alison scott

If you're in Ghent tomorrow ! I'll be sharing our recent progress deciphering the sRNA-based dominance/recessivity interactions at the self-incompatibility locus in Arabidopsis 🌱

James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA who died Thursday at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers.

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death.

Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written."

Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating.
🧪🧬🧫

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/...

It’s going to break your heart how many people you know, love, and respect will turn out to be cowards. Prepare yourself as best you can. You are not alone, but you are your own center. Be a strong center.

Multiple Autopolyploid Arabidopsis lyrata Populations Stabilized by Long-Range Adaptive Introgression Across Eurasia Abstract. Abundance of established polyploid lineages varies across lineages, evolutionary time, and geography, suggesting both genetics and environment pl

@alisondawnscott.bsky.social et al. use genome data from >400 Arabidopsis lyrata sampled across Eurasia to show it as the most polyploid-rich species complex in Arabidopsis, with multiple origins of autotetraploidy.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf153

#evobio #molbio #PlantSky

That’s a wrap on the Cologne Spring Meeting 2025! A huge thanks to all participants, speakers, and organizers for making this event a wonderful success. Stay tuned for more news and discoveries from TRR341 and the world of plant science. #CologneSpringMeeting2025 #PlantScience #TRR341 #DFG

Whoa…

Just extended the deadline to March 21 for this position in the Plant Phylogenomics group at the University of Vienna. It is sort of a "post doc plus" position funded for up to six years.

Please reach out if you want to chat - I'd love to talk to you about it!

jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Universi...

This is a closeup image of wheat plants in a disease trail nursery. There are yellow streaks on the otherwise healthy and green leaves caused by bacterial leaf streak

Tough day for small grains research in the Twin Cities. Myself and four scientist colleagues have all been let go from the USDA because we haven't completed our 3 year probationary period - effectively gutting the Cereal Disease Lab.
Taking a few days to be sad before I think about what comes next.

SPO11 dimers are sufficient to catalyse DNA double-strand breaks in vitro - Nature A biochemical system recapitulates the hallmarks of meiotic double-strand break formation, with mouse SPO11 catalysing break formation in the absence of any partners and remaining covalently atta...

🥳Just published @nature.com. Over 25 years after the discovery of SPO11 as the enzyme responsible for initiating meiotic recombination, we finally succeeded in reconstituting its DNA cleavage activity.🧵
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The dismantling of science in the USA continues.

But culling the NSF, NIH, USGS, etc. is more than that. It’s the destruction of knowledge, and of progress, both of which have been bastions of this nation for centuries.

These are truly dark days, and I fear there will be darker days yet to come.

vcfsim: flexible simulation of all-sites VCFs with missing data VCFs are the most widely used data format for encoding genetic variation. By design, standard VCFs do not include data from sites where all individuals are homozygous for the reference allele ("invari...

A new tool, vcfsim, developed by Paimon Goulart, a stellar undergraduate researcher in my lab! vcfsim allows for the quick and easy simulation (via parameterized msprime simulations) of "all-sites" vcfs, with arbitrary ploidy and amounts of missing data.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

So well-deserved!

1st paper from my lab this year. Chelsea & Erica showed that self-incompatible plants of this little groundcherry change to self-compatible as they get old, but they are only passable selfers, making less than half the number of seeds as plants are fixed for self-compatibility rdcu.be/d7ZM8

I'm begging a major news org to cover the fact NSF is defying the courts to enact Trump's unconstitutional executive order

this is the thing not to lose sight of.

yes, the biology of sex is complex and fascinating, with nearly endless diversity.

but also we don't use biology to decide who gets human rights. like, historically speaking that has not led to good places!

People Have Had Non-Binary Genders for Thousands of Years It's nothing new.

As the transgender community continues to fight for civil rights in the U.S., one of the most common arguments against progress is that transgender people are a recent phenomenon.

But it’s a fight that’s been happening here for decades and around the world for centuries. ⤵️

The German Society for Plant Sciences (Deutsche Botanische Gesellschaft DBG) is now on Bluesky 🌱
#PlantScience
@plantsciencedbg.bsky.social

#Pag2025 #pag32 Join us for our evening workshop on all things CartograPlant - supporting landscape scale analysis for georeferenced plant populations

If you’re at #PAG32 & love crazy genome evolution, check out my talk on Thlaspi arvense pangenomics later today in the Analysis of Complex Genomes workshop! I’m also organizing the Polyploidy workshop with a great set of talks on various aspects of polyploid genomics & evolution tomorrow afternoon!

Go check out the Org.one workshop at #pag32! Org.one offers free ONT long-read sequencing costs for building reference genomes of IUCN endangered/critically endangered/extinct in the wild species. Today I just received confirmation for sequencing longleaf pine and the red-cockaded woodpecker!

This Sun afternoon (Jan 12th) #PAG32 @cynthiawebster.bsky.social will be leading
#EASEL #EnTAP tutorials + community talks: structural & functional genome annotation for complex eukaryotes
@nextflow.io #NSFfunded @alisondawnscott.bsky.social
Schedule here: plan.core-apps.com/pag32/event/...

I'm building a Starter Pack of Early Career Evolutionary Biologists. It's hard to gather usernames using the search tool. Please add your name to this thread if you want to be added!

Yes please!

Allopolyploidy expanded gene content but not pangenomic variation in the hexaploid oilseed Camelina sativa Abstract. Ancient whole-genome duplications (WGDs) are believed to facilitate novelty and adaptation by providing the raw fuel for new genes. However, it i

My work on a pangenome for the hexaploid oilseed crop Camelina sativa is now out early access in Genetics! This young polyploid genome has a small pangenome to match it's low SNP diversity, but regained lost diversity by packing in all the unique genes from its 3 diploid progenitors.

hello world