Been away from BlueSky for a bit but just received tenure! Big thank you to my many many mentors and colleagues. And, of course, my family. Truly a team effort. Also, this video took like six tries to get right 🫠
Aman Husbands
@husbandslab.bsky.social
Assistant Professor, Univ of Pennsylvania. Plant developmental biology, robustness, evolution, transcription factors, Bajan rum, LFC
How was the wheel invented? I discussed this in my first ever article for @us.theconversation.com Check it out. theconversation.com/how-was-the-...
How was the wheel invented? Computer simulations reveal the unlikely birth of a world-changing technology nearly 6,000 years ago
People have long assumed that wheels evolved from simple wooden rollers. But how? And why? A new model focused on mechanical advantage and structural strength suggests some answers.
theconversation.com
I have a thousand positive memories of Greg. At the bar, playing music, talking science. RIP and thank you for everything
Robin Allshire 🇮🇪 🇪🇺✊🏿 ⬆️ Zak’s favourite nucleosome: K9me@allshire-lab.bsky.social · 4mo agoVery upsetting to hear the sad news of Greg Hannon’s passing. I always enjoyed our far too few conversations we had over the years. He had an interesting and insightful perspective on any science being discussed. He will be missed. www.cruk.cam.ac.uk/news/in-memo...
How moss makes a spiral of leaves through a rotating asymmetric division of the apical cell meristem--our paper is out @currentbiology.bsky.social today! @soestrauss.bsky.social Richard Smith, Joe Cammarata www.cell.com/current-biol...
Spiral phyllotaxis in the moss Physcomitrium patens emerges from simple division rules of the apical cell
Cammarata et al. explore how cell division orientation generates phyllotaxis in moss with a unicellular meristem. They show that successive rotational divisions in the apical cell are precisely placed...
cell.com
This was a fun project for which Mattie @mschwall95.bsky.social visited our lab to try root live imaging. Of course the roots wouldn't grow during the week she was here until the last day, but she got it to work when she got back. Cool results.
New Phytologist@newphyt.bsky.social · 6mo agoSIAMESE Regulates G2 📖https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.70947?af=R by Schwall et al. @roederlab.bsky.social @mschwall95.bsky.social
Thanks for the invitation, Sunil! Very nice to be back. Also, it was 79 degrees in Riverside and Philly was like 0 degrees, so….yeah😂
Sunil Kenchanmane Raju@kenchanmane.bsky.social · 6mo agoHad a fantastic time hosting my friend @husbandslab.bsky.social (an alum of our Plant Biology Graduate program @ucriverside.bsky.social) Cool talk on paralog-specific regulation of transcription factor families! Exciting discussion on evolutionary and regulatory divergence! #GeneRegulation
Excited to share our latest review on hydrosignaling: moisture-dependent molecular pathways that help plants grow towards water. Insightful review of the literature and discussion of moisture sensing mechanisms by Will Dwyer and @hhtormar.bsky.social. Enjoy! link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Please stop saying the bill allows "no more multi-year funding" - or at least be clear the 'more' is in reference to disastrous FY25 levels. The bill allows 39% MYF, same as in FY25, which contributed substantially to a 24% drop in new research. The bill has some wins. MYF is not one of them.
Denis Wirtz@deniswirtz.bsky.social · 6mo agoBoth chambers of Congress have now passed the FY26 minibus with NIH provisions. The President will sign. (1) $48.7 billion for NIH (2) Full IDC recovery (3) No more multi-year funding (4) No NIH reorganization, maintaining the current IC structure.
Given the described activators of cambium growth, we reasoned repressors were needed to balance the system. Here they are! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Discovery: Xing, Jingyi, Emma, Riikka, Anne-Maarit, Julia, Qing, Hanan, Raluca, Joanna, Yuqi, Wiki #plantscience #plantdev
biorxiv.org
It was good to catch up on my reading for this dispatch in Current Biology. Sjoerd Woudenberg in the Weijers lab, Wallner et al. In the Dolan lab and Flores Sandoval et al. In the Bowman lab have done a great job! Evolution and development: What makes a merry stem?: www.cell.com/current-biol...
Evolution and development: What makes a merry stem?
From tiny mosses to giant redwoods, around 450,000 species of land plants show a huge variety of forms, yet all land plants develop from stem cells in proliferative meristems. What makes a meristem? T...
cell.com
Does the noncoding genome actually carry more genetic information than coding seqs? Motivated by this question we mutated every bp in the 10kb MYC locus. Results are even more exciting: Decoding the MYC locus reveals a druggable ultraconserved RNA element www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Absolutely delighted that our paper on epigenetic dynamics during plant aging is out today in Science! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Aging drives a program of DNA methylation decay in plant organs
Plants display a wide range of life spans and aging rates. Although dynamic changes to DNA methylation are a hallmark of aging in mammals, it is unclear whether similar molecular signatures reflect ra...
science.org
XTH genes impact growth habit determination of twining common bean vine revealed by brassinosteroid treatment Hunt et al. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/FVDTFB...
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/JAIVZX... Excited to share my latest work in @newphyt.bsky.social. Here, we used TurboID proximity labeling with CLAVATA receptors FEA3 and BAM1D in maize meristems to better understand the signaling pathways important for meristem regulation. #PlantScience
Thanks Vincent E. Cerbantez-Bueno for a great conversation. @naascarabidopsis.bsky.social www.arabidopsiscommunity.org/news-events/...
Adrienne Roeder and her love of visualizing plant development — Arabidopsis Community as supported by NAASC
Vincent Cerbantez-Bueno, elected as a NAASC Early Career Scholar in 2024, interviews former NAASC faculty member Adrienne Roeder about her career: her background and personal journey to becoming a pla...
arabidopsiscommunity.org
Congrats to my colleague Doris Wagner and her excellent team! Special shout to Tian Huang for his outstanding work
Maddy Seale@maddyseale.bsky.social · 6mo agoOut First Release in @science.org this week: A feedback loop allows two shoot stem cell populations to respond differently to environmental conditions: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #plantscience
Out First Release in @science.org this week: A feedback loop allows two shoot stem cell populations to respond differently to environmental conditions: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #plantscience
A negative feedback loop between TERMINAL FLOWER1 and LEAFY protects inflorescence indeterminacy
Inflorescences of flowering plants adopt diverse genetically programmed and environmentally tuned architectures. By contrast, continued maintenance of the stem-cell pool within the apical meristem is ...
science.org
A developmental timer coordinates organism-wide microRNA transcription https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.21.700890v1
This is a very special paper for me. I had the idea of combining transcription factor binding with chromatin in 2016/8. It took some time, but thanks to Fred and Vikas, we can finally share the story in @plos.org Genetics looking at chromatin states in Arabidopsis and Marchantia. #PlantScience
Chromatin state architecture governs transcription factor accessibility across plant genomes
Author summary In eukaryotes, DNA is tightly associated with histone proteins. Histone covalent modifications and histones isoforms, also called histone variants provide most of the complexity of chro...
journals.plos.org
Functional and developmental differences between adaxial and abaxial #stomata in amphistomatous #leaves A #ResearchReview by @hanna-horak.bsky.social 👇 📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #LatestIssue
If we continue to compromise with people whose stated goal is to destroy NIH, then we will not be successful in saving it.
This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...
Paper is here and preview is below. This is case where the long back and forth between authors and reviewers is illuminating and touches on the historical literature elifesciences.org/articles/105...
Short activation domains control chromatin association of transcription factors
Single-molecule tracking of transcription factors in living cells revealed how mutations that make short activation domains stronger increased the fraction of transcription factor molecules bound to chromatin and led to longer residence times on chromatin.
elifesciences.org
eLife@elife.bsky.social · 7mo agoMutations that make short activation domains stronger increase the amount of transcription factor molecules bound to chromatin. buff.ly/pFNRtFa
Someone got Cas9-Turbo to work. It's like basically Y1H but with proteomics. It however requires transgenic plant expressing Cas9-Turbo and gRNAs, which is still cumbersome for many plants that are not Arabidopsis. #PlantSciences
Nature Plants@natplants.nature.com · 7mo agoNew Brief Communication: "A CRISPR-based sequence proximity binding protein labelling system for scanning upstream regulatory proteins" rdcu.be/eZLUP CRISPR-based proximity labelling system to profile DNA-binding proteins such as PIF4 transcription factor .
Happy to share the pre-print on GEMMIFER, a novel ERF required for the initiation of gemma in Marchantia. One of the coolest phenotypes that I have ever seen. Congratulations to Yuki and Go, who led this research. #PlantScience @biorxiv-plants.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
NSF needs to hear from you. Among other points, I suggested: keep politics out of science; stop using the threat of cancelling scientific grants to try to control universities; increase NSF funding for fundamental research. Pls send around. Deadline is January 27. Thanks www.nsf.gov/od/updates/n...
NSF seeks public input on its Fiscal Year (FY) 2026–2030 NSF Strategic Plan
nsf.gov
We should only fund research that will have huge impact and not fund research that won't. Fortunately, these are easy to distinguish. - Populists anytime they look at government research funding
💀😂
Mark A. Hanson@hansonmark.bsky.social · 7mo agoWe've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n
