Chenxin Li, PhD

A tapir resting in green grass with two small black birds nearby—one perched on its back and the other on the ground in front.

I was trying to photograph Groove-billed Anis this morning, but I was photobombed by his scofflaw.

At @tapirvalley.bsky.social #CostaRica

#tapirs #birds #nature

I started to work on MscS-Like proteins 20 years ago, dreaming that they were involved in plant mechanotransduction. And it is becoming more & more clear that they are!
#plantscience 🧪
"DmMSL10 is crucial for mechanosensing, facilitating AP firing by generating a receptor potential (RP) amplitude."

Yeah I realized.

Plants in Jars Hi! I'm Laur. Join me on my quest to teach the world about tissue culture.

I found this YouTube channel about plant tissue culture www.youtube.com/@plantsinjars

@atinygreencell.bsky.social You have totally be like that but with molecular biology and microbiology thrown into it.

Open rank faculty positions available at MSU Plant Resilience Institute. Apply online at: https://tinyurl.com/yy2kvt3n

Only 10 days left to apply to the MSU Plant Resilience Institute for a faculty position.We're looking for 1 junior and 1 senior faculty. Applications submitted after 10/15 cannot be considered. Join us! It's a very collaborative, fun, innovative group of plant biologists. Apply at: lnkd.in/eRyDv_Pi

Epidermal hydrodynamics controls water homeostasis of shoot meristems for plant adaptation to terrestrial environments Zhu et al. uncover an evolutionarily conserved water transport pathway in the epidermis of plant shoot meristems that maintains water homeostasis and regulates stem cell activity. This epidermal hydro...

Really nice work with an adaptive twist on SAM hydraulics. Congrats to @weibingyang.bsky.social and all involved 🌱🌊
#plantscience

www.cell.com/developmenta...

A strong quality for a good researcher is the ability to sometimes ignore small details, and sometimes delves into them with the greatest care, and more importantly to being able to switch wisely between the two modes.

🦀

Pivot to Plants: Training Program for Plant and Data Science | Danforth Plant Science Center The Pivot2Plants Fellows Program is a 1-year training program for people interested in pivoting to a career in plant science or data science but have limited research experience.

Deadline for our 2nd cohort of the Pivot to Plants program at the Danforth Center is Oct 15th. Excited to identify 5 participants for a 1-year NSF-funded internship. Hands-on research experience in cutting-edge #plantscience, #imaging, #datascience, and more! www.danforthcenter.org/our-work/edu...

🐚

anthocyanin-free ... 😜

New OA Letter: "Discovery of iridoid cyclase completes the iridoid pathway in asterids" rdcu.be/eJORu

With News & Views: "The missing link in the iridoid puzzle" rdcu.be/eJOSe

Lots of things can be hidden in a corn field.

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/...

It's grad school application season! My lab (cxli233.github.io/cxLi_lab/ ) will be recruiting a PhD student via the MPS program at MSU (mps.natsci.msu.edu) for Fall 2026.

Happy to take inquires via email (which can be found in the lab website) if you are applying this cycle.

Plant metabolism: Zoom in to the single-cell level The numerous emerging single-cell technologies allow uncovering plant metabolism regulation at higher resolution, enabling precise pathway discovery and me

Plant metabolism: Zoom in to the single-cell level (Nikolaos Ntelkis, C Robin Buell, Alain Goossens) doi.org/10.1093/plph... #PlantScience

One of my finer commit messages

Happy to share work spearheaded by former grad student Colin Shew testing shared duplicated cis regulatory elements (CREs) using an MPRA. While we find some high effect CREs, collectively paralog differences represent modest effects accounting for observed gene expression divergence.

It's grad school application season! My lab (cxli233.github.io/cxLi_lab/ ) will be recruiting a PhD student via the MPS program at MSU (mps.natsci.msu.edu) for Fall 2026.

Happy to take inquires via email (which can be found in the lab website) if you are applying this cycle.

MYB46 integrates cuticle and cell wall remodeling to coordinate drought tolerance and pathogen resistance in Arabidopsis The plant cuticle and cell wall form a dynamic barrier against environmental stresses. While MYB46 is a known regulator of secondary cell wall biosynthesis, its role in cuticle formation and the int...

MYB46 integrates cuticle and cell wall remodeling to coordinate drought tolerance and pathogen resistance in Arabidopsis
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
#plantscience

My department (Biological Sciences) at the University of Delaware is looking for a new tenure track assistant professor with a research focus on biomolecular sensing broadly. 🧪#molbiol #microsky
careers.udel.edu/en-us/job/50...

By “fix healthcare” they mean deny access to healthcare, especially to people who they don’t like.

Coexpression network and trans‐activation analyses of maize reproductive phasiRNA loci This work identifies the temporal gene coexpression networks associated with maize anther development, including two modules highly enriched for the 21- or 24-nucleotide reproductive phased, small in....

We tried something similar! Very small pilot experiment with very few cells so that significantly limited the power of our analysis, but I’ve always wanted to give it another (better) shot! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Would love to do this with plants

Dissecting the impact of transcription factor dose on cell reprogramming heterogeneity using scTF-seq - Nature Genetics This study introduces single-cell transcription factor (TF) sequencing, a single-cell barcoded and doxycycline-inducible TF overexpression approach that reveals dose-sensitive functional classes of TFs and cellular heterogeneity by mapping TF dose-dependent transcriptomic changes during the reprogramming of mouse embryonic multipotent stromal cells.

🧵1/ Excited to share our new paper introducing a new #singlecell assay: scTF-seq, a high-throughput single-cell approach to explore how transcription factor (TF) dose shapes cell identity and reprogramming outcomes. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Big congrats to the entire team @EPFL & @SIAT_China

The @uncchapelhill.bsky.social Department of Biology is searching for tenure-track Assistant Professor in Plant Molecular Biology. Chapel Hill is a wonderful place and Biology is an amazing group of people. To apply, see:
unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

It is common to for aquaculture to use triploid oysters as their stock! They have three sets of chromosomes, rather than the usual two, rendering them sterile. This means their body growth is faster, because they don't put energy into reproduction! (291) nwdistrict.ifas.ufl.edu/nat/2024/01/...

Fantastical flowers, synthetic biology, and storytelling.

Giving an accessible science talk tomorrow at 10:40 UK time... come join!

Register here for the link 👉 jic.link/NBIAST2025

Figure of the paper.

Our new short article is online at Plant Biotech J (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...)!

"Single Cell Multi-Omics Reveals Rare Biosynthetic Cell Types in the Medicinal Tree Camptotheca acuminata"

Product of an NSF-EAGER award that I was co-PI from 2023-2025 (www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...).

"The strength of a people lies in its purity, not in its diversity."
—Tom Metzger, a white supremacist, neo-Nazi and Klansman

"Real strength comes from homogeneity, from people who share the same blood and values."
—William Pierce, neo-Nazi, author of the Turner Diaries