Yan Zhou

My writing is still at the stage of “I need to write something”. 🫠🫠🫠hopefully I can get it started during my next week short break.

I’m proud to present the main work from my postdoc, 3+ years in making from scratch, my ultimate #MimulusPropaganda up till now:

The Moment
That
Symmetry
Breaks.

#plantscience #development #imaging #microscopy 🧪🌸🔬
w. Captain Yaowu & @biancatash.bsky.social

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

Can’t believe the embryo rescue medium our technician made back to 2023 still works 😂

ISU learning program system is so poorly organized that they actually made another training program to show you how to use their website and it took 30 minutes to watch.

My entire summer is for this moment, so sweet.

Never stop

A WRKY transcription factor confers broad-spectrum resistance to biotic stresses and yield stability in rice | PNAS Plants are subject to attack by diverse pests and pathogens. Few genes conferring broad-spectrum resistance to both insects and pathogens have been...

This kind of “knocking off a single gene improves both disease resistance and yield” fantasy always amuses me. How could thousands of years of evolutions and selections fail to find that? www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The deers wondered in my field during weekend had carefully avoided all my plants. Amazing.

The maize community needs your help!

I was making a purchasing plan for lab PCR supplies today. Compared with the time when I was a first-year graduate student, almost everything gets 30%-100% more expensive now. How could genotyping costs keep getting lower and lower? Do they buy supplies from China too?

a cartoon of a man holding a frying pan and a spoon with red alert written above him ALT: a cartoon of a man holding a frying pan and a spoon with red alert written above him

ATTENTION: NSF GRANT RECIPIENTS

We received a heads up from a trusted source that you should proactively download/print/screen shot any documentation on research.gov pertaining to your NSF awards, both those that are current and any that have closed in the last 5-6 years.

1/n

Top left panel shows a parasitic plant winding around a host, with the haustoria highlighted in the panel below. On the right is a diagram that shows the role of the mechanosensitive ion channel CcMCA1, and the hyptothetical downstream pathways that transduce the mechanical stimulation into haustorium development, involving auxin and ethylene.

Plant Science Research Weekly April 25 plantae.org/plant-scienc... (2/2) Cryptic giant virus infection; A fungal switch between ally and aggressor; Stopping citrus greening with peptide therapy; A mechanosensitive ion channel helps parasitic plants clamp down.

Luckily I bought a lot last fall when I took my vacation in China. Should be enough for another year at least.

Congratulations!

No spring tea imported from China this year.🥲 Guess this is not a totally lose? At least they can still import tea from Japan and India @cedarwarman.bsky.social

Any field experiments this summer? ;)

One dead, one survived.

Good news, tea are capable for longtime storage. So if you buy several big bags, you shall be self-sustained till next presidency.

Zeavolution slack group brought tremendously help to my phd research. A lot of fun researches and inspiring discussions every week. I would highly recommend to join.

Nearing 400 members on our Zeavolution slack! Want to interact with other members of the maize genetics community? We have a weekly webinar on maize diversity/evolution as well. DM me and I'll share a link to join the slack.

Work and life balance

Nope Microsoft, you have not fixed your stupid codes.

If you lost your PhD offer during this crazy federal funding crisis and would be interested in studying corn genetics. Feel free to shoot our lab a mail. We are recruiting and will be happy to chat. Don’t worry about the application DL of 25 fall, genetics PhD program here at ISU is very supportive.

I agree, we as scientists received our higher educations mostly with support from public funding, which is essentially from our taxpayers. Thus, scientists, by nature, have a social responsibility for science outreach as something in return for public investments.

No, your genes do not improve the yield under high density. 60K and 85K per Ha (~24K and 34K per acre) are already high planting densities. I'm sick of the over-claimed findings in these paper.

Attention Attention Attention

If anyone knows clinicians or patients who have knowledge of pediatric patients with the very rare cancer interdigitating dendritic cell sarcoma (IDCS) or other (non-LCH) dendritic or histiocytoc sarcomas please contact Sri

It looks like China takes less times now. Interview appointment is fairly quick plus 32 days on average AP times. So somewhere between 1.5 to 2 months. Actually close to pre-Covid time.

visagrader.com/us-visa-appo... From local tracking database. It is going to take 60 days waiting for interview after an appointment is made. Plus minimum of 60 days for administrative processing after the interview for F1 students. So 120 days would be what one would take in an optimum situation.

Diversity panel for genetics mapping…wait what? I can’t use this term because it’s triggering “DEI”? Fine, how about using “global collections of germplasm population” for genetic mapping? It works? Good. I don’t like censorship, regardless it is from left or right.

An ideal office for me: A big window to get enough sunshine to keep body synthesizing Vitamin D; A big table to put all of my trash; Three sides of walls with white boards to write.