Shawn K. Thomas

Cat is out of the bag! Later this summer I’ll make a big jump across the pond for 4 years to work on polyploid genome evolution and diploidization patterns across angiosperms as part of this awesome grant and team

And so many people who contributed will never be able to be credited because of the forces of colonialism and enslavement that erased their humanity. Working with science historians to tell part of this story has been a real career highlight so far. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Afro-Caribbean researcher R. Shawn Abrahams in the Moroccan desert, measuring the photosynthetic capacity of the plant Moricandia suffruticose, a relative of Brassica crop plants like Broccoli.

Hi new folks! I'm Shawn. My research utilizes a combination of systems biology, systematics, and comparative genomics to understand trait evolution in plants. My current work took me to the northern Sahara in search of desert-adapted wild relatives of Brassica crops (🥦🧪). Here's how it went:

Shawn Thomas “The timing, placement, and impacts of the tribe Brassiceae mesohexaploidy” (unpublished) & new pub “Halophytes and heavy metals: a multi-omics approach to understand stress tolerance in Cakile bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec... #ibc2024 #Botany #PlantScience 🌾🧪🌱🌍🌿🍄🌻🔬

A fascinating evolutionary history as well with multiple rounds of ancient polyploidy! I would love to chat more with you to learn more about Cakile maritima’s disruptive side.

Cakile maritima has a fascinating geography and geographic history. It's naturalized on California's beaches and does some pretty disruptive things. But it's super hardy so you gotta give it some respect.

Science is a team effort! Thank you to fellow co-authors: Kathryn Vanden Hoek, Tasha Ogoti, Ha Duong, Angelovici Ruthie, @jchrispires.bsky.social , David G. Mendoza Cozatl, Jacob Washburn, and Craig Schenck.

@botsocamerica.bsky.social

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Traits observed in crop wild relatives, such as salt and heavy metal tolerance, offer invaluable insights for developing stress resilient crops and implementing scalable phytoremediation techniques to mitigate soil pollution.
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We identify retained duplicate genes that likely facilitated adaptation to these stressors. By studying genome evolution in crop wild relatives like C. maritima, we gain foundational knowledge essential for understanding the evolution of environmental resilience.
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Cakile maritima is salt and heavy metal tolerant, and a wild relative of mustard crops such as broccoli, cabbage, and canola. Employing ionomics, free amino acid profiling, and comparative genomics, we uncover insights into salt and heavy metal tolerance mechanisms.
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Did you know that gene duplications play a crucial role in the evolution of plants and their ability to adapt to extreme environments? 🌿🌍

Here we explore gene and genome duplications in the salt and heavy metal tolerant species Cakile maritima: bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
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In this image, panel A shows a phylogeny with the five species: Cakile maritima, Brassica rapa, Schrenkiella parvula, Eutrema salsugineum, and Arabidopsis thaliana. In the figure genus names are used to label the tips of the tree, and representative images of the 5 species are shown by the labels. Cakile and Brassica form a clade In addition the phylogeny has a 4-pointed star at the root of the tree representing the At-alpha WGD shared by all 5 species, and a 6-point star on the branch leading to Cakile and Brassica representing the Br-alpha WGT (only shared by Brassica and Cakile). Panel B shows 3 bar graphs depicting results from a stress experiment done with Cakile, Brassica, and and Arabidopsis. The bar graphs depict average root length in mm for control, salt stress(150mM NaCl), and cadmium stress (20uM CdCl2) treatments.

🌱From the upcoming #AJB #Polyploidy special issue🌱

Halophytes & heavy metals: A multi-omics approach to understand the role of gene & genome duplication in abiotic stress tolerance of Cakile maritima

By @shawnkthomas.bsky.social, @jchrispires.bsky.social et al.

doi.org/10.1002/ajb2... #botany

Complementing model species with model clades Abstract. Model species continue to underpin groundbreaking plant science research. At the same time, the phylogenetic resolution of the land plant Tree of Life

Complementing model species with model clades