Sascha Laubinger

Before this #PlantBio2025 thread closes: two exciting opportunities now open for early-career plant scientists.
1. Plantae Fellows program, apply by Aug 31 plantae.org/2026fellowsa...
2. @theplantcell.bsky.social Assistant Features Editor program, apply by Sep 15.
blog.aspb.org/the-plant-ce...

A major trade-off between growth and defense in Arabidopsis thaliana can vanish in field conditions In controlled greenhouse conditions, Arabidopsis thaliana plants with a hyperactive allele of the ACD6 gene have stronger pathogen defenses but are smaller and make fewer seeds, in a classic fitness t...

This work started nearly 10 years ago and was once my main postdoctoral project at @plantevolution.bsky.social before I slowed work on it to a trickle because it became confusing. But it always remained extremely interesting.

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

The report identifies factors that limit innovation in Europe: fragmentation, both of markets and of regulatory frameworks, incl different national implementations of EU legislation, no true financial union, incompatible standards, insufficient R&D funding, risk-averse regulatory culture.

Less than a week left to apply! 🌱💚

We are hiring! If you have experience in plant genomics + AI, or promoter engineering + synthetic biology, check out our two open postdoc positions (computational + wetlab): www.vandepoelelab.be/Jobs please re-share RT #ERC

Someone asked if they could use this recording in their teaching. #PlantSci
YES! 😁
Please share this with students - the topics raised are so important.
Let's teach students (and colleagues?) to think critically about expectations for basic research, & be realistic about applications! 🌱🌾🌽

One more week to apply for this exciting Professorship in Plant Sciences at Uni Halle! Join our vibrant plant research community 🌱

Info 👉 wcms.itz.uni-halle.de/download.php...

@unihalle.bsky.social @snp2prot.bsky.social

Small DNA elements can act as both insulators and silencers in plants (Tobias Jores , Nicholas A Mueth , Jackson Tonnies , Si Nian Char , et al) doi.org/10.1093/plce... #PlantScience

#PlantSciJobs #PlantSciJob

Great session with amazing talks! Using single-plant omics on naturally occurring (Wild) Arabidopsis populations is a powerful and underutilized approach for uncovering gene-phenotype relationships in an ecological context. #icar2025

Concurrent session 14: gene to phenotype prediction: Eneza Yoeli Mjema: approach: collect data from plants growing in natural habitats to find missing gene functions, use machine learning to look for gene-phenotype relationships @enezer.bsky.social
#icar2025

Genes influential in controlling petiole length ratio identified using LASSO model (some well studied and some 🆕 )- lab validated 👍🏼

Inheritance of acquired adaptive cold tolerance in rice through DNA methylation Multigenerational cold stress induces heritable ACT1 promoter hypomethylation, enabling rice to acquire cold tolerance for high-latitude adaptation.

A new study in Cell finds claims that when a variety of rice is subjected to cold stress, it generates adaptive cold tolerance.

This tolerance is epigenetically mediated and is heritable for at least three generations.

🐋🌱🧠🗃🦋🦫🧪 #EvoBio

Super excited to release a huge evolution project on the works for many years:

Evolution experiments synchronized across climates to understand rapid adaptation

Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025...
All data available: www.grene-net.org/data

#MOILAB
@ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social
@hhmi.org

🧵👇

Cryptic infection of a giant virus in a unicellular green alga Latency is a common strategy in a wide range of viral lineages, but its prevalence in giant viruses remains unknown. Here we describe a 617 kbp integrated giant viral element in the model green alga C...

Latest findings on cryptic infection of giant viruses published in @ScienceMagazine. We discovered a large virus hiding within a green algal genome producing virions.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

📣 We offer a #PhDposition within the @dfg.de-funded @rtg2498.bsky.social on "Communication and Dynamics of Plant Cell Compartments" in Debora Gasperini's lab at the IPB.

🔗All information: www.ipb-halle.de/karriere/ste...

📅Apply now until: March 21, 2025!

#plantsci #plantscijobs #phd

Apoplastic barriers are essential for nodule formation and nitrogen fixation in Lotus japonicus Establishment of the apoplastic root barrier known as the Casparian strip occurs early in root development. In legumes, this area overlaps with nitrogen-fixing nodule formation, which raises the possi...

Finally!
Im so excited to present to culmination of many years of work from the fantastic Defeng Shen and some great collaborators. For details, I have made a digested thread below, but if you are more interested feel free to reach out (and read the paper of course).
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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 🧵👇

Regulation of alternative splicing by CBF-mediated protein condensation in plant response to cold stress - Nature Plants CBF transcription factors facilitate the formation of SKIP nuclear condensates to increase the splicing efficiency of cold-responsive transcripts, bridging transcriptional and post-transcriptional reg...

What a super cool story: New role of CBFs in alternative splicing by interacting with spliceosome-associated proteins like SKIP.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

From the archives: Plasmodesmata – regulation of function, targeting by pathogenic bacteria, and plasmodesmal-associated proteins Mariana Schuster; From the archives: Plasmodesmata – regulation of function, targeting by pathogenic bacteria, and plasmodesmal-associated proteins, The Pl

I am happy to share my last #InBrief.
I thoroughly enjoyed being an assistant feature editor for @theplantcell.bsky.social the last two years. I am very grateful for the opportunity which I would highly recommend to all ECRs that like to write. Special thanks to Nan Eckardt for all her support!

Looking for bright spots in 2025: it's the 25th anniversary of the completion of the Arabidopsis genome! We're celebrating in @theplantcell.bsky.social in May with a Focus Issue, but you can have some love here too www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... & here onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/....

Please RT:
🌱 We’re hiring a Postdoc and a PhD student!
⏳ Application deadline: 17. March 2025
Join our lab and explore the role of alternative mRNA isoforms in drought stress and environmental adaptation in crops and Arabidopsis. Learn more and apply: www.lablaubinger.eu/Opportunities

And it is a wrap!
Now we know each other a bit better, have elected our representatives and can continue this journey together. Thanks @dfg.de for enabling all this!

Let's put faces to the name 😀
We are #SNP2Prot

Great talk from Timo Mühlhaus from DataPlant @nfdi4plants.bsky.social at our #snp2prot Kick-off Event about Research data Management #rdm and FAIR principles!

Very happy to be part of this cool story showing that LUC7 proteins define two major classes of 5’SS in animals and plants! Thanks, Chris @daspliceisright.bsky.social and Connor, for reaching out to us!

We’re looking for a postdoc in plant bioengineering to join an exciting interdisciplinary ERC project @UPSC! Work in a vibrant, international environment alongside top researchers, pushing the boundaries of plant science. Apply here: shorturl.at/smdwD

Are you interested in joining our team as a PhD student to explore telescripting in crops? Apply now! Deadline: December 25th.
www.verwaltung.uni-halle.de/dezern3/Auss...

Figure 4. Position and type of fluorescent tag affect protein expression and P-body numbers in vivo.

The dark side of fluorescent protein tagging: the impact of protein tags on biomolecular condensation
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Development of an inducible DNA barcoding system to understand lineage changes in Arabidopsis regeneration Lu and Zhang et al. investigate the cell-lineage relationship of regenerated Arabidopsis plants. They demonstrate that the regenerated plant originated from a single somatic cell within the donor tiss...

Development of an inducible DNA barcoding system to understand lineage changes in Arabidopsis regeneration www.cell.com/developmenta...