#TodayOnMybike
#SpringIsComing

Découvrez les 18 nouvelles et nouveaux membres élus à @academiesciences.bsky.social pour l'année 2026 🔎

Communiqué de presse à lire sur ➡️ www.academie-sciences.fr/sites/defaul...

Félicitations François !

Size of Life From an amoeba to a blue whale

and the winner of the "2025 best thing on Internet" has just arrived
neal.fun/size-of-life/

@carlbergstrom.com

An early Christmas present from our team for all of the tomato 🍅 & recombination fans:

Chromosome-scale Solanum pennellii and Solanum cheesmaniae genome assemblies reveal structural variants, repeat content and recombination barriers of the tomato clade

biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

Chromosome-scale Solanum pennellii and Solanum cheesmaniae genome assemblies reveal structural variants, repeat content and recombination barriers of the tomato clade Crop wild relatives are important resources for improving cultivated crops, yet the precise introgression of wild genetic material into cultivated crops is often difficult and cannot be fully defined ...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Merry Xmas from the department of Chromosome Biology!

‼️Please RT: The CEPLAS Graduate School call for 2026 is now open! Detailed info on our website: bit.ly/4q19JWk
@hhu.de @unicologne.bsky.social @mpipz.bsky.social @fz-juelich.de @leibnizipk.bsky.social @plantsciencedbg.bsky.social

Imtiyaz Khanday and Dr Venkatesan Sundaresan stand next to cloned rice plants in a green house.

Two researchers at UC Davis have been awarded a VinFuture Prize in recognition of their work developing self-cloning crops, a breakthrough for sustainable agriculture.

Read more: ucdav.is/4oJ41Hx

Congrats to Dipesh, the driver of this story. And thanks to all the contributors and in particular the collaborators Jelle Van Leene and Geert De Jaeger (amazing IP ms) and the best of all Raphaels @raphguerois.bsky.social for the structure predictions and analysis

The composition and structure of the outer kinetochore KMN complex is conserved across kingdoms - Communications Biology Affinity purification in Arabidopsis identified all key subunits of the outer kinetochore KMN complex. Functional analyses revealed a striking conservation of its composition and organization across k...

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Latest from the lab. The conclusion is in the title!
Basically, we found that the KMN complex (outer kinetochore) is fully conserved between plants and fungi/animals, showing deep origin. (reminder, you are closer to a mushroom than a mushroom is to a plant.)

On mange des OGM tous les jours depuis plusieurs décennies (les plantes obtenues par mutagénèse chimique ou radiative) et ça ne pose aucun problème

The Author List

Only those who know🐖🎮

Nobel Prizes This Year Offer Three Cheers for Slow Science

“The scientific Nobels announced this week underscore that point. All three awards — granted each year in physiology or medicine, physics and chemistry — honored achievements rooted in fundamental research…Decades of inquiry paved the way for the technology, treatments and toys of tomorrow.” 🎁

Thanking the reviewers

This is the work of a tremendous PhD student, Benoit Madec, who did everything in this study (genetics, molecular biology, all the bioinformatics analyses)

He defended his PhD on Monday and is now Dr Madec!

I am very proud of him and all the work he has accomplished!

The recombination frequency (cM/Mb) along chromosome 4 of A. thaliana (female meiosis). In full hybrids (grey), where polymorphism is distributed all along chromosomes, most crossovers occur in the regions surrounding the Centromere (Cen), and very few at chromosome ends (Tel: telomeres). In lines where polymorphism is restricted to chromosome ends (purple), the local recombination rate increases drastically, at the expense of the non-polymorphic regions (yellow).

🚨 First pre-print from my team !!

TL;DR: presence of polymorphism (sequence differences between the homologous chromosomes) can *increase* the local rate of recombination in Arabidopsis thaliana, turning cold regions of the genome hot (purple v. grey) !

Writing: just add coffee
**Hey, my new book comes out on Tuesday! 👉 amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1419764063

Transposable elements are vectors of recurrent transgenerational epigenetic inheritance DNA methylation loss at transposable elements (TEs) can affect neighboring genes and be epigenetically inherited in plants, yet the determinants and significance of this additional system of inheritan...

Out First Release in @science.org this week:

A large scale analysis of the epigenetics of transposable elements in Arabidopsis shows transgenerational stability

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#PlantScience

Clinical and genetic spectrum of Fanconi anemia in Australia and New Zealand Fanconi anemia (FA) is a rare genetic condition that predisposes to progressive bone marrow failure, a specific spectrum of malignancies, including he…

I feel incredibly privileged to share this study on Fanconi anaemia, based on a small but important cohort. This work describes the genetics and clinical outcomes of patients in Australia and New Zealand with a diagnosis of FA.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This is a great opportunity to start an independent group in one of the best research environments you could think of!

Call for Applications / Ausschreibung

Springboard for an international scientific career! 🧬🧪🔭⚛️🧠🌱 Call for #MaxPlanckResearchGroups launched; applications are possible until October 14, 2025 www.mpg.de/max-planck-r... #ScienceCareer

Is this the future of food? 'Sexless' seeds that could transform farming Scientists are tinkering with plant genes to create crops that seed their own clones, with a host of benefits for farmers.

Idee de sujet:
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Is this the future of food? 'Sexless' seeds that could transform farming Scientists are tinkering with plant genes to create crops that seed their own clones, with a host of benefits for farmers.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Interesting journalist piece on apomixix. With pieces of MiMe inside :-)

A cytological framework of female meiosis in Arabidopsis Female and male meiosis often differ in many aspects, such as their duration and the frequency as well as the positioning of crossovers. However, studying female meiosis is often very challenging and ...

Six more years—plus a lot of blood, sweat, and tears—later, we are thrilled to finally share it: a cytological framework of female meiosis in Arabidopsis!

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

Thank you and congrats to all contributors in Versailles @ijpb-versaillescly.bsky.social and Cologne @mpipz.bsky.social and in particular to Dipesh Singh, Alexander Mahland, Rigel Salinas, Joiselle Fernandes and Qichao Lian.

Unlocking meiotic crossovers near plant centromeres Crossovers (COs) ensure proper chromosome segregation during meiosis and generate genetic diversity. COs are non-uniformly distributed along chromosomes and almost universally suppressed in centromere...

The identification of the very conserved CTF18, SGO2 and SPF2 as suppressors of centromere-proximal crossovers highlights the importance of cohesin turnover in this process and opens up new possibilities for plant breeding. Much more in the paper : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

two women are sitting next to each other and one is pointing at the camera ALT: two women are sitting next to each other and one is pointing at the camera

and guess what, some did! The cohesion regulators CTF18 and SGO2, and the deSUMOylase SPF2 actively limit centromere proximal crossover. Their mutation allows both the formation of crossover where they were completely absent in the wild-type, and enhance their frequency where they were rare!

a close up of a woman 's face with a triangle and a mathematical formula . ALT: a close up of a woman 's face with a triangle and a mathematical formula .

We reasoned that the changes in the organization of the centromere-proximal region that affect kinetochore orientation in the identified mutants (see above and the first preprint) may also affect crossover formation near centromeres.