Angus Bucknell

One week left to apply for the PhD position in my group in Stockholm!

So happy to have @mcdonaldmeganc.bsky.social with us for the day!

Sanctuary: a Starship transposon facilitating the movement of the virulence factor ToxA in fungal wheat pathogens | mBio The work presented here expands our understanding of a novel group of mobile genetic elements called Starships that facilitate the horizontal exchange of numerous genes between fungal pathogens. Our a...

Delighted that our work on the Sanctuary Starship #transposon is now published! A big thanks to all co-authors, especially to the ever-amazing @mcdonaldmeganc.bsky.social for her mentorship!

doi.org/10.1128/mbio...

Yes! During my extremely brief foray into Rust, the error messages (there’s been a lot!) have been extremely helpful.

I’m hoping to put in some proper time into learning Rust soon. Do you have any advice for those who have only worked with high-level languages?

I talk a lot about Rust for building high-perf (& even non-perf critical) software, & scientific software in particular. I often discuss what's interesting to me, but wanted to offer the chance to those interested for me to answer their questions about Rust in science. Fire away with questions!🧬🖥️

There’s plenty of plotting libraries now, I’ve settled on Makie - and am quite frankly loving it.

I’ve heard terrible things about the runtime startup speeds in the past. For me now it’s completely usable, but anecdotally Python is noticeably faster.

For me, the biggest issue is error message!

I’ve switched to Julia now for a lot of the tasks you’ve mentioned, having previously used a combination of Python and R. Can really recommend it for most of these uses, but only used Quarto rather than Jupyter.

I’ve also thought about giving Rust a try, so looking forward to this thread!

You designed binders for your favourite protein and wish there was a way to experimentally screen them within 24h w/ only a set of pipettes and a plate reader?

Check out our Cell-Free 2-Hybrid approach (CF2H)

Full post: tinyurl.com/48cz5nb6

Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

#2025ISMPMI Agnus Bucknell of the Talbot lab gives an exciting presentation to engineer fungal effectors recognizing immune sensors based on Pik1. Great and clear talk.

#2025ISMPMI Want to know about transcriptional regulation driving pathogenicity in the blast fungus? Come to my poster (P-156) session today!
From 13:30 to 15:15 🌾

A man giving a presentation at a lectern with an MPMI logo

@angusb.bsky.social wants to engineer plant resistance proteins (NLRs) from scratch.

Can we create protein domains to integrate into NLRs to catch pathogen effectors? New tech makes this possible now.

Chose Magnaporthe and Fusarium effectors as targets - many steps later, it worked!
#2025ISMPMI

@adamrbentham.bsky.social

Sounds great - see you all there!

Scientific presentation with a PowerPoint slide showing a global map with sample locations and ToxB genotype

@mcdonaldmeganc.bsky.social presents on the ToxB fungal effector. Pacbio long-read sequencing ~doubles detection of transposons compared to short-read. Helpful for finding where the multiple copies of ToxB -flanked by TEs- are throughout the genome. Sometimes in tandem copies! #2025ISMPMI

Excited to attend my 1st ISMPMI conference, and present our work on a paired wheat CNL/MLKL receptor mechanism! 🌾

Come chat to me at my poster on Tuesday, P-050! 📜

If you miss my poster session, I will be talking in: Crop resistance genetics and genomics on Wednesday - 16:25-16:35!

Big thanks to everyone who stopped by my poster today at #2025ISMPMI!

For those that missed it, you can check it out on Zenodo!

zenodo.org/records/1588...

Sounds great! Would love to join.

Looking forward to #2025ISMPMI next week! I'll be presenting during the Engineering Plant-Microbe Traits session on Thursday, 17th.

I'll be sharing some exciting collaborative work which will also be showcased by me at P-427 (Session 1, 14th) and Yuxuan Xi at P-193 (Session 2, 16th)! Come say hi!

Robigalia Roundup #28 Photosynthetic performance of infected eucalypt clones, and meet Angus Bucknell

Happy to have been featured in the Robigalia newsletter, led by @myrtlerustmartino.bsky.social. I would highly recommend checking out the newsletter for weekly plant pathology news and jobs/scholarships!

robigalia.beehiiv.com/p/robigalia-...

Illustration depicting the ways in which fungi can exchange genetic material with each other. Starship mediated HGT is confirmed experimentally in this preprint.

We did it! We caught Starship #transposons moving between #fungal species in the lab, including between species separated by ~100my. We think Starships are a mediator of HGT in fungi, akin to conjugative elements in bacteria. Check out the preprint. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Opportunities to do some great science with a great supervisor!

Having worked in Megan’s lab for my Master’s research I can personally attest to how great of a PI she is!

If you're from the UK and are looking for a PhD, don't miss out on this fantastic opportunity! Amazing lab and amazing project!

Come join us at the Centre Programmable Biological Matter 👇

Last few days to apply for a PhD studentship in my group @thesainsburylab.bsky.social

biodtp.norwichresearchpark.ac.uk/projects/ide...

Our work on a Phytophthora WY effector that hijacks a host is now out in MPMI! Check it out here: doi.org/10.1094/MPMI...

Haven’t heard of the iCloud Keychain being used got 2FA outside of the Apple ecosystem before. That’s news to me!

More shocked that people have their stove and microwave clock set correctly! If anything mine just act as timers from since they were last turned on at the mains.

Another MIBTP PhD opportunity, in collaboration with @djgibbs.bsky.social. It turns out ferns are really hard to drown! How do they sense and survive low oxygen and what can this tell us about the evolution of O2 sensing mechanisms in plants?
warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fa...
I'm holding my breath...

There’s a few apps out there that will scrape the recipe data from a webpage and format it for you into a collection. I feel like it’s sort of using technology to solve a non-problem, but I suck at cooking and it’s helped me cook more and try out more recipes.

If it’s not useful for yeast, it’s not useful for us!