Carlos Rodríguez

Call for Ambizione

Ambizione grants are aimed at early-career researchers who wish to conduct and lead a project of their own. Interested in learning more about this call? Take part in our online info event on 14 August 2025.

Submission deadline: 4 November 2025

➡️ buff.ly/dDQl9QA

I’ve been mystified for years why my line of research (which includes genetic engineering of plants) makes (German) people so much more upset than the AI work of my campus neighbors.

And why does eco-anxiety have a @wikipedia.org page, but not AI-anxiety?

Also, I can tell you exactly all the components on your sample with a single test, including concentrations and place of origin! That's why my screen has all these spinning structures.

Hello, I am a scientist in a film. All my liquids are brightly coloured. The time it takes to perform tests and experiments is dependent on plot requirements, not biology or chemistry. Also, my safety glasses are extremely stylish.

Fiiiine, apparently half my readers enjoy an info dump, so here we go!

Grasslands Sequester Carbon Too or “Why trees are not the be-all and end-all.”

Ahem. *takes a sip of water*

We owe this confidence to generations of scientists who pushed the boundaries of knowledge, not knowing if their efforts would make a difference. Oliver and Schafer didn’t put calf adrenal extracts into dogs to save my son but because they thought the world should know what adrenal glands do. 20/n

Expansion of the Stereochemical Space of Triterpenes by Mining Noncanonical Oxidosqualene Cyclases Across the Diversity of Green Plants Triterpenoids and steroids are structurally complex polycyclic natural products with potent biological functions, for example, as hormones. In all eukaryotes, the carbon skeletons of these compounds a...

Started as a very successful master thesis, now published in JACS. Screening sequence similarity networks turned out to be a great way to discover oxidosqualene cyclases with unusual activity from more than thousand plant transcriptome sequence datasets.

pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Authoritarians love "Gen AI" because it
- Sounds confident even when factually wrong
- Broadly conforms to & reproduces their biases, off the shelf
- Lets them create bespoke realities (text, audio, moving & still image) which agree w/ their biases
- Degrades trust in knowledge/evidence/expertise…

Three-step biosynthesis of salicylic acid from benzoyl-CoA in plants - Nature The salicylic acid (SA) biosynthesis pathway—involving ligation of benzoyl coenzyme A and benzyl alcohol to give benzyl benzoate; hydroxylation of benzyl benzoate to give benzyl salicylate; and cleava...

Three back-to-back Salicylic Acid biosynthesis papers 1/3 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Phytochemical Society of North America (#PSNA2025) starts today at York University, Toronto. We welcome all attendees to dive into groundbreaking phytochemical research, vibrant networking, and fun experiences! #PlantScience #Phytochemisty
Download detailed programme

Rachel Thomas, PhD - Deep learning gets the glory, deep fact checking gets ignored an AI researcher going back to school for immunology

"a fascinating case study on the limits of AI in biology and the harms of current publishing incentives" rachel.fast.ai/posts/2025-0...

Highly recommended read on the discovery of a very, very elusive enzyme!

Discovery of FoTO1 and Taxol genes enables biosynthesis of baccatin III - Nature An approach that combines single-nucleus RNA sequencing and multiplexed perturbation identifies genes that enable the biosynthesis of direct precursors of the anti-cancer drug Taxol, whose curren...

Today in Nature we report a systematic strategy to activate & identify gene sets in plants. We identify 8 new genes from the yew tree's Taxol biosynthetic pathway, enabling us to engineer tobacco with 17- & 20-gene pathways to Taxol precursors baccatin III & deBz-deoxy-Taxol #SingleCell #secmet 🧬🧪🌾

Discovery of FoTO1 and Taxol genes enables biosynthesis of baccatin III - Nature An approach that combines single-nucleus RNA sequencing and multiplexed perturbation identifies genes that enable the biosynthesis of direct precursors of the anti-cancer drug Taxol, whose curren...

Fantastic work by the Sattely group on taxol biosynthesis, featuring a highly innovative application of single nuclei sequencing to find elusive biosynthetic genes 👏
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hi everyone! I’m new to Bluesky. At the beginning of the year, I moved to Zurich @UZH_en to start a postdoc with #CyrilZipfel and @pedrobeltrao.bsky.social, investigating protein phosphorylation in plants 🌱

If you’re nearby or working on something similar, let’s connect 😀

New preprint out from the @oconnorlab.bsky.social department led by Moonyoung Kang, Anh Vu and Lorenzo Caputi.
Metabolomics and RNA-seq on the same single cell!

Or as we call it here in the lab: "the split-cell method"

I got hit by some rather sudden and extreme financial hardship so if anyone is in need of remote wetlab contract research, strictly BSL1, do let me know. Currently scrambling for gigs.

Plant, Bacterial, Archaeal Non-model Bioeng
Custom Lab Hardware
Turn Key Genetic Design

Please repost for reach 💚

Laboratory Technician, Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences

We're hiring!
🥼 2-year lab technician at UCPH from 01 Aug
🌿 Support our research in plant natural products with relevance in agriculture, nutrition, and medicine.
🧬 Your skills: plant molecular biology and/or tissue culture & transformation
📅 Deadline 18 May 2025
jobportal.ku.dk/administrati...

Hello Bluesky! 🎉 The Photochemical Society of North America☘️ is here! We'll be sharing all the latest updates on PSNA2025. Don't miss out on early bird registration – it's still available! Join us! #PSNA2025 #Photochemistry
#Science
www.psna2025.com/register

It's working now! It was temporary

Thanks! I think lately I just panic whenever a database is down :(

Is anyone else having problems with MASSive? Anyone know if the repository is going to remain active? #MassSpec

Sarah O'Connor is a new member of the Leopoldina Sarah O'Connor has been elected as a new member of the Leopoldina's Section for Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. Election to the oldest scientific society in the German-speaking world is one of th...

Our director Sarah O'Connor, head of the Department of Natural Product Biosynthesis @oconnorlab.bsky.social, has has been elected a member of the German National Academy of Sciences, the #Leopoldina! Congratulations! 👏
www.ice.mpg.de/492460/sarah...

Anyone knows of an alternative to GenBank for depositing sequences? An EBI mirror like the ENA is to the SRA?

Radicalize your loved ones before they get radicalized.

Opening at UdeM Biochemistry department for a professor position in bioinfomatics!

www.umontreal.ca/public/www/d...

Pictures of Lise Meitner Group leaders: Sofie Valk, Flore Kunst, Anna-Maria Meister, Maria Sokolova, Heidi Colleran, Nathalie Feiner und Ulrike Kraft.

A new round of the Lise Meitner Excellence Program for #tenuretrack group leaders opened today - please consider applying! The program aims to recruit and promote exceptionally qualified female scientists. www.mpg.de/lise-meitner... #LiseMeitnerGroups #WomeninScience #ScienceCareer

This preprint makes a point that is valid for a lot of machine learning approaches. Organisms or genes are linked by evolutionary history; they are not independent. This results in correlation between learning and test sets, and often in over-optimistic evaluations of the methods' outcome.

The latest one on the withanolide clusters. I believe this is number 3 within three months?! Contains previously not yet elucidated part of the pathway from what I can see after a brief look.
#PlantScience
#NatProd

A new paper out from our @oconnorlab.bsky.social department led by @angelicagg.bsky.social and Tobias Köllner. They optimised expression of an insect pathway in Benthy. Expressing insect proteins in plants is often not as easy as it sounds so this is a nice story! Congratulations!
#PlantScience