Robert Laport

What can we do as scientists? One thing: mentor the habits of seeing and thinking scientifically, and cultivate interest in the world. From @botsocamerica.bsky.social Plant Science Bulletin, a clip of high-school students' responses to @plantingscience.bsky.social mentorship:

Image of title and author list for a paper in the journal Castanea. Title reads: Community analyses of urban forested natural area in Shelby County, Tennessee, reveal old-growth attributes. Authors: Braxton J. Jeffcoat, Lee E. Bridges, Aidan M. Kron, Jacob F. Spears, and Robert G. Laport

Excited to have this paper out in the journal Castanea at the end of 2025! Lots of hard work and neat insights into Urban Forested Natural Areas around Memphis by former students Braxton Jeffcoat, Aidan Kron, & Jacob Spears at Rhodes College, and Eric Bridges at Overton Park Conservancy!

Some one wished me that “I hope next year will be even better than this one was.”

I grew all serious and said “It bloody well better be.”

I might have a few extra! How many would your friend want?

The PBS shining a light on the best native fruit tree in North America, just outclassing sand plums. Both make superb ice creams and sorbets or are also good shoveled under the source tree directly.

Just outside of Olin Science Center!

Four Larrea tridentata recently removed from their pots and planted in soil near each other in a common garden arrangement in a concrete raised bed.

Common garden installed! Diploid, tetraploid, and hexaploid Larrea tridentata planted out at Harvey Mudd College with collaborator Jessica Guo! Fun science will ensue!

Photo of a large number of scarlet monkeyflower plants growing in southern California (photo by MC Moazed).

Excited to share the first two publications from our PERSIST (Predicting Evolutionary Rescue of a Species in Space and Time) project. Thanks to NSF-DEB for supporting this work! (1/3)

The frequency and importance of polyploidy in tropical rainforest tree radiations The presence of two or more copies of the genome in an organism, termed ‘polyploidy’, is a crucial force in plant evolution, generating genetic, phenotypic and ecological diversity. The Amazonian tr...

New paper just posted with @rschley.bsky.social et al: doi.org/10.1111/nph.... (1/n)

Ready for 2025? #plantsgivinfg

Chestnuts in a paper bag and in coconut fiber for stratification

Time to stratify the harvest from century+ old American chestnuts in Oregon and Washington! Preserving pre-blight genetics from an accidental genetic diversity repository! #TACF #americanchestnut #chestnutrestoration

Top row (L to R): Maricela Rodriguez Acosta; Hernando Rodríguez Correa; Antoine Kremer; Victoria Sork; Paul Manos bottom row (L to R): Alan Whittemore, Andrew Hipp, Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Antonio Gonzalez Rodriguez, Susana Valencia-A.

A small sample of oak heroes who have had a disproportionate influence on my thinking and work, from Mexico, France, and the U.S.

Names in the alt text; from the International Oak Society meeting last week in Oaxaca.

Join www.internationaloaksociety.org today!

Undergrads, grad students, professors, medical researchers, scientists in industry: help middle and high schoolers across the country understand what you *actually* do and why it matters! Be a source of inspiration amid all this chaos.

Figure 3 | Macrosynteny and genome structure across the Brassicaceae. Horizontal blue/black/orange bands represent the chromosomes of Arabidopsis thaliana, A. lyrata, MN106, and Brassica rapa (top to bottom). Chromosomes are ordered by their number from left to right. Colors represent genomic content binned hierarchically in sliding windows (400kb-overlapping 500kb) as follow: (1) within a gene annotation (including intron and UTR, orange), (2) within EDTA-annotated repeats categorized as Ty3, (3) Ty1 (copia), (4) within another repeat category, or (5) un-annotated. Grey bands are sequence-based syntenic blocks between each pair of genomes. Pennycress and B. rapa are phylogenetically proximate (both in Brassicodae supertribe), but have reduced synteny in part because of genome reshuffling in B. rapa following a whole-genome triplication event. The seven pennycress genome assemblies (horizontal bars) are binned into TRASH-defined centromeres (orange), pericentromeres (dark blue), chromosome arms (light blue) and telomeres (dark red). The colors along the chromosome segments scale physically with the size of the bin, except that centromeres and telomeres have a 1pt buffer to make it easier to see these typically small regions. Each genome is connected to its neighbor by grey polygons that represent sequence-based syntenic blocks. Plots, genomic bins, and syntenic blocks were built with DEEPSPACE (github.com/jtlovell/DEEPSPACE).

Genome-wide classification of sequence alignments between each genome and the MN106 reference genome from SyRI. Alignments are broken down into syntenic, not alignable to MN106, duplicated, inverted, inverted and translocated, and “highly-diverged region”

In the most extreme case, an accession from Armenia (Ames 32873) has nearly unprecedented levels of genomic rearrangement: only 25% syntenic to the reference genotype. However, those rearrangements are entirely located in the pericentromeres and don't contribute to higher levels of gene PAV. 4/

Figure 2 | Pan-genome variation in pennycress. A The amount of sequence in the genome graph that is shared by different numbers of haplotypes (assemblies). This figure only represents sequence in the final graph and does not contain sequences ‘clipped out.’ B Breakdown of core, dispensable, and unique orthogroups among our seven genomes. C Growth curves describing patterns of 31-mer sharing across assemblies; a steeper curve indicates a smaller degree of k-mer sharing among assemblies for that sequence class.

Genome size variation (455Mb-466Mb) and gene level presence/absence variation between genotypes was small (~80% core), but the pangenomic variation in genome graph was larger (~53% core), suggesting more going on beneath the surface. 2/

Structure and sequence evolution in the pennycress (Thlaspi arvense) pangenome Summary · Eukaryotic genomes harbor many forms of variation, including nucleotide diversity and structural polymorphisms, which experience natural selection and contribute to genome evolution and biod...

New — with @joannarifkin.bsky.social, @jotlovell.bsky.social, @spicybotrytis.bsky.social, and many more — we created seven new high-quality genomes and explored pangenomic variation in the emerging oilseed crop pennycress (Thlaspi arvense). 1/

Figure 3 | Macrosynteny and genome structure across the Brassicaceae. Horizontal blue/black/orange bands represent the chromosomes of Arabidopsis thaliana, A. lyrata, MN106, and Brassica rapa (top to bottom). Chromosomes are ordered by their number from left to right. Colors represent genomic content binned hierarchically in sliding windows (400kb-overlapping 500kb) as follow: (1) within a gene annotation (including intron and UTR, orange), (2) within EDTA-annotated repeats categorized as Ty3, (3) Ty1 (copia), (4) within another repeat category, or (5) un-annotated. Grey bands are sequence-based syntenic blocks between each pair of genomes. Pennycress and B. rapa are phylogenetically proximate (both in Brassicodae supertribe), but have reduced synteny in part because of genome reshuffling in B. rapa following a whole-genome triplication event. The seven pennycress genome assemblies (horizontal bars) are binned into TRASH-defined centromeres (orange), pericentromeres (dark blue), chromosome arms (light blue) and telomeres (dark red). The colors along the chromosome segments scale physically with the size of the bin, except that centromeres and telomeres have a 1pt buffer to make it easier to see these typically small regions. Each genome is connected to its neighbor by grey polygons that represent sequence-based syntenic blocks. Plots, genomic bins, and syntenic blocks were built with DEEPSPACE (github.com/jtlovell/DEEPSPACE).

Whole-genome alignments revealed pennycress has nearly dichotomous genome compartmentalization: huge gene-poor pericentromeric regions (~300Mb; <1% genic) with frequent rearrangements and highly syntenic gene-rich chromosome arms (~150Mb; ~20% genic). What we call a "two-speed" genome structure. 3/

Please repost and amplify !

We are hiring a faculty position in Evolutionary Genetics in the Biology Department at U of South Carolina!

Check us out and come be our colleague!
sc.edu/study/colleg...

Deadline for applications is Oct 1

#AcademicJobs #EvoBio

Plants and Places by Andrew Hipp"And so, when his prescribed devotion to boyish beauties has carried our candidate so far that the universal beauty dawns upon his inward sight, he is almost within reach of the final re...

Why are you a naturalist? What does natural history do for us?

Swedish botanist Peter Kalm (1750) claimed that American adults take “little account of Natural History… that science being… looked upon as a mere trifle, and the pastime of fools.”

Still true?

www.plantlovestories.com/post/plants-...

Did you see @racheljabaily.bsky.social new open educational resource "Biology of Plants" coloring textbook when you were at #Botany2025 ? No? WELL GO CHECK IT OUT: oercommons.org/courses/the-... Gorgeous illustrations by MGB Hurst 😍

Undergrad woman scientist pointing to her poster as she presents it to a crowd

Undergrad woman scientist showing supplemental pictures on her phone to present her poster to a crowd

Undergrad woman scientist pointing at her poster to present it to a colleague

Positive COVID test on a table

#Botany2025 was fabulous! I'm SO proud of these undergrads, who did a fantastic job presenting their work! It is so gratifying to make and strengthen connections with my Botany fam. 💖 you all! Unfortunately, my sore throat on Thurs morning was not karaoke related...I have COVID, so test yourself :(

a man in a black jacket and white pants is standing on a dirt field near the ocean . Alt: a man in a black jacket and white pants is standing on a dirt field near the ocean .

#Botany2025… the comedown is real.

#Botany2025 was a blast! So much cool botanical science to learn from.
Also, very happy to present our work on the genetics of Saguaro 🌵
Looking forward to the next one!

#botany2025 was incredible! Thank you to all the organizers, speakers, and conference center staff!

I loved seeing old seeing old friends and making new ones! I always come home inspired and renewed!

See you all in Tucson in 2026!

Me standing at a podium talking about the BIOFAIR Vision and roadmap.

Me standing at a podium in front of a slide that read Linking Functional Traits and Niches to Lineage Diversification in Asclepias.

A group of 5 people standing shoulder to shoulder smiling at a camera on Joshue Tree National Park.

A flower of Asclepias eriocarpa that is cream colored with many yellow-orange aphids around it.

Had such a great time at #botany2025! Hearing about everyone's research was very inspiring and generated some new ideas for my own work.

See you all in Tucson next year!

Americans Love Avocados. It’s Killing Mexico’s Forests. (Published 2023)

This story is not new but a presentation at #Botany2025 raised awareness on the impact of avocado production on biodiversity. U.S. demand is driving deforestation in rich Mexican cloud forests which also support monarch butterflies. www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/u...

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

A large chocolate lab

Happy mammal reunion day to all botanists returning from #Botany2025

Selfie of the lab in front of the entrance to Starr Resort in Tuscon, the location of Botany 2026. Saguaros in the background!

Hey #Botany2025 was so fun we’re ready for #Botany2026 … maybe we’ll wait for y’all here in Tuscon!