Guillaume Hummel 🌱 🇪🇺 🇫🇷 🥨 🇮🇹

This work is now officially published
@natsmb.nature.com
with some fun new analyses included in the revised version. Congratulations to all the authors! @connyyu.bsky.social @rappsilber.bsky.social @lrsinn.bsky.social @fjoreilly.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is a remarkable study describing a new fungal species in a 407 million year old plant - Rugososporomyces lavoisierae Strullu-Derrien and Schornack sp. nov - using some amazing technology. Worth a read 👇

We are looking for a PhD student to work on an exciting plastid endosymbiosis in microbial eukaryotes. This position involves sampling, exciting microscopy such as CARDFISH, ExM and FIBSEM, single-cell transcriptomics and more. #protistsonsky 1/2

Recurrent acquisition of nuclease-protease pairs in antiviral immunity Antiviral immune systems diversify by integrating new genes into existing pathways, creating new mechanisms of viral resistance. We identified genes encoding a predicted nuclease paired with a trypsin...

Our nuclease-protease story is out! We explored a fascinating case of coevolution and modularity in prokaryotic immune systems: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Thanks to wonderful coauthors/collaborators/friends, the whole @doudna-lab.bsky.social and everyone at @innovativegenomics.bsky.social

Beyond the niche - unlocking the full potential of synthetic riboswitches
doi.org/10.1038/s414...

An Asgard archaeon with internal membrane compartments

Brilliant study led by @fmacleod.bsky.social and Andriko von Kügelgen. Tight collaboration with @buzzbaum.bsky.social and lab. Congrats to all authors!

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

The worst thing about the book is that it creates the impression that this hypercompetitive, no respect for rules or others, approach to science is normal or desirable.

21/41

Watson was an opportunist. He took advantage of Crick’s command of crystallography and managed to get access to Franklin’s experimental data including the famous Photography 51 which reveal a simple cross-like diffraction pattern of DNA in high humidity.

15/41

Yes, some people's legacies are complicated. For example, Watson. After all, though he was racist, don't forget his other traits. For example, he was also sexist. And also anti-semitic. And a data / idea thief. So let's not forget all the different facets.

When people celebrate the individual genius of folks in science, they should also
mourn the collective loss of genius of folks who were actively discouraged or disadvantaged from a career in science because of the same person(s)

Key results: loss of selenocysteine-decoding tRNAs in land plants, major intron shifts at terrestrialization, contrasting plastid vs mitochondrial trajectories, and lineage-specific expansion & clustering of nuclear tRNA genes.

Guillaume Hummel, David Pflieger, Alexandre Berr, Laurence Drouard: From the RNA world to land plants: Evolutionary insights from tRNA genes https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01943 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01943 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.01943

From the RNA world to land plants: Evolutionary insights from tRNA genes Transfer RNAs (tRNAs) are universal adaptors of the genetic code, yet their evolutionary dynamics across photosynthetic eukaryotes remain underexplored. Here, we present the largest comparative re-ana...

Thrilled to share our new preprint on the evolution of transfer RNA (tRNA) genes in photosynthetic organisms, together with David Pflieger, Alexandre Berr, and Laurence Drouard!
#PlantGenomics #Evolution #tRNA

@ibmp-cnrs.bsky.social

arxiv.org/abs/2511.01943

How sodium gets sequestered in the vacuoles of salinized plants? #opinion #MolecularPlant cell.com/molecular-pl...

Excited to share my first PhD student’s @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social!

Tracking 5 dyes simultaneously Kavan Gor @embl.org tracks nascent #RNA folding during #ribosome assembly to correlate structural with functional information on single RNA molecules!

Check it out!

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

An RNA sponge directs the transition from feast to famine in Caulobacter crescentus - Nature Communications In bacteria, many small regulatory RNAs (sRNAs) associate with the RNA chaperone Hfq to modulate gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. Here, the authors identify global Hfq-mediated RNA-R...

Cool work by @microberna.bsky.social & Kai Papenfort, presenting the first RNA-RNA map in C. crescentus using RIL-seq, revealing an RNA sponge that controls the transition from nutrient abundance to starvation; new insights into RNA networks and stress responses!
#RNA
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Plant cell wall signaling is indeed a very dynamic process 🌱

You can read what our very own Sebastian Wolf says about pectin in this news feature 👇

Selective RNA sequestration in biomolecular condensates directs cell fate transitions - Nature Biotechnology Stem cell differentiation is controlled by manipulating RNA condensates.

1/ Excited to share our new study with @brumbaugh-lab.bsky.social, out in @natbiotech.nature.com! P-bodies selectively sequester RNAs encoding cell fate regulators, often from the preceding developmental stage. Releasing these RNAs can drive changes in cell identity. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Been working on a really strange retron bacterial immune system, here's the preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Type VI retrons are unlike any other. Phage infection triggers reverse transcription of a DNA fragment that activates translation of a toxin to kill the infected cell.

Enhancer activation from transposable elements in extrachromosomal DNA - Nature Cell Biology Kraft, Murphy, Jones et al. identify extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA)-interacting elements (EIEs) enriched for transposable elements within ecDNA in colorectal cancer cells. They show that EIE 14 integrat...

Here, we show that the unique regulatory landscape of ecDNA enables an ancient LINE to resurrect and act as an enhancer of Myc. This was so fun with @katerinakraft.bsky.social and @mattjones.bsky.social and others. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Three sisters intercropping system. Maize (blue), beans (red), and squash (yellow) are grown together. Factors making the system more robust and higher yielding than monocropping are listed in boxes.

#Intercropping & #CropRotation are ancient #agricultural practices that increase yield & #DiseaseResistance in #crops. This Essay discusses the role of plant-derived metabolites & microbes in these systems and how they can contribute to #SustainableAgriculture @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4op7k6W

Gene expression divergence following gene and genome duplications in spatially resolved plant transcriptomes After gene and genome duplications, expression divergence across cell types is not random, and it can be explained by a combination of gene age, gene funct

Our paper on the evolution (duplicated) gene expression divergence in spatially resolved plant transcriptomes is now out @theplantcell.bsky.social

w/ @yvdp.bsky.social

#PlantSci #Evolution

academic.oup.com/plcell/advan...

Antiviral reverse transcriptases reveal the evolutionary origin of telomerase Defense-associated reverse transcriptases (DRTs) employ diverse and distinctive mechanisms of cDNA synthesis to protect bacteria against viral infection. However, much of DRT family diversity remains ...

1/10 Genome maintenance by telomerase is a fundamental process in nearly all eukaryotes. But where does it come from?

Today, we report the discovery of telomerase homologs in a family of antiviral RTs, revealing an unexpected evolutionary origin in bacteria.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New Article: "Pan-centromere landscape and dynamic evolution in Brassica plants" rdcu.be/eLtOL

Pan-centromere landscape and evolutionary dynamics in Brassica. T2T genome assemblies of multiple morphotypes shedding light on centromere evolution during domestication.

Impact of post-translational modifications on cytoplasmic biomolecular condensate dynamics. The figure shows the importance of phosphorylation (a–g), ubiquitination (h, i), and other PTMs (j–m) in the dynamics of cytoplasmic biomolecular condensate formation under different biotic and abiotic stresses and for different target proteins.

The role of post-translational modifications in the dynamics of cytoplasmic biomolecular condensates in #plants

A #ResearchReview by Legoux et al. 👇

📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

#LatestIssue #PlantScience

A human cell-free translation screen identifies the NT-2 mycotoxin as a ribosomal peptidyl transferase inhibitor Translation inhibitors are invaluable for probing ribosome function and therapeutic applications, but systematic discovery in human systems is limited by the lack of scalable, screening-compatible cel...

🚀 New preprint!
We used a human cell-free translation screen (~28 000 compounds) to discover NT-2, a #Fusarium -derived #mycotoxin that blocks human ribosomes.
#Cryo-EM at 1.72 Å reveals a link between chemical inhibition and ribosome dormancy.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Game changer for cell-based plant genetics: the labs of Caixia Gao & Jin-Long Qiu have developed very efficient self-replicating vectors and they just published a very nice proof-of-concept paper.
#plantscience
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Lead by postdoc in the lab Ruiqi Ge and in collaboration with Bob Coffey’s lab, we are happy to share rPAL-seq for rapid and sensitive sequencing based profiling of glycoRNAs @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

And look at this graphic abstract….. 😱🤯

Two microbiome metabolites compete for tRNA modification to impact mammalian cell proliferation and translation quality control - Nature Cell Biology Zhang, Lahry, Cipurko et al. show that the microbial metabolites queuine and preQ1 modify the same host tRNA. PreQ1-tRNA reduces cell proliferation, slows tumour growth, decreases the translation of ribosomal proteins and is cleaved by IRE1 on the ER ribosome.

☕Pan, David, Chevrier & co show that the microbial #metabolites queuine and preQ1 modify the same host tRNA. PreQ1-tRNA reduces cell proliferation, slows #tumor growth, decreases the translation of ribosomal proteins and is cleaved by IRE1 on the ER #ribosome.
👉https://rdcu.be/eJqFc
bit.ly/46BPXtJ