Devang Mehta🌱🧬

Long-read detection of transposable element mobilization in the soma of hypomethylated Arabidopsis thaliana individuals - Genome Biology Background Because transposable elements (TEs) can cause heritable genetic changes, past work on TE mobility in Arabidopsis thaliana has mostly focused on new TE insertions in the germline of hypometh...

Paper led by @movillome.bsky.social on unbiased detection of (somatic) #TE insertions in #Arabidopsis with @pacbio.bsky.social long reads out after peer review. Thanks to academic editor Leandro Quadrana for shepherding it through the review process.
#plantscience
link.springer.com/article/10.1...?

Happened to me once before (colleague’s relevant paper wasn’t cited) and I reached out to the editor of the published paper who asked the authors if they’d like to add it and they did. Pretty easy fix if the authors are willing.

I’ve seen too many signs of funders biased by personal/ethnic/nationalist connections (a completely impervious hidden curriculum) and one solution is to value people who publish major advances in selective non-profit journals vs those who churn out hundreds of MDPI and Frontiers papers.

I’m deeply conflicted about this. On the one hand I agree that the CNS (+PNAS) journal worship in science is ridiculous but at the same time we need to recognise quality science. While I pledge to only submit papers to non-profit journals, I do aim for ones with high levels of discernment (1/n)

10 years ago I was looking at non science jobs and talked to a marketing person. They asked what I wanted in a job I said exciting, creative and impactful and their response was that wasn’t really a job.

We scientists have a privileged daily “grind” that isn’t easily replaced doing something else.

Congratulations!

An Israeli strike killed at least 10 people, including children, on Sunday near a water distribution point in central Gaza, according to health officials in the enclave. nyti.ms/3IjPeng

Every action counts.

#ethicalpublishing

Bizarre discussion on the radio likening air condition to passive smoking because it accounts for 3% of CO2 emissions.

But: we don’t moralise turning heating on in winter, and heating accounts for 15% of emissions. If aircon is intrinsically immoral, so are radiators.

Shows death rates in US and eu cities by temperature, air con being the decisive factor

Sitting here bleary after another poor night's sleep, disinclined to engage in a day of cognitive effort, this chart from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com really strikes home on.ft.com/4eFZG4l

Cremieux’s real name is Jordan Lasker. I put his name in the newspaper. He’s a scientific racist www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

A panel from a Calvin and Hobbes comic. Calvin's mom, eating dinner, says "Life could be worse, Calvin." Calvin, clearly upset, his mouth huge says "Life could be a lot BETTER too!"

happy birthday to bill watterson who gave me the gift of encapsulating my entire ethical approach in one comic panel.

Computer-vision research is hiding its role in creating ‘Big Brother’ technologies Technologies that can interpret imagery have many potential applications. An innovative study of papers and patents in the field suggests one use case that overrides the others: human surveillance.

Very happy to see my invited article for Nature is out in the new issue. I wrote about computer vision, the AI surveillance industrial complex, and brilliant new research that shows just how deeply embedded the field of computer vision is in the surveillance pipeline. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

(My) Takeaways from the metascience conference 2025 In a swelteringly hot London around 800 metascientists gathered for 3 days. It was a conference dominated by heat (physical and metaphorical), politics, AI and a few elephants in the room.

My key takeaways from the #metascience2025 conference. It was a great experience overall and loved finally meeting so many people in person that I've been interacting with for a while.

tl;dr It was hot, physically and metaphorically

Native, Spatiotemporal Profiling of the Global Human Regulome The regulome, comprising transcription factors, cofactors, chromatin remodelers, and other regulatory proteins, forms the core machinery by which cells interpret signals and execute gene expression pr...

Here we go, my first skeet-torial(?) on Bluesky for my first paper from @talusbio.bsky.social !

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

This preprint describes our scalable, mass spec-based method for measuring which (and how many of them) proteins are interacting with DNA.

1/?

Final Plenary of #ICAR2025 with @diorkelley.bsky.social presenting.

This was a great session! Thank you to the organizers for making room for it, though I still await a 🌱 meeting where DEI is a plenary topic..

#ICAR2025 Workshop 8: „Building a diverse community through effective teaching and mentoring“ led by Andrea Paterlini apaterlini.bsky.social and Mary Williams @plantteaching.bsky.social with @yoselin.bsky.social @mehta-lab.com, Sophie Goormachtig, & Agnes Uhereczky from @viblifesciences.bsky.social

Impressive presentation by Keiji Nakajima on day 4 of #ICAR2025

Read the related JSPP award- winning paper by Tatsuaki Goh et al. here…

🆓🔗 doi.org/10.1093/pcp/...

Back to my first love #chronobiology at #ICAR2025 day 2

The Plant Cell is accepting applications for Assistant Features Editors | Plant Science Today Are you an early career researcher passionate about plants and science communication? The Plant Cell is accepting applications for new Assistant Features Editors (AFEs) to begin in 2026 and 2027.

I would love to talk to interested PhD students & postdocs about the wonderful @theplantcell.bsky.social Assistant Features Editor program!
It's largely a volunteer position but great training & networking opportunity. Applications being accepted! #ICAR2025
blog.aspb.org/the-plant-ce...

Temperature is so important for plants that they have come up with many independent temperature sensors.

Curious? Read more in this review by former WeigelWorld members Sridevi Sureshkumar & Suresh Balasubramanian.
#plantscience
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Excited to be here a Plant Chronobiology 2025 at KU Leuven BE!

Great job @mehta-lab.com et al!

no, but the panel is internal.

That's what I told the person in charge of this funding program. He said there's no evidence of that 🤷‍♂️😭

I will talk about more this and the risks of doing advocacy as an academic at #ICAR2025 next week. #plantsci

to clarify, none of these papers was mentioned on the CV I submitted.

thanks. the crazy thing is none of these papers were even on my CV!

How sharing your science in an opinion piece can boost your career Don’t rely solely on academic papers to raise your professional profile. General readers are interested in your opinions, too.

This one hurts bit more coz it was an internal grant from my uni. Disappointing.

Here's the article I mentioned, take it with a grain of salt now, though I'm not going to stop advocating for EDI and ethical publishing. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A while back @nature.com profiled my opinion writing, suggesting that this can boost your career.

Sadly, I now have proof to the contrary: that people will target you behind the anonymity of peer review 'cause of your writing about science culture, racism, etc., and even succeed. Grant rejected🍾