Facundo Romani

This Halloween, we have a spooky evolutionary story for you.
The brainchild of @delaconcepcionjc.bsky.social, Nick Irwin and our fantastic collaborators is now out in @natplants.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Here’s why I love this work — and why I think you’ll enjoy it too. 👇

A new tool for engineering Phaeodactylum tricornutum: the METE promoter drives both high expression and B12‐tuneable regulation of transgenes The promoter of the METE gene in the diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum is repressed by nanomolar concentrations of vitamin B12. It can be used to tune the expression of genes for reporter proteins or ...

If you want to read about a strong tuneable promoter in a diatom, see our publication: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

It was a team effort! So thank you, Patrick Hickland, Alison Smith, and the rest of the Plant Met lab at the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge.

Some highlights of the wonderful visit to Huazhong Agricultural University. Great scientific discussions and the best food. Thanks professor Fei Zhang for hosting.

Nice initiative! I am already trying it. One marketing question, what is the meaning of q.e.d.? It is too close to the Spanish q.e.p.d. Which it is literally Rest In Peace.

Very happy and proud to share the #Spirogyra genome: 50 Mbp small, lacking almost all plastid division proteins and many transcription factors. Kudos to all the many people involved in this multi year project!
@jandevries.bsky.social
@watertoland.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A tRNA-gRNA multiplexing system for CRISPR genome editing in Marchantia polymorpha Abstract. The liverwort Marchantia polymorpha is a widely used model organism for studying land plant biology, which has also proven to be a promising test

Glad to see Eftychis CRISPR multiplexing pipeline published now in Journal of Experimental Botany #plantsciences #marchantia academic.oup.com/jxb/advance-...

Bryophytes hold a larger gene family space than vascular plants - Nature Genetics A super-pangenome analysis incorporating 123 newly sequenced bryophyte genomes reveals that bryophytes exhibit a larger number of unique and lineage-specific gene families than vascular plants.

Very important paper and resource. Bryophyte genomes expanded by one order of magnitude. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Decay stages of Jurassic wood debris from Scotland: evidence for the coevolution of fungal rot, arthropods and the nurse log strategy A key feature of extant conifer forests is the high percentage of seeds that germinate and establish on dead wood; in some forests, this can exceed 90%. This deadwood can act as an ideal nursery for...

Excited to share our recent paper @newphyt.bsky.social where we describe evidence of a Jurassic nurse log from Scotland! Great work led by @anajusagasti.bsky.social Sophie Burne and @jeremywyman.bsky.social @instmolplantsci.bsky.social
🧵 👇 1/6
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I'm recruiting a post doc and a research assistant for a 30 month project “ZHOUPI genes, cell death and the evolution of plant endosperm” funded by a Research Project grant from the Leverhulme Trust @Leverhulme.ac.uk. Application details are on the Opportunities page at biology.ed.ac.uk/goodrich

Marchantia berteroana at 3000 meters above the sea level. Vallecitos, Mendoza.

4th Genetics Society Non-Seed Plant Group Meeting 2025 | John Innes Centre General Information Established thanks to the support of the Genetics Society, the Non-Seed Plant Sectional Interest Group brings together UK researchers studying all aspects of plant biology using…

EVENT - 4th Genetics Society Non-Seed Plant Group Meeting 2025

🗓️ 12 December 2025
⏰ From 9:30 am
📍 @theforumnorwich.bsky.social, Millennium Plain, Norwich, NR2 1TF

For more info: www.jic.ac.uk/event/4th-ge...

💻 Register by 14 NOVEMBER 2025: forms.office.com/e/7xLvVHtbC6

@philcarella.bsky.social

We are looking for a PDRA for the PlantPlug project, turning parasitic plants into programmable bio-modules! Using mistletoe as a novel chassis, we are exploring the frontiers of inter-species communication.
Apply online by 15/10/2025.
*RP*
#PlantSciencesJobs

vacancies.essex.ac.uk/tlive_webrec...

What Large Language Models Know About Plant Molecular Biology Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly permeating scientific research, yet their capabilities in plant molecular biology remain largely uncharacterized. Here, we present MoBiPlant, the first compreh...

🧬🌱 Excited to share our new preprint. Large effort by Fede, Manuel, Enzo, and other 112 plant biologists. In short, LLMs perform better on well-established knowledge from highly cited sources but struggle with cutting-edge research www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #plantscience

JXB 75th Anniversary Symposium SESSION 1: BEGINNINGS The origins of plants and the start of the plant life cycle Chairs: Diana Santelia & Steve Penfield 18 September | 9 AM | Edinburgh INVITED SPEAKERS Prof Steve Penfield John Innes Centre Inter-generational temperature signalling during plant reproductive development Asst Prof Kin Pan Chung Wageningen University To begin is easy, to persist is art: the inheritance of cytoplasmic genomes in plants

JXB 75th Anniversary Symposium SESSION 2: GROWING Photosynthesis, respiration, nutrient acquisition, growth Chairs: Diane Beckles & Agustin Zsögön 18 September | 1.30 PM | Edinburgh INVITED SPEAKERS Prof Christine Raines University of Essex Improving photosynthesis for sustainable crop productivity Assoc Prof Berkley Walker Michigan State University Learning from nature to make more thermotolerant and efficient photosynthetic systems Prof Diane Beckles University of California, Davis Fruit Photosynthesis and Carbohydrate Dynamics in Tomato: From Starch Accumulation to Sugar Mobilization

JXB 75th Anniversary Symposium SESSION 3: MATURITY Flowering, reproduction and coping with stress Chairs: Madelaine Bartlett & Cristobal Uauy 19 September | 9 AM | Edinburgh INVITED SPEAKERS Dr Madelaine Bartlett Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge Developmental mechanisms underpinning the evolution of floral form in the grasses Dr Teva Vernoux ENS Lyon From dynamical auxin fields to the emergence of phyllotaxis Prof Cristóbal Uauy John Innes Centre Early inflorescence development shapes yield in the field

XB 75th Anniversary Symposium SESSION 4: FUTURE New Plan(t)s Chairs: Franziska Fichtner & Ola Skirycz 19 September | 1.30 PM | Edinburgh INVITED SPEAKERS Assoc Prof Nicola Patron University of Cambridge Recoding Regulation: Towards predictable network engineering Dr Franziska Fichtner Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf Trehalose 6-phosphate coordinates sugar status with hormone signalling and plant development Dr Devang Mehta KU Leuven Re-engineering plant chronobiology: from genome to proteome and from molecules to future geographies

📢 Good news! #JXB75 registration deadline extended ⏳

🎉 Secure your place by 31 Aug 🎉

Plus the full programme is now LIVE 📢
🧩 1 day of workshops & plenary
🌱 2 days of sessions: Beginnings, Growing, Maturity & Future

👉🔗 bit.ly/JXB75

#PlantScience 🧪

📢 To all molecular mossers 📢

The Moss Workshop will be held in (not always as sunny as this) Oxford next year (30th June until 2nd July 2026). More details will follow soon, but in the meantime please make a note of the dates 😃 👍

I agree that is hard to understand how editors are unable to find reviewers but a paper “rejected” without revisions is not a rejected paper. It is often the case they did not find the reviewers they wanted/expected and reject on that ground. That is flawed.

👋

Checkout our new starter pack: Academics to follow on BlueSky to keep up to date with cutting edge discoveries in the world of plant science!
go.bsky.app/5CYhV8v

Hey all!
We have been awarded a Spanish national grant to keep researching. Best of all is we have a full PhD contract assigned. We are looking for candidates interested in molecular biology and evolution of (plant) transcription factors, please spread the word!!
Check our web for more information.

Our new work uncovering how WIND1 promotes somatic embryogenesis as a bifunctional chromatic regulator!!!!

We knew WIND1 promotes new fate acquisition and now we show WIND1 also helps repressing existing identity!

Internal Phase Separation in Synthetic DNA Condensates The modular, programmable system of DNA nanostructures developed provides programmatic control over multiphase condensate behavior, enabling mapping onto a predictive Flory-Huggins model. This combin...

Thrilled to share this new Adv. Sci. paper by @dianatanase.bsky.social with Dino Osmanovic @rogerrubiosanchez.bsky.social @laylamalouf.bsky.social @francolab.bsky.social. We demonstrate a modular approach to program internal phase separation in DNA condensates 1/n doi.org/10.1002/advs...

Don't forget to submit your abstract for the #EMBO Workshop on #PlantEvolution by August 25th!
Join us @gmivienna.bsky.social in November to discuss all things #plantevodevo

Please spread the word! 🙏🦠🌱

#algae #bryophytes #nonseedplants #terrestrialization

Ancestral P-body proteins rewired for autophagic recycling in the early land plant Marchantia polymorpha Processing bodies (P-bodies) are conserved ribonucleoprotein (RNP) granules central to RNA metabolism across eukaryotes. Although the mechanisms underlying their assembly are well understood, the path...

If you’re enjoying some calm while others are on holiday, here’s a #NEW #preprint to dive into — led by the brilliant @vbcscitraining.bsky.social student A. Abdrakhmanov:
👇 A quick thread + link:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Check out this excellent opportunity #PlantBio2025 #PlantBio

This is a great program. We started in in 2016 and it just gets better and better!
Check out some past fellows who are on Bluesky: @philcarella.bsky.social @mattbnt.bsky.social @psaima.bsky.social @fromani.bsky.social @sjb287.bsky.social @aribidopsis.bsky.social @cavycavs.bsky.social

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

#plantscience #evochromo

It was a pleasure to work again with colleagues at GMI. Thanks, Vikas, Fred, Tetsuya, and Elin for having me on board and making this manuscript finally possible. Feedback will be very welcome 🙏

In Animals, TFs have a clear preference for certain chromatin states. With some tricks, we show that this could also be true in plants. This opens the possibility to distinguish TFs by their mode of action (pioneer vs normal TFs). This includes some unusual 5'UTR TFs.

Chromatin is highly conserved across eukaryotes, but it does not always work the same way. First, in both Arabidopsis and Marchantia, analogous chromatin states can be identified. Tissue-specific genes associate with TFs in facultative chromatin.h