Jim Leebens-Mack

Frontiers | Utilizing target capture sequencing to resolve the speciation history of Echinacea (Asteraceae) It has been difficult to resolve relationships among many important lineages within the Asteraceae family due to interspecific hybridization and rapid specie...

Chazz Jordan's phylogenomic analysis of cone flowers (Echinacea) just published! - doi.org/10.3389/fpls.... Chazz's findings suggests rapid diversification in the genus as ancestral populations dispersed from southeastern North America into the midwest.

Two independent origins of XY sex chromosomes in Asparagus The relatively young and repeated evolutionary origins of dioecy (separate sexes) in flowering plants enable investigation of molecular dynamics occurring at the earliest stages of sex chromosome evol...

Analyses of a new genomes for garden asparagus and a Mediterranean basin congener reveal independent origins of dioecy and XY sex chromosomes. The work led by Phil Bentz @pbentz.bsky.social finds no overlap in the two Y-linked sex-determination genes - www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... .

Our EEB department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is hiring an assistant professor in evo-devo. See go.illinois.edu/EEBAsstProf for details. Please share!

🌾The Functional traits in primary producers: recent advances and future directions special feature is open for proposals!🍄

🌲Proposal submissions close 15 September, more details here: buff.ly/e8PTkMM

IQ-Tree2 should run faster

How long? What tree building tool are you using?

#iamabotanist #herbarium #botany2025

#iamabotanist #herbarium #botany2025

On the cover of @natplants.nature.com this month:

@leobaumgart.bsky.social @greensi.bsky.social @abmora.bsky.social @omalley-regulome.bsky.social et al. map binding sites for 360 TFs across 10 🌿plant🌿 species using a new multiDAP approach

Here is Sharon's explainer 🧵:
bsky.app/profile/gree...

🤦‍♂️

Awesome research with implications for understanding of transitions between CAM and C3 modes of photosynthesis in yaccas agaves and their relatives!

Lauren's defense poster with an ABBA-BABA site pattern diagram in the background, and photos of Neotropical bellflowers in the foreground. There's a picture of her to the left along with text: "Inferring hybridization at shallow and deep timescales. Lauren Frankel PhD dissertation defense. Monday, August 25 10:00am CDT"

hi friends, let me know if you'd like a zoom link for my defense next week!

I love this trend in polyploid research:

“With new data and techniques, we can finally tackle this horribly complicated group!”

“And guess what? It’s even worse than we imagined!”

But seriously, excellent work!

The Idiot's Guide to Effective Population Size This is a reference manual for the elegant, yet hideously complex concept of effective population size (Ne), inspired by a classic, self-published manual of automotive repair ‘for the compleat idiot’...

Day 3 of popgen we talked about effective population size. No, I don't really understand it. You probably don't either. But I highly recommend this fantastic guide about how to think about Ne onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Oregon State University is hiring a Directory of the Herbarium

The Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Oregon State University is Hiring!

We are searching for a Director of the Oregon State University Herbarium and applications are welcomed at the ranks of assistant, associate, or full professor.

Are you an early-career biologist or ecologist who would benefit from an invited seminar? Would you like to come to UMaine next fall or spring to give a talk? Leave a brief comment with some info about what you do. I'm co-hosting our seminar series again, and am filling out our rosters.

Herbarium director position opening at Oregon State University ‪@osu-herbarium.bsky.social‬ Great opportunity for herbarium- and field-trained botanists at any rank. bpp.oregonstate.edu/bpp/about/op...

Come be my colleague (& @jacquelyngill.bsky.social's and other great folks)!

UMaine is hiring a Genetics Facilities Manager to lead the CORE eDNA and DNA Sequencing Labs. Hiring range is $75-85k (up $20k from previous round)

fa-ewca-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Some months later, work is now published @natcomms.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Biodiversity Collections Task Force is a nascent effort to help collections through anticipated difficult times in the near future.

We are planning a webinar series, beginning in September 2025.

Let us know which topics would be most useful to you:
lnkd.in/gQmyMKmN

Let congress know that pro-growth = pro-science!

‘This is bull——”: National Science Foundation employees protest HUD's takeover Dozens of National Science Foundation employees crowded the agency’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, Wednesday to protest the news that the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, w...

Another day testing the limits of resilience.

The Alexandria NSF building was designed for the NSF merit review process (gold standard), complete with a floor devoted to panels.

Now we aren’t allowed to have in person panels.

The loss of US science leadership will haunt this country for decades.

Karolina Heyduk: A Career Shaped by Desert Plants and Midnight Photosynthesis Botany One interviews Dr Karolina Heyduk, a plant evolutionary biologist interested in the origins a unique type of photosynthesis.

Check out this interview with BSA member and BSA Director at Large for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Karolina Heyduk!

botany.one/2025/06/karo...

Marchantia Pangenome Highlights Adaptive Nature of Plant Lineages | Joint Genome Institute Understanding the shared genetic toolkit of ancestral and present-day plants

The #OpenGreenGenomes Project, supported through our #CommunityScience Program, represents 35 major evolutionary plant lineages — including M. polymorpha, or liverwort.

For decades it has been used as a model for evolutionary studies. 🖥️🧬🌱

@jleebensmack.bsky.social @maximebonhomme.bsky.social

Plastids in a Pinch: Coordinating Stress and Developmental Responses Through Retrograde Signalling Plastids can sense environmental stress and improve whole plant adaptation through retrograde communication to the nucleus. Recent studies have advanced our understanding of integrated canonical and ...

Very happy to see this review by @elizavveen.bsky.social, Jesse Küpers and myself now out in Plant Cell & Environment! About how stresses impact chloroplasts, and how this can steer plant development via retrograde signaling 🌱 @pph-wur.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pce.15664

Call your congressional representatives and Senators!

NSF, NASA and NIH budgets per year, inflation adjusted from 2000-2025 along with the proposed cuts. NSF includes research component only. Massive cuts across all sectors, well below support spanning 25 years.

How bad will it be? Catastrophic.

Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come.

But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget.

Speak up now before it is too late.

(inflation adjusted $-s below)

Tools to Take Action

9/ 🚨🚨🚨 CALL TO ACTION

Call your elective representatives to tell them how these draconian cuts will directly harm (as applicable):

your state
your local communities
your trainees
yourself

See the #SaveNSF website for some inspiration:

www.savensf.com/take-action

Senior Researchers 60,400 --> 16,900 Other Professionals 14,400 --> 4,100 Postdoctoral Associates 5,500 --> 1,000 Graduate Students 41,500 --> 12,400 Undergraduate Students 37,300 --> 8,000 PreK-12 Teachers 42,900 --> 8,200 PreK-12 Students 128,100 --> 39,400 Total Number of People 330,100 --> 90,000

🚨🚨 Friday night news drop from National Science Foundation!! 🧪

NSF just released its detailed budget request for next year: nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

We knew it was going to be bad...and it lives up. Guts direct NSF support for a **quarter million people**

🧵 on some highlights...