologies, and climate neutrality ↓ link.europa.eu/YP7MtB
Highly suspicious claim turns out to be baseless 😮 truly shocked NHS England adds caveat to pro-Palantir data after watchdog probe - giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @FT
NHS England adds caveat to pro-Palantir data after watchdog probe
Regulator urges health service to ensure communications about benefits are ‘clearly and appropriately labelled’
giftarticle.ft.com
“move from preprint to peer-reviewed publication leaves the central claims of most abstracts intact, indicating preprints are a reliable source…papers that were never posted as preprints were retracted at roughly twice the rate of those that were…” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Tracking claim changes from preprint to publication across 72,644 biomedical studies using large language models
Preprints now disseminate a large share of biomedical research before peer review. Because they have not yet passed peer review, some scientists regard preprint claims as unverified or potentially unr...
biorxiv.org
Magic benthi! 🍄 🌱 Psychedelic Nicotiana benthamiana wasn’t on my 2026 synbio bingo card www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
#PlantDisease news 📃! Great new preprint from Xinnian Dong's lab on a nucleoporin (Nup58) mechanically linking Ca++ influx with ETI! Good work on what is still a pretty open question. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Ca2+-activated CKL3 phosphorylates nucleoporin 58 to reprogram nuclear transport and execute effector-triggered immunity
Recognition of pathogen effectors by nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat receptors (NLRs) activates effector-triggered immunity (ETI) in plants through resistosome formation, which generates a sust...
biorxiv.org
TIRs are key regulators of plant immunity, but the role of conserved TIR-only proteins has remained unclear. Here, we compare TIR-only proteins from Arabidopsis and barley and show that they share a conserved role in plant immunity. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Conserved TIR-only proteins drive transcriptional defense and basal immunity in dicot and monocot plants
Toll/interleukin-1/resistance (TIR) domain NADase enzymes signal in plant immunity by producing ribosylated nucleotide second messengers which activate EDS1 dimer-helper NLR pathways to restrict patho...
biorxiv.org
🍇🧬Optimized hairy root protocol for grapevine. Tested multiple strains, cultivars & explants. Universal primers confirm transformation. DsRed reporter works well. Overexpressed VviMYBA1 turns roots red First CRISPR edited grapevine hairy roots reported #plantscience academic.oup.com/jxb/advance-...
Optimized protocol for efficient generation, confirmation, transformation, and CRISPR editing of grapevine hairy roots
Optimized workflows and methods are provided for the establishment of Rhizobium rhizogenes-mediated transgenic or CRISPR-edited hairy root cultures for gra
academic.oup.com
Molecular mimicry of a pathogen virulence target by a plant immune receptor | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Molecular mimicry of a pathogen virulence target by a plant immune receptor
Plants and animals respond to pathogen attack by mounting innate immune responses that require intracellular nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) proteins. These immune receptors detect pathog...
science.org
Years ago, research linked ultra-processed foods and obesity. Unsurprising However, this was misconstrued - somehow the processing was blamed, not the contents. Oddly, this led to items like plant yogurts labelled as bad for you The science is in: it's the contents www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Ultraprocessed foods and obesity: Interpreting the evidence
What do randomized controlled trials really tell us about the effects of ultraprocessed foods?
science.org
#Apiospora marii is an ascomycete recently associated with olive tree dieback in Italy and Spain. Giuseppe Incampo et al. developed a quantitative PCR and a digital droplet PCR for its detection: https://doi.org/10.1094/PDIS-03-25-0635-SR #plantdisease #plantpathology
A livestream of a volcano in the Philippines captured a meteor crashing to Earth today. What are the odds? Mayon Volcano, Location: Albay, Luzon, Philippines
Started off as convergent observations in the lab with Mau and led to one of my favorite works so far! Gotta love molecular evolution and receptor biology 😊🧬💻 Huge effort from @maigarro.bsky.social @mpcontreras.bsky.social for pushing this together to the end. 🤘🏻
Mauricio Contreras@mpcontreras.bsky.social · 3mo agoCheck out our latest work! AlphaFold 3 revealed a transient immune receptor complex that eluded biochemical studies for almost a decade 🤯 We describe a conserved structural logic underlying sensor–helper communication in an NLR immune receptor network 🧵👇
Emma Turley started her PhD expecting the effector ChEC108 would aid Colletotrichum establish infection, but she instead discovered that when it makes it's way to plasmodesmata it's bound by host HIPP6, triggering PD closure and impeding infection. #PlantScience
bioRxiv Plant Bio@biorxiv-plants.bsky.social · 3mo agoColletotrichum higginsianum effector ChEC108 binds a plasmodesmal HMA protein and elicits plant defence https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.19.726166v1
We are excited to release the BAT!🦇🚨 We've used this phylogenetic analysis pipeline in our lab for years, and grad Ben Sheppard now presents a Github release and preprint. I run BAT analyses almost daily. It makes exploring gene families routine, customizable, and fun🧵
Preprint 🧵! I’m really excited to introduce BIGSMALL, an interleaved multi-magnification cryo-ET scheme bridging molecular and cellular scales in a single acquisition! BIGSMALL = 𝐁road 𝐈nformation 𝐆athering 𝐒trategy by 𝐌ultiscale 𝐀cquisition of lame𝐋𝐋a www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (1/6)
More seriously, be wary of trillion-dimensional spaces. As long as they are the same model, the teacher model teaches the student model to prefer owls simply by transmitting sequences of numbers. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Language models transmit behavioural traits through hidden signals in data - Nature
During model distillation, large language models can subtly transmit traits unrelated to the training data.
nature.com
Today we mourn the passing of our beloved central dogma. It served Crick well. But it is time to let go. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Science | AAAS
science.org
New Article: "A fungal nuclease effector subverts the chloroplast genome and triggers cell death to promote infection" rdcu.be/fdgOE MoNee6 is a chloroplast-targeted nuclease from Magnaporthe oryzae. Engineering OsClpP1 enhances Nee6 degradation and blast resistance.
Crispy toast enjoyers, rejoice! Fantastic to see Gene Editing being allowed to do some good in Europe.
Rothamsted Research@rothamsted.ac.uk · 5mo agoScientists have successfully developed wheat with dramatically reduced levels of asparagine using gene editing, offering a promising route to safer food production and improved regulatory compliance👇 https://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/news/ultra-low-asparagine-wheat-developed-using-precision-gene-editing
Fancy word of the day: pollenkitt An oily, waxy, sticky goo that plants that are pollinated by insects, bats, & birds put on top of their pollen so that it -sticks to pollinators -doesn't blow away in the wind (hypoallergenic!!) -has extra tasty calories for the pollinators maybe
ROCKET 🚀 inference-time optimization of AlphaFold to fit structural data is published! rdcu.be/fa9YH Since our preprint, we’ve pushed it to regimes where other methods break: low resolution, weak signal, real experimental edge cases. Here’s what we learned: 1/15
AlphaFold as a prior: experimental structure determination conditioned on a pretrained neural network
Nature Methods - ROCKET improves experimental structure elucidation by integrating implicit structural knowledge from OpenFold, a trainable reimplementation of AlphaFold2, with X-ray...
rdcu.be
🌿🐛 RESEARCH 🐛🌿 Screening 99 purslane accessions identified aphid-susceptible and -resistant lines. Integrated transcriptomics and metabolomics show TPS genes regulate d-limonene and myrcene, underlying variation in aphid resistance – Xu et al. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/jxb/... #PlantScience 🧪
#GiveGenesAChance in UK 🌾 www.rothamsted.ac.uk/news/rothams...
Rothamsted gene-edited barley crop becomes first to receive a UK Precision Bred Organism marketing notice | Rothamsted Research
A gene-edited barley developed by scientists at Rothamsted Research has become the first crop to receive a Precision Bred Organism (PBO) marketing notice confirmation through the UK’s new regulatory p...
rothamsted.ac.uk
#PlantScienceClassics #20: Kinetin & Cytokinins. In 1955 Carlos Miller, Folke Skoog & co-workers describe the first #Cytokinin and its role in promoting cell division and growth promotion. #Phytohormones #PlantScience #PlantDevelopment pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1... pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1...
Do you have a PhD in plant science 🌿 and are you excited by the commercial application of research? Do you want to grow your skills in IP management?💡 We have an exciting opportunity for you ⬇️ VACANCY: TSL Ventures Operations Officer www.tsl.ac.uk/working-at-t... Apply before 7 April '26