Starting next week we will begin revealing the results of our Flower Bioengineering genetic toolkit, all sponsored and synthesised by @genewiz.bsky.social Here’s a teaser of our first results. Can you guess what gene it is?? 🖤

Meet Ruby Petunie! Our little alien Petunia growing in tissue culture ❤️🧬

Thanks to all the plant scientists, who have tirelessly explained the new genomic techniques (#NGT) besides their workload in the universities, the labs and during their PhD theses! #SciComm Read details on EU’s new rules www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/pres...

New genomic techniques for plants to boost innovation in sustainable agriculture | News | European Parliament

Parliament has adopted new rules facilitating access to new plants that are climate and pest resistant, give higher yields and require fewer pesticides.

europarl.europa.eu

Excited to share our new preprint "Genetic code expansion enables plant-directed control of bacterial activity", a fantastic collaboration with @kunjapur.bsky.social lab! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

📢Out now on bioRxiv: We used Plant STARR-seq to characterize the species- and condition-specific enhancer activity of over 350,000 sequences derived from four plant species. For more, see below and read the paper at: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

JGI @jgi.doe.gov is looking for bold partners with expertise in lab automation 🤖, plant transformation 🌱, AI-supported imaging 🔬, and scalable bioengineering 🧬 Goal: build an automated system to identify, select, and process 10k+ transformed plant calluses/day Details: sam.gov/workspace/co...

I am super excited to announce that I am recruiting a new post-doc to join my team at UWA & @plants4space.bsky.social to work on plant synthetic biology, with a focus on genome engineering. If you are interested, please apply or reach out to me. external.jobs.uwa.edu.au/cw/en/job/52...

Excited to share our discovery of a new programmable RNA-guided DNA-targeting system hiding inside bacteriophages that predates CRISPR. We call it VIPR (Viral Interference Programmable Repeat), and it uses an entirely new logic to find its targets. Thread + link below.

#PlantSciJobs #PlantSciJob 7 PhD positions SMART Plants for Tomorrow’s Needs SMART Plants for Tomorrow’s Needs @ceplas.bsky.social in several locations Deadline: 18 March 2026 www.deutsche-botanische-gesellschaft.de/stellenangeb...

Almost forgot to thank @reneinckemann.bsky.social for helping us set up the chloroplast transformation system we relied so heavily upon! Go read his cool paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How does molecular valency shape condensate assembly and function? We used the CO2-fixing organelle in algae—the pyrenoid—to find out… 🧵 Preprint here!: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @cellarchlab.com @phaips.vd.st @biologyatyork.bsky.social #Rubisco #PhaseSeparation #Condensates #Pyrenoid

FoldMason is out now in @science.org. It generates accurate multiple structure alignments for thousands of protein structures in seconds. Great work by Cameron L. M. Gilchrist and @milot.bsky.social. 📄 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🌐 search.foldseek.com/foldmason 💾 github.com/steineggerla...

Multiple protein structure alignment at scale with FoldMason

Protein structure is conserved beyond sequence, making multiple structural alignment (MSTA) essential for analyzing distantly related proteins. Computational prediction methods have vastly extended ou...

science.org

Rational improvement of pennycress using CRISPR. #PlantScience From: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Creating a new oilseed crop, pennycress, by combining key domestication traits using CRISPR genome editing - Nature Plants

De novo domestication was performed on the brassica Thlaspi arvense (pennycress) by identifying and stacking CRISPR-induced mutations to create a new intermediate oilseed crop that can be grown in the...

nature.com

🚀 New preprint! @jacobsenucla.bsky.social x @doudna-lab.bsky.social collaboration: High-activity TnpB (Ymu1-WFR) + a multi-gRNA system in TRV enables heritable, tissue-culture-free multiplex editing in plants. Big potential for plant biotech 🧬🌾🌱 doi.org/10.64898/202...

New 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 .

My poster on flower bioengineering at the #AIEBaB26 conference in Bristol last week 🌹 🧬 ✨

Why I’m genetically engineering a rainbow flower… And how a Russian fairy tale inspired the idea 🧵

Genetic engineering, painting, sculpting, floristry, and fantasy are united in @nickdesnoyer.bsky.social 's flower design art project. New essay out now on a blossoming frontier of transgenic art!

Mutating The Medium

A blooming future for biodesign

allmovingparts.substack.com

Pleased to share this thoughtful essay by Jess on my flower design project🌹🧬 As a small thank-you for spreading the work, I'm randomly giving away 5 of these new morphogenesis hoodies to whoever reposts this!

Jess@jessnash.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Genetic engineering, painting, sculpting, floristry, and fantasy are united in @nickdesnoyer.bsky.social 's flower design art project. New essay out now on a blossoming frontier of transgenic art!

‼️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

European plant scientists welcome the EU Trilogue Provisional Agreement on New Genomic Techniques (#NGT), as EU-SAGE reports, the network representing plants scientists at 134 European plant science institutes and societies www.eu-sage.eu/news/Europea...

AI model Helixer predicts eukaryotic genes ab initio, directly from a plain text FASTA file. No RNA-seq. No protein homology. No repeats, hints, or curated evidence. Raw genome → accurate gene models. Deep learning + HMM, published in @natmethods.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Helixer: ab initio prediction of primary eukaryotic gene models combining deep learning and a hidden Markov model - Nature Methods

By leveraging both deep learning and hidden Markov models, Helixer achieves broad taxonomic coverage for ab initio gene annotation of eukaryotic genomes from fungi, plants, vertebrates and invertebrat...

nature.com

After 10 Fridays, 10 flowers, and 100+ drawings, the Florédex is complete! ✨ Come take a tour of the design and science behind 10 iconic flowers 🌺🧵

New paper is online! We used single cell RNA-seq & phylogenetics to identify 2 additional cell type specific TFs that control late-stage vinca alkaloid biosynthesis. The key insights originated from Camptotheca, another species that produces alkaloids. doi.org/10.1111/nph.... #PlantScience #SecMet

New OA Article: "A modular high-throughput approach for advancing synthetic biology in the chloroplast of Chlamydomonas" rdcu.be/eOdZP Modular-cloning-based platform for high-throughput chloroplast engineering in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.

Very excited to finally share my PhD paper, about advancing #chloroplast #synbio through high-throughput plastome engineering of #Chlamydomonas. Huge thanks to the whole team! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A modular high-throughput approach for advancing synthetic biology in the chloroplast of Chlamydomonas - Nature Plants

This study reports a modular-cloning-based platform for high-throughput chloroplast engineering in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii that allows large-scale characterization of genetic parts and prototyping o...

nature.com

Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology@mpimicrobiomarburg.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Turbo platform for plant research 🚀🪴 Extreme weather events due to #climatechange reduce crop yields. @reneinckemann.bsky.social & team led by Tobias Erb @synmikro.bsky.social has now developed a microalgae platform for fast and efficient tests of chloroplast gene variants s.gwdg.de/hznfNe

I am delighted to share our latest work on memory gene circuits for plants. This work was led by the phenomenal PhD student @patrickgong.bsky.social A lot of debugging & highlights how even simple components in synthetic biology can have unexpected properties. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

CREation of an expanded plant memory gene circuit toolkit

Genetic circuits rely on modular, well-characterized genetic parts to achieve predictable cellular behaviour. Despite their widespread adoption, biological parts are complex and when used in a new mol...

biorxiv.org

Don’t miss my presentation @iGEM tomorrow at 14:00 main stage! I will be throwing out bio-designer shirts to the back row 🧬🤘

Genetically engineered color-changing Arabidopsis 🧬📷- attempt #3 I think I finally nailed it with this one.

Friday Flower 008: Tulip 🌷 Tulip’s pastel colors and waxy cuticle that scatters light give them a soft watercolor look. The “broken” petals of Semper Augustus, created by a virus, became some of the most famous and valuable flowers in history... and their genome is 34Gb 🤯