I am happy to announce the launch of a new Arabidopsis genomics resource! Check out arabidopsislyrata.org Now you can easily look at the natural genetic variation across the entire species range of A. lyrata and A. arenosa.

Our most recent work on the “function and evolution” of #nuclear-speckles is now online at Cell @cp-cell.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...
Read the thread👇 for the highlights of our findings.

Old Irish Goat carries 3,000 years of Irish history

🐐🧬 New research has revealed that the Old Irish Goat shares a 3,000-year genetic link with goats living in Ireland during the Late Bronze Age.

The findings suggest the rare indigenous breed represents a continuous Irish lineage stretching back millennia.

@gingerhowley.bsky.social

Keeping cells fit Fragments of aberrant cytoplasmic mRNA pair with nuclear RNAs to augment transcription

In a new Science study, researchers report on transcriptional adaptation, a dual feedback and feedforward mechanism that uses genetic redundancy to compensate for mutations in protein-coding genes.

Learn more in a new #SciencePerspective: https://scim.ag/4ryeXtN

Amazing peppered moth story from Saccheri lab - same locus, but different structural variants, underly parallel evolution of industrial melanism in the UK and across continental Europe.

Winter blooming of hundreds of plants in UK ‘visible signal’ of climate breakdown New year plant hunt shows rising temperatures are shifting natural cycles of wildflowers such as daisies

We've been working with @metoffice.gov.uk to analyse 10 years of #NewYearPlantHunt data.
The analysis provides the clearest evidence yet of how rising temperatures are impacting the British & Irish flora, with knock-on effects for all our wildlife.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Red and yellow columbine flower with swept back spurs

Aquilegia elegantula, our Western Red Columbine, blooming above the Conejos River #nativeplants

#FallbackFlowers #Fallback to June 27 🌿

Cycad plants use thermogenesis to warm their reproductive cones. A beetle dusted with pollen and fluorescent dyes lands on the warm cone of a cycad. High concentrations of dye have been deposited on the cone’s hottest regions during previous visits by other labeled beetles. Beetle pollinators use these thermal infrared patterns as a guide to locate host pollen and ovulate cones.

Long before flowers dazzled pollinators with brilliant colors and sweet scents, ancient plants used another feature to signal insects: heat. The findings in Science offer insights into what shaped the earliest eras of plant-animal coevolution.

Read more in this week's issue: https://scim.ag/4rVtArQ

AGO5 restricts virus vertical transmission in plant gametophytes The propagation of a viral infection from a host parent to its progeny is known as vertical transmission, or seed transmission in plants. It allows viral infections to rapidly spread locally via polle...

Preprint alert! It is my great pleasure to announce the first manuscript from the lab, a story that started @gmivienna.bsky.social and was mainly accomplished by the intrepid @gesahoffmann.bsky.social at @mpi-mp-potsdam.bsky.social. A brief thread with our findings
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How do new centromeres evolve while staying compatible with the division machinery?

Discover it in our new Nature paper! We show centromeres transition gradually via a mix of drift, selection, and sex, reaching new states that still work with the kinetochore.

👉 doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09779-1

CRISPR-Cas–mediated heritable chromosome fusions in Arabidopsis The genome of Arabidopsis thaliana consists of 10 chromosomes. By inducing CRISPR-Cas–mediated breaks at subcentromeric and subtelomeric sequences, we fused entire chromosome arms, obtaining two eight...

CRISPR-Cas–mediated heritable chromosome fusions in Arabidopsis | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Very nice work from Holger Puchta & colleagues

What James Watson got wrong about DNA - The Boston Globe The science he helped pioneer consistently undermines his view that genes determine everything about us.

"What James Watson got wrong about DNA"

By the great Sohini Ramachandran (@sramach.bsky.social) and your boy for The Boston Globe (@bostonglobe.com).

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/14/o...

New paper! Work led by @p-bourguet.bsky.social and Frédéric Berger at the GMI of the @oeaw.bsky.social and @esasaki007.bsky.social identified how protein CDCA7 helps plants stably maintain epigenetic modifications across generations.

Read more: www.oeaw.ac.at/gmi/detail/n...

The genetic and geographic origin of Arabidopsis suecica.

Diploid origins and early genome stabilization in the allotetraploid Arabidopsis suecica

Burns et al. robinburns@bsky.social alisondawnscott@bsky.social

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

CRISPR targeting of H3K4me3 activates gene expression and unlocks centromere-proximal crossover recombination in Arabidopsis Nature Communications - Binenbaum et al. demonstrate that precise CRISPR-based targeting of a key chromatin mark (H3K4me3) can switch on genes, boost disease resistance, and unlock meiotic...

Very excited to share our work published in Nature Comms last week! Here we describe a range of cool things that can be done once you have the power to control deposition of H3K4me3…

rdcu.be/eNEf4

A short thread:

Antiviral reverse transcriptases reveal the evolutionary origin of telomerase Defense-associated reverse transcriptases (DRTs) employ diverse and distinctive mechanisms of cDNA synthesis to protect bacteria against viral infection. However, much of DRT family diversity remains ...

1/10 Genome maintenance by telomerase is a fundamental process in nearly all eukaryotes. But where does it come from?

Today, we report the discovery of telomerase homologs in a family of antiviral RTs, revealing an unexpected evolutionary origin in bacteria.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

From genotype to phenotype with 1,086 near telomere-to-telomere yeast genomes Nature - A newly compiled atlas of species-wide structural variants and gene-based and graph pangenomes derived from highly complete assemblies of genomes from 1,086 natural isolates enable...

Incredible new paper from @schacherer.bsky.social et al rdcu.be/eLcTH

How To Reproduce As A Plant

How To Reproduce As A Plant

#Plants #Botany #Angiosperms #Evolution #Reproduction

https://sciencehumor.io/biology-memes/how-to-reproduce-as-a-plant-zfkw

This tiny butterfly has the most chromosomes of any animal on Earth Scientists have confirmed that the Atlas blue butterfly carries the most chromosomes of any animal, with 229 pairs. Unlike duplication, its chromosomes split apart, reshaping its genome in surprising ...

Homie got 229 pairs of chromosomes

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

Collateral mutagenesis funnels multiple sources of DNA damage into a ubiquitous mutational signature Mutations reflect the net effects of myriad types of damage, replication errors, and repair mechanisms, and thus are expected to differ across cell types with distinct exposures to mutagens, division ...

In these dark times, it comes as a rare pleasure to highlight @natanaels.bsky.social ‬ & @marcdemanuel.bsky.social's work on germline and somatic mutations in humans. 1/n
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Out after peer review, collaborative study from Nordborg & Weigel labs with help from many others. Not the largest collection of new Arabidopsis thaliana genomes, but we hopefully put forward some good ideas for how to think about pangenomes and their analysis!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How can England possibly be running out of water? While famously rainswept, climate crisis, population growth and profligacy mean the once unthinkable could be possible

How can England possibly be running out of water? | Water | The Guardian share.google/M8qhPxIx3zIg...

1/ How do animals develop immunity against a newly encountered transposable element from scratch? Our study reveals that the mobility of TEs is their Achilles heel, allowing hosts to develop a powerful small RNA-mediated silencing response.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Bimodal centromeres in pentaploid dogroses shed light on their unique meiosis - Nature Insights into the dogrose genome and centromeres explain their ability to achieve stable sexual reproduction.

1/7
I am very excited to announce our🌹NEW PAPER OUT IN 𝑁𝐴𝑇𝑈𝑅𝐸!🌹
𝐃𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐒𝐔𝐑𝐕𝐈𝐕𝐄: Bimodal centromeres in pentaploid dogroses shed light on their unique meiosis
With the Ritz and Kovařík labs we show a potential role for centromeres on 𝘙𝘰𝘴𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘢 bizarre reproduction!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Antagonism as a foraging strategy in microbial communities In natural habitats, nutrient availability limits bacterial growth. We discovered that bacteria can overcome this limitation by acquiring nutrients by lysing neighboring cells through contact-dependen...

Thrilled to share our new paper in @science.org describing our discovery that bacteria can switch from competitors to bonafide predators when resources run dry—arming nanoscale “spears” (T6SS) to stab & consume neighbours.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#MicroSKy #Microbiology

Life-history trade-offs explain local adaptation in Arabidopsis thaliana https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.18.654693v1

Excited to share our work on using pathway-specific polygenic scores to discover gene-environment interactions www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

. @pnas.org just published the final version of our manuscript on how generation time and effective population size interact to shape vertebrate germline mutation rates, led by Luke Zhu and Annabel Beichman: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Suppression of plastid-to-nucleus gene transfer by DNA double-strand break repair - Nature Plants Inactivation of double-strand break repair pathways greatly increases the integration of plastid DNA into the nuclear genome of tobacco plants, highlighting the mutagenic potential of organellar DNA a...

New research by @egonzalezduran.bsky.social shows that DSB repair suppresses gene transfer from chloroplasts to nucleus. With DSB repair impaired, transfer rates jump 20× — revealing how plants protect genome stability, with lessons beyond plant biology. Read: nature.com/articles/s41477-025-02005-w

Single-cell transcriptomics reveal how root tissues adapt to soil stress Nature - Single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomic approaches reveal major expression changes in outer root cell types when grown in soil versus gel conditions, and also uncover how...

I'm so very excited to see this out - a single cell and spatial transcriptomic analysis in the rice root reveals mechanisms by which roots can respond to different below-ground growth conditions - including compaction. Congratulations to everyone for persisting in difficult times. rdcu.be/ej8Ui