Gesa Hoffmann

RNA splicing generates a functionally specialized Rep protein isoform in geminiviruses — enabling timely control of the viral cycle. Strikingly, similar strategies might have evolved in DNA viruses infecting different kingdoms: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Spearheaded by @delphinem-p.bsky.social!

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My group at @zmbp-tuebingen.bsky.social is offering a post-doctoral position (4 years). We look for a structural biologist with experience in Cryo-EM/Cryo-ET to investigate the mechanisms of host invasion by pathogenic fungi. Deadline February 28th!
uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet...

Please share!
PhD position (4 years) available in my group @zmbp-tuebingen.bsky.social. We look for candidates with solid aptitude in computer science to cross disciplines and use cutting edge imaging to understand host infection by destructive plant pathogens.
uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet...

New OA Article: "Long-distance transport of siRNAs with functional roles in pollen development" rdcu.be/e1pxk

...These mobile small RNAs support proper pollen development, revealing that non-cell-autonomous small RNAs are crucial for successful plant reproduction.

Ziv Spiegelmann (left) and Marco Incarbone (right) standing outside near an office building in snowy weather. They are both smiling in the camera.

Thanks a lot to @zivirus.bsky.social visiting us from @volcaniinstitute.bsky.social to talk about the #tobamovirus revealing a crossroad between viral movement and #PlantImmunity 🍅🦠

Thanks as well to @incavirus.bsky.social for hosting! 🙏

Uppsala in late autumn

Join us at the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University. We’re searching for an Assistant Professor in Biology. www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

Fig. 1.Current expansion microscopy (ExM) methods in plant systems and other potential applications. Figure shows a schematic diagram of digested, permeabilized, expanded plant organelles, cells, or tissues embedded in a hydrogel in the center. Left panel showcases ExM techniques successfully applied in plant systems. These include chloroplast and nuclei (isolated organelles), Chlamydomonas, tobacco BY-2 cells, protoplasts, Arabidopsis seed embryos, and Arabidopsis roots. Right panel outlines other potential applications of ExM in other areas of plant biology including developmental biology, plant-microbe interactions, and spatial and single-cell biology. Created in BioRender. Cox, K. (2025) https://BioRender.com/ok72cvy.

🔬 EXPERT VIEW 🔬

In this review, Cox & Czymmek cover the recent developments of expansion microscopy techniques in plant systems and provides examples of their applications in plant biology research.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...

#PlantScience 🧪 @kcox-bioguy.bsky.social

Defence-mediated phloem restriction of a plant virus facilitates insect transmission

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

Winter forest scene with snow-covered trees and a small stream, sunlight shining through the trees. The image includes the text “Happy Holidays!” and the logo of Umeå Plant Science Centre, with logos of Umeå University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) at the bottom.

🎄✨ Season’s greetings from UPSC!

Looking ahead to the new year - are you an early career plant scientist interested in new research ideas and collaborations?

🌾Apply for the UPSC Early Career Symposium, April 2026!🧪

🗓 Deadline: 11 January 2026

👉 www.upsc.se/early-career...

Poster announcing the 3rd Early Career Plant Researchers Network Meeting, held 20–21 April 2026 in Halle (Saale), Germany. The event targets experienced PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in plant science and features scientific talks, career development and grant-writing workshops, and networking. Travel and accommodation are covered, and participants are registered for the 11th Leibniz Plant Biochemistry Symposium (22–24 April 2026). Application deadline: 23 January 2026. Website: plant-ecr-networking.eu.

Are you an experienced PhD student or postdoc in plant science looking to connect, present your work, and discuss career paths?
Join us at the 3rd Early Career Plant Researchers Network Meeting, Halle (Saale), 20–21 April 2026
Deadline: 23 January 2026
plant-ecr-networking.eu

Thank you @scienceslam.de for this wonderful night in Hamburg! 👩‍🔬🎤
I had a blast, learned a lot and thoroughly enjoyed slamming about vertical transmission of plant viruses 🦠💚

Organelles do NOT have a single uniform pH.
And if you think they must, because “protons diffuse fast,” this paper is for you.
A thread on why that assumption is wrong; and what we found instead. 🧵 1/n

The Clavel Group is recruiting a new postdoc for two possible projects dealing with plant-virus interactions and selective autophagy! More (wordy) details below ⬇️🌱🦠

🧪🌱 Sooo… our paper on how SPOROCYTELESS/NOZZLE controls the onset of megasporogenesis is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com 🎉🎉! This is one of the major projects of my postdoc at #LuciaColombo’s lab at #UniMI. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧶 1/7

An embryo-derived peptide signal directs endosperm polarity in Arabidopsis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.11.693621v1

Fig. 5 (shortened, full legend in paper): Development of a simplified approach for on-site Cas13a-based diagnostics. (A) Cas13a-mediated detection of tomato brown rugose fruit virus (ToBRFV) in serial dilutions of crude RNA samples from ToBRFV-infected plants diluted in RNA from healthy plants. Viral RNA can be detected in a 1:5 dilution using this method. (B) Equipment required for on-site diagnostics includes dry bath, vortex, portable fluorescence viewer, a pipette, and test tubes. (C) Schematic illustration of virus detection using a portable fluorescence viewer and a cellular phone camera. (D) Mobile phone camera image of serial dilutions of crude RNA from ToBRFV-infected plants. (E) Samples are converted to grayscale. (F) Fluorescence intensity is quantified using ImageJ.

🧬 TECHNICAL INNOVATION 🧬

CRISPR/Cas technology is an emerging tool for identifying nucleic acid sequences.

Hak et al. present a user-friendly, extraction-free, rapid protocol for specific on-site detection of plant viruses using CRISPR/Cas13a.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...
#PlantScience 🧪

Have you ever wondered how it is possible that systemically infected plants produce (a certain percentage of) healthy progeny? 💚

Check out the first preprint of the @incavirus.bsky.social lab and first preprint of my postdoc! 🍀

We'd be very happy about feedback and discussions!

Glad to have this finally published: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... lots of new data since the #preprint. If you are into selective #autophagy, #evolution, #proteostasis Please have a look!

It's great to see this work finally out! @newphyt.bsky.social
Here we showed that auxin production after fertilization is a conserved, paternal-triggered mechanism for seed initiation in angiosperms.

In vivo RNA structure influences the translation and stability of plant long noncoding RNAs #research #PlantCommunications cell.com/plant-commun...

Widespread and intron-rich mirusviruses are predicted to reproduce in nuclei of unicellular eukaryotes - Nature Microbiology Environmental metagenomic explorations show that Mirusviricota lineages lack essential replication and transcription genes and contain spliceosomal introns, suggesting nuclear reproduction.

Check out our latest paper on mirusviruses, one of the most remarkable new groups of protist viruses - extremely diverse, carry lots of spliceosomal introns (including new homing introns) and are at the evolutionary crossroads between tailed phages and herpesviruses! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Delphine Pott (left) and Marco Incarbone (right) standing in front of a yellow wall and next to a window facade in an office building. Both are smiling.

Great talk by @delphinem-p.bsky.social from @geminiteamlab.bsky.social yesterday: “Hijacking the Plant #Spliceosome” on how alternative splicing drives #viral infection and #tomato fruit development 🍅

Thanks to our host @incavirus.bsky.social for organizing this insightful seminar! 👏

Graphic with Arabidopsis thaliana plant. It says in the text: We're hiring: 5 PhD positions, apply by 10 January, 2026. Over the caption, there are keywords: Plant Physiology, Epigenetics, Biotechnology, Cell Biology, Bioinformatics. At the bottom there are logos of IMPRS, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, University of Potsdam and the Max Planck Society.

Looking for a #PhDposition in #PlantScience ?
Our #IMPRS @mpi-mp-potsdam.bsky.social and @unipotsdam.bsky.social is #hiring !

📅 Apply by 10 January 2026

More info:
👉 www.mpimp-golm.mpg.de/IMPRS-PhD

Please share this post to plant it in the right feed 🌱 #PlantSciJobs

CRISPR-Cas–mediated heritable chromosome fusions in Arabidopsis The genome of Arabidopsis thaliana consists of 10 chromosomes. By inducing CRISPR-Cas–mediated breaks at subcentromeric and subtelomeric sequences, we fused entire chromosome arms, obtaining two eight...

And now we have Arabidopsis plants with 8 chromosomes instead of 10 and no obvious phenotypic differences, this week in @science.org
#PlantScience
Paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Perspective here:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Historic transposon mobilisation waves create distinct pools of adaptive variants in a major crop pathogen - Nature Communications In this study, the authors analysed a large genomic dataset to trace how jumping genes shaped the global spread of a major wheat pathogen and reveal bursts of activity over decades that drove adaptati...

TEs aren’t just genomic parasites, they’re also engines of genomic novelty.

Our new study with ~2,000 Z. tritici genomes shows repeated TE mobilization waves during global expansion.

With @danielcroll.bsky.social & @guidopuccetti.bsky.social

🧬 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#TEworldwide

Excited to share our latest work on the factors that determine what genes we find (and don't find!) in GWAS and burden tests.

We describe a critical concept that we call *specificity*.

Led by Jeff Spence and Hakhamanesh Mostafavi:

How many plant species are buzz pollinated? After more than six years in the making, our paper on the convergent evolution of buzz pollinated flowers is out in @journal-evo.bsky.social. Thanks @draverbee.bsky.social @roszenil.bsky.social and all co-authors for your hard work! doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Collage of 4 mushroom pictures that look like Polaroids.

News for mushroom lovers: With the Flora Incognita app, you can now identify numerous #mushroom species in Central Europe based on images. These results can give you a good initial indication of what you have found 🍄 😱https://floraincognita.com

It was wonderful to have Bijun with us @mpi-mp-potsdam.bsky.social & @incavirus.bsky.social to finally "use our microscope to its full potential" as our core-facility put it! 🔬

Congrats to all, esp. @bijuntang.bsky.social and @xanderjones.bsky.social ! Super happy to be a part of this great story!

Pervasive splicing in a plant DNA virus Viruses maximize their limited coding space through strategies that increase transcript and protein diversity. In mammalian viruses, splicing is a well-established mechanism for proteome expansion, ye...

How do geminiviruses maximize their limited coding capacity? Our recent preprint uncovers splicing of viral transcripts as one more strategy used by this viral family. We show that RNA splicing is prevalent in the geminivirus TYLCV — and required for infectivity! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...