Conor McClune

Reminiscing about the fantastic 4th SBNP Conference in 2024!
📢 Interested in joining us for the 5th edition? Visit the conference website today to secure your place at the best available price.
We look forward to welcoming you later this year 🎉
Conference Website: bit.ly/3OX3KEM

Paclitaxel saved my life. New discoveries could boost supply After decades, scientists have finally pieced together the 23-step biosynthetic pathway to produce this cancer drug

Lovely C&EN @cenmag.bsky.social story on the history and personal impact of the cancer drug Taxol. After spending recent years deciphering how yew trees, our source for Taxol, synthesize this lifesaving drug, it’s so nice to see it in the larger context #secmet #medsky
Plants are amazing chemists.

Research Technician - Reck-Peterson Lab Primary Work Address: 418 E 71st St #21, New York, NY, 10021 Current HHMI Employees, click here to apply via your Workday account. About the role: The Reck-Peterson lab studies the molecular mechanism...

Join the Reck-Peterson lab in NYC as a HHMI Research Technician! This role will support our new work on the cell biology of secondary metabolite production in filamentous fungi. Apply here: hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

Do you know what happens when you touch a carnivorous sundew plant?
If the touch is strong and large enough, a cytosolic calcium wave will spread from the site of touch throughout the whole plant, but if you only touch one tentacle (see post below), the calcium wave will be local and less intense.

Linalool-triggered plant-soil feedback drives defense adaptation in dense maize plantings High planting density boosts crop yields but also heightens pest and pathogen risks. How plants adapt their defenses under these conditions remains unclear. In this study, we reveal that maize enhance...

Out in @science.org The crazy sequence of events from planting maize in dense fields. Density-dependent linalool release triggers release of compounds into the soil affecting microbes and plants.
Article: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Perspective: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
#PlantScience

Perhaps in a couple years Claude* will pity the slow, handicapped way we now study metabolites’ in planta roles

Point taken. It’s empowering that we now have easy transient expression, cheap NGS, cheap synthesis, huge databases, computers, electricity, etc now.

Perhaps in a couple years scientists will pity the slow, handicapped way we now study metabolites’ in planta roles

Agree with @chenxinli2.bsky.social - cloning and testing in bentamiana is fast, but gene discovery is still slow and challenging when our initial hypotheses are incorrect (often). guessing we're also running into silent obstacles like localization, scaffolding, cofactors, etc

A truly enabling new approach by @taralowensohn.bsky.social Will Cody and @sattelylab.bsky.social to probe plant genetics at scale.

Single-gene-per-cell delivery coupled to an effective transcriptional selection system

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

Discovery of FoTO1 and Taxol genes enables biosynthesis of baccatin III - Nature An approach that combines single-nucleus RNA sequencing and multiplexed perturbation identifies genes that enable the biosynthesis of direct precursors of the anti-cancer drug Taxol, whose curren...

@cmcclune.bsky.social will be at the GRC for Single-Cell Approaches in Plant Biology! Be on the lookout for his talk on Wednesday (8/13) at 9.10 am. Talk will be about some new approaches and discoveries recently published in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41... #grc #singlecell #plantbiology

Elucidating #plant #Biosynthetic pathways: @jjjvanderhooft.bsky.social @marnixmedema.bsky.social &co develop #MEANtools, an unsupervised computational workflow that integrates #MultiOmics data to predict #metabolic pathways by linking transcripts to metabolites @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4odL94g

#plants #trees #history #botany #art 🌲

Taxus baccata - English Yew, Common Yew

Folk lore has it that the English used Churchyard Yew longbows - not true. Spanish Yew was straighter and better quality. (Confirmed by an Olympian archer I knew.)

Bows and trees:
www.longbow-archers.com/longbow.html

Scientists, please take a moment to comment on these plans to limit animal testing in drug regulation and biomedical research. Use whatever experience you have to make your comments specific to you. The law requires regulators take these comments into account, so it might help. Mine is attached.

ah, thanks for the fix!

Also crazy that the long-term-storage genome can be ~20x larger

And it’s chopped up into the just the useful pieces to form the get-shit-done genome (doi.org/10.1371/jour...)

Almost like ciliates have encrypted their genome 🤯

I just learned these this elephant-trunked-shaped cells, known as ciliate, put their sexy DNA into a special pocket (called a generative nucleus), and the rest of their DNA in a normal get-shit-done nucleus.

It has functional specialization nuclei.

Respectfully: holy shit 🧵🧪

There are many total syntheses, but since Taxol is large and has a 11 chiral centers it's hard to compete with enzymes for yield/affordability…

And we were missing about half of the 22 enzymes in the pathway until this year

Discovery of FoTO1 and Taxol genes enables biosynthesis of baccatin III - Nature An approach that combines single-nucleus RNA sequencing and multiplexed perturbation identifies genes that enable the biosynthesis of direct precursors of the anti-cancer drug Taxol, whose curren...

I didn’t know this but apparently paclitaxel is still derived from the yew tree!? I had just assumed we had found a way to synthesize it.

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Discovery of FoTO1 and Taxol genes enables biosynthesis of baccatin III | Nature

🙏

Thank you Carolyn Bertozzi @carolynbertozzi.bskyverified.social for highlighting our Taxol work!

Discovery of FoTO1 and Taxol genes enables biosynthesis of baccatin III - Nature An approach that combines single-nucleus RNA sequencing and multiplexed perturbation identifies genes that enable the biosynthesis of direct precursors of the anti-cancer drug Taxol, whose curren...

Check out this amazing new work from @sattelylab.bsky.social along with collaborator and @stanford-chemh.bsky.social Institute Scholar @pollyfordyce.bsky.social !

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A friend of my compared gutting of federal agencies to a wrecking a car: if you remove 30% of the parts of the car, it does not go 30% slower. It stops working.

A million shades of green: understanding and harnessing plant metabolic diversity
Rocky Payet, Anne Osbourn et al presents a step-by-step guide to starting a project that characterises plant secondary metabolites
www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

Effects of chaperone selectivity on the assembly of plant Rubisco orthologs in E. coli We used an E. coli system to examine recognition of plant Rubisco chaperones for different Rubiscos. Identified factors influencing chaperone selectivity e

Further advanced in synbio systems for expression of plant rubiscos in E. coli, exploring importance of Raf1 variants:
academic.oup.com/jxb/article-...
and accompanying perspective via @jxbotany.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...

It makes sense that skin microbes would have an intimate relationship with our immune cells.

But engineering these bugs into topical vaccines still feels like sci-fi.

Congrats @djenetbousbaine.bsky.social on the well deserved prize

Check out this prize-winning essay by postdoc @djenetbousbaine.bsky.social on her work with @mfgrp.bsky.social @stanford-chemh.bsky.social 👏

Plants monitor the integrity of their barrier by sensing gas diffusion - Nature A study using Arabidopsis shows that plants can monitor the integrity of their outer barriers by sensing gas diffusion, enabling them to initiate wound repair to prevent water loss and pathogen entry.

How plants sense injury in their barrier tissue, periderm? Painstakingly detailed and amazing work by post doc Hiroyuki Iida shows that wounding is sensed by the diffusion of two gases: ethylene and oxygen. @treebiocoe.bsky.social‬ @erc.europa.eu‬ 1/x 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Pithy coverage by @plantaeofficial.bsky.social of our recent Taxol work

#chemsky #medsky

Elucidation and recreation of the biosynthetic pathway for taxol | Plantae Paclitaxel (sold as Taxol) is taxane diterpene natural product of yew trees (Taxus spp.) and a potent stabilizer of microtubules that is effective in treatment of cancers. However…

Plant Science Research Weekly -- Elucidation and recreation of the biosynthetic pathway for taxol (Nature) @cmcclune.bsky.social‬ (Summary by Mary Williams @PlantTeaching.bsky.social)
buff.ly/miccEK3

#PlantaePSRW

A host organelle integrates stolen chloroplasts for animal photosynthesis Sea slugs steal foreign chloroplasts and store them in specialized organelles that facilitate photosynthesis and eventual digestion to mediate starvation resistance.

How 🆒 is this?!? www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...