Delfi Dorussen

Homoeolog expression in polyploid #wheat #mutants shows limited transcriptional compensation

Dorussen et al. 👇

📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

#LatestIssue #PlantScience @delfidorussen.bsky.social @emilieknight.bsky.social @simmojsimmo.bsky.social @philippaborrill.bsky.social

The mystery of redundancy between homoeologs continues! Knocking out one homoeolog in wheat doesn't cause the other homoeologs to be upregulated... nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Great work led by @delfidorussen.bsky.social with @emilieknight.bsky.social @simmojsimmo.bsky.social

BLOG - Women in wheat event provides training to address gender bias in wheat research

This July saw the latest #WomenInWheat event, where 25 early career women researchers attended a JIC training event focused on addressing gender bias in the UK and internationally

www.jic.ac.uk/blog/women-i...

Mary Agnes Chase looking over some plant specimens at the photographer with an expression of forbearance.

Women, Plants, and the Power of a Name

Researchers uncover the real women behind botanical names, turning obscure eponyms into powerful stories of recognition and representation.

botany.one/2025/07/wome...

#Botany #PlantScience 🧪

We'd love to hear any comments/questions/feedback on this work!
Many thanks to BBSRC @ukri.org, @nrpdtp.bsky.social, @dsw-isp.bsky.social & @bric-isp.bsky.social for funding
8/8

Instead, passive compensation could explain the high levels of functional redundancy - in this case, half (in tetraploid) or two-thirds (in hexaploid) of the WT levels of functional transcript are sufficient to maintain the WT phenotype
7/8

However, the PHS1 homoeolog group also showed no transcriptional compensation - PHS1-B1 transcripts were not increased in the phs1-a1 mutant and vice versa
This suggests that transcriptional compensation between homoeologs is not required for functional redundancy in wheat
6/8

Lastly, we checked whether transcriptional compensation could explain redundancy between previously characterised homoeologs
For this, we selected the PHS1 homoeolog group, shown to be redundant by Kamble et al. - doi.org/10.1093/plce...
5/8

We repeated this analysis in tetraploid wheat, where a loss-of-function mutation in one homoeolog will result in a 50% decrease in functional transcript (compared to a 33% decrease in hexaploid wheat)
Similarly, the vast majority of homoeolog groups didn't show transcriptional compensation
4/8

Overall, we identified only very low levels of potential transcriptional compensation between homoeologs - generally, the non-mutated homoeologs did not change in expression relative to the WT
3/8

To answer this question, we performed RNA-seq on hexaploid EMS-mutagenised lines and identified homoeolog groups in which one homoeolog is affected by a premature termination codon (PTC) mutation
For these groups, we compared the homoeolog expression levels between the mutagenised line and WT
2/8

We asked whether mutations in single genes are compensated by transcriptional up-regulation of their homoeologs, given that mutations in multiple homoeologs are often required to produce a mutant phenotype in wheat (i.e. the homoeologs are redundant)
1/8

I'm excited to share our work investigating transcriptional compensation in polyploid wheat 🌾
It was fun to work on this project led by @philippaborrill.bsky.social and myself, with key contributions from @emilieknight.bsky.social and @simmojsimmo.bsky.social
The key take-aways, a 🧵

Happy to share that our study of inheritance of homoeolog expression bias in wheat biparental populations is out in @biomedcentral.bsky.social Genome Biology! 🧬

Many thanks to all co-authors and @philippaborrill.bsky.social for great leadership on the project!
#PlantScience #Botany

rdcu.be/eokf2

Very cool protocol development from Emilie in the Borrill Lab 🧪 👇

This linocut is of both an adult and baby Malayan tapir. The adult is facing right and is on the top of the print. It’s a heavy quadruped with a trunk. It’s black with white saddle pattern. Below is the juvenile tapir facing left. It is smaller with rounder ears and shorter trunk. It is black with a pattern of spots in stripes like a faun. This lino block print is printed on Japanese kozo, or mulberry paper 23.5 cm by 31.7 cm (9.25 inches by 12.5 inches).

For #WorldTapirDay my #linocut Malayan tapirs, adult and baby. 🐡🧪 There are 4 types of tapir; this linocut is of both an adult & baby Malayan tapir. Tapirs always look very dapper, if improbable, in their black and white coat. The adults with their white saddles look like an aardvark crossed with 🧵

Thank you!

@johninnescentre.bsky.social @bric-isp.bsky.social @dsw-isp.bsky.social

It was great to work on this project together with Sam Burrows and @philippaborrill.bsky.social, as well as having vital contributions from Joe Crudgington, Giorgia di Santolo, James Simmonds and Marco Catoni

Partial redundancy buffers deleterious effects of mutating DNA methyltransferase 1-1 (MET1-1) in polyploid wheat Varying gene dosage through mutating DNA methyltransferase 1-1 (MET1-1 ) in polyploid wheat generates quantitative changes to CG methylation without the le

I’m very happy to share the published version of our paper on the role of MET1 in wheat 🌾 🧬

It’s been really exciting to discover more about DNA methylation in wheat and it’s huge polyploid genome

doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...

My latest article for The Observer 😍🙏

a illustration of our standard kitchen onion, Allium cepa, from 1586. Handcolored engraving

a black and white photograph of a white man in a suit, holding stalks of some plant, possibly corn or some sort of grain. Photo depicts Nikolai Vavilov (1887 - 1943)

The world has been through anti-science cycles before, to disastrous results

On a detour on my lit review, a mosey through the history of our familiar friend, the standard onion (Allium cepa) brought me right to one of botany's greatest cautionary tales of what happens when ideology overrides data

It was great fun to present some of my research into functional redundancy in wheat at the IWGSC workshop at #PAG32 😄🌾🧬

Some cool research I was very happy to be a part of 🌱👇

1/10 We are thrilled to share our preprint on spatial transcriptomics in wheat spikes led by the amazing @katielong.bsky.social and Ashleigh Lister. We resolved expression of 200 genes to cellular resolution. Pre-print👉 tinyurl.com/c7t3kncf., @johninnescentre.bsky.social @earlhaminst.bsky.social

An extinct elephant-sized brown ground sloth Eremotherium trying to eat the pale round fruit growing on the trunk of the Cannonball tree. There are also small red flowers. The fruit and seeds may have been distributed by extinct megafauna.

A small white flower with thin green leaves in front of a dark stone wall with a representation of a cave painting of a woolly rhino. The flower Silence stenophylla or Narrow-leafed Campion was reconstructed from a seed found in a ground squirrel burrow that was 32,000 years old.

A grey bird sits on a branch of an extinct plant Florissantia that has green leaves and flower-like papery husks. This plant is in the Malvaceae family and lived during the Eocene 50 million years ago. The bird is a Zygodactylus and it is eating an ancient wasp Palaeovespa.

A small brown pterosaur, Sibopterus,with a yellow and orange crest eating the orange seeds of an epiphydic cycad growing on the side of a tree.

Paleoart is better with plants 💚🌱

📢A new blog published! Using drawing as a tool for learning ✏️🌱🌵
Read more here⏩ 1url.cz/W1IU7
As a person who draws almost every day, I was surprised to discover just how effective drawing can be as a tool for learning about anything, really
#GoBelowground #CloPla #rhizome #drawing #bud #clonality

Hawaiian crow that went extinct in the wild decades ago released on Maui Two female and three male alala released after years of preparation in ongoing effort to return species to its home

A major conservation win! I won't try to conceal my excitement. This Hawaiian crow was BROUGHT BACK FROM EXTINCTION. Well done to everyone involved.

Hawaiian crow that went extinct in the wild decades ago released on Maui www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024... #crow #crows #corvids #conservation 🌎

Exaptation of ancestral cell-identity networks enables C4 photosynthesis - Nature Single-nucleus RNA-sequencing and chromatin-accessibility analyses in rice (a C3 plant) and sorghum (a C4 plant) provide insight into how C4 photosynthesis evolved in bundle-sheath cells, revealing th...

Very happy to share that our latest publication on the evolution of C4 photosynthesis is out now. It was such a pleasure working with the amazing Joseph Swift, Joe Ecker, @tinaschreier.bsky.social, and @jmhibberd.bsky.social.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...