Delyan Zafirov

Cool story from @meristemania.bsky.social lab on growth-defense tradeoff at the shoot apical meristem www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Recruitment of bifunctional regulator thermospermine to methylated ribosomes directs xylem fate Polyamines are often associated with ribosomes and are thought to stabilize their integrity. In Arabidopsis, the polyamine thermospermine (tSpm) affects xylem cell fate. tSpm induces translation of SU...

Recruitment of bifunctional regulator thermospermine to methylated ribosomes directs xylem fate | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Great news: Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowships for Julia Baulies and @delyan.bsky.social funded. Looking forward to exciting work on root regeneration and TOR signaling, respectively!

Really excited about this - thanks for the support !

Looking to work with and learn from world-leading experts in plant cell imaging? I’ve got an open PhD position www.photobodies.com/about-6 in the framework of the AGILE Marie Curie Doctoral Network cordis.europa.eu/project/id/1...
Deadline: 15th of April, start date September 2026. #phd #job

Looking forward to meeting you at PEM2026 this summer, in beautiful Montpellier 🌱 Registration is open, join us! 👇🏼

Fluorescent proteins (mTurquoise2, mEGFP, mCitrine, mScarlet-I) move between cells via plasmodesmata in the epidermis of Nicotiana benthamiana. (Image credit: Rory Greenhalgh, Jacob O. Brunkard.)

🌱 SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORIAL 🌱

🔬 Plasmodesmata (PD) are membrane-lined channels in cell walls 🔬
In this editorial, Brunkard & Burch-Smith shift focus from "which molecules move through PD?" to "which molecules are *prevented* from moving through PD?" 🔎

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...
#PlantScience 🧪

Root growth in Arabidopsis depends on the amount of glutathione and not the glutathione redox potential Abstract. Activity of the root apical meristem and hence plant growth strictly depends on glutathione homeostasis. Despite compelling evidence for this dep

Root growth in Arabidopsis depends on the amount of glutathione and not the glutathione redox potential academic.oup.com/jxb/article-... @jxbotany.bsky.social

Functional Characterization of Target of Rapamycin (TOR) Signalling in Physcomitrella Target of rapamycin (TOR) is a conserved protein kinase and an important signalling hub in eukaryotes. The moss Physcomitrella ( Physcomitrium patens ) is a model organism for plant physiology, develo...

Happy to share that our improved preprint
Functional Characterization of Target of Rapamycin (TOR) Signalling in Physcomitrella
has been accepted for publication. Stay tuned.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

mRNA methylation at the crossroads of translation, transport, and decay in plant development and stress responses Modified nucleotides on RNAs have been investigated for over six decades for their potential role in regulating gene expression and protein synthesis …

mRNA methylation at the crossroads of translation, transport, and decay in plant development and stress responses

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

Indeed a great story illustrating how the plant TOR kinase can control the balance between growth and defense against pathogens !

Raffinose induces autophagy to promote the growth of Arabidopsis Thaliana - BMC Plant Biology Background Plant growth depends on the integration of environmental signals and nutrient availability. Under stress conditions, growth is often attenuated to prioritise defense, creating a trade-off b...

Excited to share our work about autophagy and raffinose. So proud of Sahar Magen for doing a great job and grateful for all the people who helped bring this work to light.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Great preprint by Liu, Blanford et al. (2025) on how trehalose 6-phosphate #T6P stimulates plant cell growth via #PlantTOR and is required for sucrose-induced TOR activation in #Arabidopsis by suppressing #SnRK1 in a dose-dependent manner, thereby mediating the antagonistic TOR–SnRK1 relationship.

Timing of transcription controls the selective translation of newly synthesized mRNAs during acute environmental stress Under stress, cells adapt their gene expression programs through changes in transcription and translation. It is unclear how cells determine which mRNAs are translated or repressed. Zedan et al. show that the timing of mRNA production alone determines the selectivity of translation, thereby coupling the processes of transcription and translation.

Timing of transcription controls the selective translation of newly synthesized mRNAs during acute environmental stress

AGO5 restricts virus vertical transmission in plant gametophytes The propagation of a viral infection from a host parent to its progeny is known as vertical transmission, or seed transmission in plants. It allows viral infections to rapidly spread locally via polle...

Preprint alert! It is my great pleasure to announce the first manuscript from the lab, a story that started @gmivienna.bsky.social and was mainly accomplished by the intrepid @gesahoffmann.bsky.social at @mpi-mp-potsdam.bsky.social. A brief thread with our findings
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A synthetic transcription cascade enables direct in planta shoot regeneration for transgenesis and gene editing in multiple plants #resource #MolecularPlant cell.com/molecular-pl...

Bioluminescent sentinel plants enable autonomous diagnostics of viral infections Plants engineered with synthetic genetic programs can transform how we monitor and manage the extension of crop pests and diseases. Here, we establish a bioluminescent platform in Nicotiana benthamian...

Such a cool pre-print on making sentinel plants - so much potential!

Bioluminescent sentinel plants enable autonomous diagnostics of viral infections

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

An important connection with the plant TOR signalling pathway!

In vivo RNA structure influences the translation and stability of plant long noncoding RNAs #research #PlantCommunications cell.com/plant-commun...

Engineered geminivirus replicons enable rapid in planta directed evolution Directed evolution can rapidly generate genetic variants with new and enhanced properties, yet efficient platforms for performing such evolution directly in plant cells have been lacking. We developed...

Out First Release in @science.org this week:
The development of a directed evolution strategy with proof of concept in plant immune protein engineering.

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

SALICYLIC ACID SENSOR1 reveals the propagation of an SA hormone surge during plant pathogen advance Salicylic acid (SA) is a key phytohormone that orchestrates immune responses against pathogens, including Pseudomonas syringae bacteria. The timing and extent of SA accumulation are tightly controlled...

FRET sensor for SA developed. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Fig. 1 (a) Model for how photoperiodic time measurement works across different species. (b) Examples of the photoperiodic pathways in plants (upper) and mammals (lower).

✨ Paper spotlight ✨

(🧵 1/8) Could photoperiodic responses have evolved prior to the emergence of circadian clocks?
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

And now for something completely different in co-translational targeting In two recent papers in Cell, Zhu et al. and Luo et al. use selective ribosome profiling to identify the substrates and timing of co-translational protein targeting to mitochondria. The results sugges...

And now for something completely different in co-translational targeting: Molecular Cell www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

FEBS Press Methodological advances in mapping transcriptome-wide RNA-protein interactions and RNA structures have started to uncover the potential of RNP conformations in gene regulation. Competing RNA–RNA, RNA...

Happy to share our review on the Interplay between RNA-protein interactions and RNA structures. The open access article can be accessed here: doi.org/10.1002/2211...

RNA‐binding proteins orchestrating immunity in plants RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) play a central role in plant immunity by controlling the form, function and fate of RNA and are directly targeted by pathogens to promote susceptibility. This review exami...

RNA-binding proteins orchestrating immunity in plants onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants - Nature In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same moth...

Look at this crazy thing!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Restricted edition of ALS is required during co-edition in order to maintain normal tomato development https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.27.672575v1

Large-scale single-cell profiling of stem cells identifies redundant regulators of shoot development and yield trait variation Xu et al. performed large-scale single-cell RNA-seq of maize and Arabidopsis shoot stem cells, identifying conserved regulators and candidate stem cell genes through mutant analysis. They linked stem ...

"Large-scale single-cell profiling of stem cells identifies redundant regulators of shoot development and yield trait variation"

From: www.cell.com/developmenta...

#PlantScience

My lab's very first manuscripts are out!!!!

- We identified nearly 60 conserved RNA structures in plastids #chloroplast #RNA
- We found that transcriptional response to warm temperatures in whole seedling is confounded by response at organ level #thermomorphogenesis

Link to both preprints below

New OA Article: "Assembly-dependent translational feedback regulation of photosynthetic proteins in land plants" rdcu.be/eBbQ6

Algae fine-tune protein synthesis to assembly demands of photosynthetic complexes. In land plants, this feedback control varies or is absent.