Michael Borg

The histone core domain evolves at single-residue resolution to directly orchestrate transcription Nucleosomes are thought to be structural barriers to transcription, establishing a restrictive ground state that must be destabilized for gene express…

Happy to share our new paper out today in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social in collaboration with @tobiaswarnecke.bsky.social @akihisaosakabe.bsky.social about how evolution can do big things with small changes. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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...?

A roadmap to developing unified streptophyte algal model systems Carrillo-Carrasco and colleagues highlight the importance of the establishment of streptophyte algal model systems and the community efforts towards this goal.

We've tried to gather and unite the streptophyte algae community all around the world to join forces and develop tools and methods for these critters. Learn more about it on @currentbiology.bsky.social!
With @jandevries.bsky.social, @dolfweijers.bsky.social, and (many) others!

tinyurl.com/29n4zwen

1/2 Somatic TE transposition in plants is getting traction again (70 years after McClintock's discovery of "controlling elements")! A very large collection of somatic TE insertions in A. thaliana described by Ambreen et al.(www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...).

Hassan Salem Interview with Hassan Salem, who studies beetles and their microbial partners at the Max Planck Institute for Biology.

Grateful to the folks @CurrentBiology.bsky.social for the fun Q&A!

Come for the beetles, stay for the symbionts — and forgive the basketball detour 🪲🦠🏀

www.cell.com/current-biol...

We are looking for a student to continue our work on chromatin evolution:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The project with @seanamontgomery.bsky.social will focus on chromatin state readers across eukaryotes.

More info: recruitment.crg.eu/content/jobs...

Excited to share our latest review on histone-mediated chromatin organization in prokaryotes and viruses! 🧬 @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social

The art of arranging marine algae into designs, bouquets, and even sometimes intricate little scenes, was surprisingly popular in the 19th century. See an album of such pictures by a woman named Eliza A. Jordson here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/album-of-seaweed-pictures-1848

A wonderful summary of our recent work in @currentbiology.bsky.social . It’s an honour for it to have been written by such respected researchers in the field. Thank you @multicellgenome.bsky.social & team! 🤩

Congrats, well deserved!!

Omaya Dudin Interview with Omaya Dudin, who uses Ichthyosporea as models to study how and why unicellular organisms evolved multicellularity at the University of Geneva.

90% of you probably don’t need to read this.
But maybe some of you are curious & 10% will feel seen. Or a little less alone. This isn’t about seeking sympathy.
It’s about sharing something hard to say out loud;
partly to heal, partly in case someone needs to hear it too. (1/3)
tinyurl.com/DudinO

Thanks Vikram 🙏🏼

Thanks Pete, hope to see you again soon!

Thanks for the kind words and please enjoy the Plavakas! 🙏🏼

Delighted to see our work now published in @currentbiology.bsky.social. A great place for Bostrychia to stake its claim as an emerging red algal model system. Check it out here: www.cell.com/current-biol...

🎉 We’re hiring! Two ERC-funded #PostdocJobs on insect–phytopathogen mutualisms are available in my lab. Explore the chemical and molecular evolution of symbioses!
🧪Chemical ecology: tinyurl.com/chem-ecol-symb
🦠Phytopathology & mutualisms: tinyurl.com/symb-plantpath
#SymbioSky #PlantPathology

I always say, never trust a scientist who can’t cook!

Wonderful news and well deserved. Congrats Hassan!

Our preprint has now found a wonderful home in @molbioevol.bsky.social. Shout out to our collaborators in the Mozgova lab too 💚

Mind blowing 🤯

New post doc opportunity in our team at Kiel University in the north of Germany. We are looking for a motivated molecular biologists to unravel plant-microbe interactions in grasses. Please see: www.uni-kiel.de/personal/de/...

More to our research and group here: www.environmental-genomics.de

My group is hiring a new Postdoc to work on gene regulation and chromatin in Nematostella. Please RT!
For more information see here:
gahanlab.com
tinyurl.com/34xke35d

New Letter: "Sporophyte-directed gametogenesis in Arabidopsis" rdcu.be/ed0V0

In flowering plants the gametophyte develops within the sporophyte. Male gametophyte development in Arabidopsis is directed by the sporophyte through repression of gametogenesis genes.

Gene networks are conserved across reproductive development between the fern Ceratopteris richardii and the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana How plants first invented seeds is a longstanding unresolved evolutionary question. Seed-bearing plants arose from within seedless vascular plants, with ferns as their closest relatives, but how the s...

It's been a long time coming but I'm very happy to share this preprint with folks. 🙂 Thanks again to the Royal Society for funding this research.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#Plantscience
#Plantevolution
#Fernbiology

Credit: Margot Riggi (@margotriggi.bsky.social), Max-Planck Institute of Biochemistry (@mpibiochem.bsky.social)

Asgard archaea have actin - but what about microtubules? Where do they come from? 🧐 Our new paper www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... by @xujwet.bsky.social & @florianwollweber.bsky.social, in collaboration with the Schleper & Wieczorek labs, describes tiny Asgard microtubules! #TeamTomo #ArchaeaSky 1/6

Microtubules in Asgard archaea Discovery of heterodimeric, microtubule-forming tubulins in Asgard archaea, the closest known relatives of eukaryotes, reveals snapshots of microtubule evolution.

Microtubules in Asgard archaea 🤩🤩 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Exciting #FossilFriday as our preprint on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social was picked up by @newscientist.com!

You can read the prepint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Exploring fern pathosystems and immune receptors to bridge gaps in plant immunity Land plants include angiosperms, bryophytes, lycophytes and ferns, each of which may deploy distinct strategies to resist pathogens. Here, we investigate fern-pathogen interactions by characterizing n...

🔗 Preprint alert: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧵 New insights into plant immunity: using ferns to understand evolution! 🌱✨🌿

Excited to share my first (but not last) published research at @lrsv-toulouse.bsky.social. A THREAD … [1/9]

Drosophila follicle showing retrotransposons (pink & yellow) expressed in somatic cells infecting the oocyte

1/ Transposable elements are often called "jumping genes" because they mobilize within genomes. 🧬
But did you know they can also jump 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 cells? 🤯
Our new study reveals how retrotransposons invade the germline directly from somatic cells.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A short thread 🧵👇