David Pires

Speaker highlight!

Adriaan Verhage will be presenting at Plant Pathology 2026. Bringing together researchers, industry professionals and early-career scientists working across crop health disciplines.
Early-bird registration is open until 31 May.
Find out more: www.bspp.org.uk/plant-pathol...

🟢 Webinar - Let’s Talk About Planted Forests

📅 Join online to discuss maritime pine and pine wood nematode in South-West Europe: status and challenge.

🕑 27 February 2026 at 2:00 PM CET (Paris Time)

📢 Registration: www.plantedforests.org/webinar-lets...

#forest #plantedforest #ForestScience

🌱🦠 New preprint out!

What if soil is not just a passive background for plant diseases, but an active battlefield & reservoir?

Our review explores how soil structure & microbiomes jointly shape the emergence & persistence of plant pathogens: doi.org/10.21203/rs....

Feedback & discussion welcome.

🟢 Webinar - Let’s Talk About Planted Forests

📅 Join online to discuss maritime pine and pine wood nematode in South-West Europe: status and challenge.

🕑 27 February 2026 at 2:00 PM CET (Paris Time)

📢 Registration: www.plantedforests.org/webinar-lets...

#forest #plantedforest #ForestScience

Secondary metabolites from plants can affect nematode behavior via microbial volatile signaling cues | Plantae Plant parasitic nematodes such as root-knot nematodes (RKNs) are thought to use chemical cues from the plant to locate their favorable hosts. These chemical cues can code for host specificity and can…

Plant Science Research Weekly --  Secondary metabolites from plants can affect nematode behavior via microbial volatile signaling cues (Nature Plants) (Summary by Atharv Ambekar @atharvambekar2.bsky.social) buff.ly/IGDHPdh

#PlantaePSRW

Plant-parasitic nematode microRNAs hijack plant AGO1 to induce host-cell reprogramming https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.13.705329v1

Professional Learning Needs in Nematology This short survey explores learning needs and gaps in nematology to inform the development of future lifelong learning opportunities. It takes 2-3 minutes to complete, and responses are anonymous.

⚠️ Do you work with nematodes, or are they a problem for you? Do you need training? Your input is needed!

👇This survey explores learning needs and gaps in nematology to inform the development of future lifelong learning opportunities: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I spend quite a lot of time looking at CVs (whether for recritment or promotion). One of the first areas I look at is the list of publications.

To evaulate a CV, from the publications is not as easy as you might think.

Here are some of the things that I look at:
🧵

The ISME20 abstract submission deadline has been extended to 22 February. Microbial ecologists worldwide are invited to submit abstracts for oral, short talk, or poster presentations and contribute to the ISME20 programme.
isme-microbes.org/isme20-abstr...
#ISME20 #MicrobialEcology

Interested in knowing more about the microbial life and content of your soil? Join us at this year’s CT NOFA winter conference and bring along a soil sample! Our team will be staffing our soil health table all day, analyzing soil under the microscope. ctnofa.org/winter-confe...

🌱 Happy #WorldPulsesDay, dedicated to raising public awareness about the power of pulses to nourish people and the planet. 🫘

📚 Check out our latest paper on pulses and their sustainable production in tropical systems 👉 doi.org/10.3390/nitr...

Happy to see the interest in our latest preprint.

We asked two microbiologists, Antonella Colque and Nurdana Orynbek, to test a selection of AI tools built for scientific publishing and research. The goal? To see how well these tools perform in real research tasks. Here is what worked for them.
And what did not : buff.ly/rm3775c

How ChatGPT and Gemini picture me working

🌱🦠 New preprint out!

What if soil is not just a passive background for plant diseases, but an active battlefield & reservoir?

Our review explores how soil structure & microbiomes jointly shape the emergence & persistence of plant pathogens: doi.org/10.21203/rs....

Feedback & discussion welcome.

Academic precarity in Portugal “In Portugal more than 95% of all research activities are carried out under precarious labour conditions, by undergraduate and PhD researchers employed under a variety of temporary contracts,…

Academic precarity in Portugal, a guest post with my examples on how to succeed anyway:
forbetterscience.com/2026/02/04/a...

Dormancy and reactivation of the seed and its microbiome: a holobiont perspective | mSystems Desiccation tolerance—the ability of organisms to withstand severe water loss and subsequently revive—is a key trait acquired by seeds of most plant species during the final stages of development, whe...

Imagine still viewing animals and plants as discrete entities in 2026. To ignore the shift toward holobiont terminology at this stage is to admit you’ve willfully stopped reading the literature, basically on how host systems work.

journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Fig. 1. “Vacuole-like” structural aberrations (indicated by red arrows) in the soybean cyst nematode (SCN; Heterodera glycines) eggs 5 days after treatment with fungal filtrate under in vitro conditions. A, Vacuole-like structures in SCN eggs. B, Vacuole-like structures in enclosed first-stage juveniles and emerging second-stage juveniles (J2s). C, Vacuole-like structures in hatched J2s. D, Hatched J2s in potato dextrose broth (PDB) control without vacuole-like structures. E, Eggs in PDB control. Scale bar = 45 µm.

Biological control of soybean cyst #nematode (SCN) using fungi associated with cyst nematodes shows promise. Vijay Kunwar et al. screened 75 fungal isolates across 55 species associated with different cyst nematodes to assess antagonistic effects on SCN: https://doi.org/10.1094/PHYTO-03-25-0094-R

📈 Really happy to see my first PhD chapter getting some traction: the article has reached 200 reads on ResearchGate. www.researchgate.net/profile/Davi...

📄 Full paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.fu...

🤦‍♂️ Am I the only one getting fed up with the proliferation of half-baked, AI-generated, and often inaccurate images on social media, and increasingly in papers?

Life After Ice: 46,000-Year-Old Worms Wake Up YouTube video by SETI Institute

Yesterday I had the great pleasure to talk with Simon Steel
@setiinstitute.bsky.social about cryptobiotic nematodes. You can watch it here:

www.youtube.com/live/K27rhxm...

Last chance to join our YNN session at #ESN2026. Abstract submission closes tomorrow!

🟢 Webinar - Let’s Talk About Planted Forests

📅 Join online to discuss maritime pine and pine wood nematode in South-West Europe: status and challenge.

🕑 27 February 2026 at 2:00 PM CET (Paris Time)

📢 Registration: www.plantedforests.org/webinar-lets...

#forest #plantedforest #ForestScience

Webinar – Let’s Talk About Planted Forests – 27 February 2026 - European Institute of Planted Forest - IEFC

📅 Webinar: Maritime pine and pine wood #nematode in South-West Europe: status and challenge

🕑 27 February 2026 at 2:00 PM CET (Paris Time)

📢 Registration: www.plantedforests.org/webinar-lets...

Evolution of sensory systems underlies the emergence of predatory feeding behaviors in nematodes | PNAS Understanding how animal behavior evolves remains a major challenge, with few studies linking genetic changes to differences in neural function and...

How does evolution turn a harmless bacterial feeder into an active predator?
Our new study led by @marianneroca.bsky.social and published in @pnas.org explores how sensory systems were rewired to enable prey detection and predatory behaviour in nematodes.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🧵below!

📢 January's Reporting Service is OUT NOW!

📖 Read about the latest phytosanitary updates for the EPPO region in November's reporting service.

🔓 Free to read in English and French at gd.eppo.int/reporting/Rs...

Why do scientific societies matter now more than ever?

Scientists board explore how societies support researchers, foster global collaboration, & shape the future of science. A must-read for all career stages 👍

🔗 buff.ly/YW2XUN3

#plantscience #science

An illustration of a man pulling a large clock behind him, with the hedline: How chasing a high-impact publication nearly broke me

"… I have come to appreciate that success isn’t solely a matter of high-impact papers or the steep climb up the academic ladder. For me, it now means tracing my own path, one that is sustainable and isn’t defined by what others expect of me." #ScienceWorkingLife https://scim.ag/4abAzWo

Agriculture depends on crop-associated microbiome. Orozco-Mosqueda et al. examine how endophytic and arbuscular mycorrhizal #fungi colonize plants and contribute to growth in coordination with the plant microbiome.
#FEMSMicrobiolRev
buff.ly/xMFmJxa

📢 🏳️🌈🦠
We are expanding our matching program for 2SLGBTQIA+ microbiologists! Whether you need a mentor, a collaborator, or community support, we can help you.

🔗 Mentorship & Geo-matching:
tinyurl.com/5cdyppys

🔗 Research Interest Groups:
tinyurl.com/4p88bm4k

#Microbiology #QueerInSTEM