Joel Masanga

Congratulations Diana and team @laskyjr.bsky.social

Local adaptation to climate has facilitated the global invasion of cheatgrass - Nature Communications Here, the authors examine the mechanisms behind cheatgrass’s successful invasion of North American ecosystems. Their genetic analyses and common garden experiments demonstrate that multiple introducti...

Cheatgrass is reshaping western ecosystems, but research shows its spread follows locally adapted genotypes.

By understanding how traits like flowering time shift with climate, scientists can better predict movements and guide smarter ecosystem management. Read more here https://nature.ly/45k1mNM

Let me guess, Striga hermonthica is on the bottom right?

Congratulations @mngigi.bsky.social . Best of luck in the next step

Good luck @ehlawrence-paul.bsky.social

Employment - Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

EEB Postdoctoral Fellowship @ U.Toronto app deadline Jan 15 2026. Opportunity for independent research, encourages collab across labs/disciplines. Lots of great folks to interact with, Come join us!
eeb.utoronto.ca/employment-2/

Population genomic structure of sorghum landraces across landscape, environment and culture https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.02.686151v1

pangenome 'expansion' curves for cotton and soybean

Determining presence-absence variation (PAV) across reference genomes is a major goal of pangenome analysis. It turns out that A LOT of gene PAV is due to methodological artifacts.

We explore the causes of this in soybean and cotton datasets in our recent preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Legacy of warming and microbial treatments shape root exudates and rhizosphere fungal communities of a tropical tree Plant metabolites play a pivotal role in shaping rhizosphere microbial communities, yet how plant and microbial functions respond to environmental change remains poorly understood. We combined ecometa...

Our preprint on the interaction between root-exuded plant metabolites and fungal community assemblages under altered environments is now online.

Very happy to share our preprint on sorghum strigolactone diversity! 🌱

Sorghum naturally varies in strigolactones, plant hormones that can sometimes protect against the parasitic plant Striga.

We asked if this diversity could be connected to potential trade-offs in host resistance strategies.

Strigolactone effects on Sorghum bicolor ecophysiology and symbioses Strigolactones are ecologically, developmentally, and physiologically important hormones, but much remains unknown about their evolution and role in non-model species. Sorghum is an important C4 cerea...

Great work by @chloeemc.bsky.social . Very honored to have been part of the team.

Thank you, Mary!

Delivering trait-enhanced varieties to African smallholders through a pangenomic breeding network Pangenomics has been promoted to accelerate breeding of orphan crops, but smallholder farmers in developing nations have seen little benefit so far. To address this gap, we built a global pangenomic b...

Excited to see our pangenomic breeding network preprint out www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Developing future resilience from signatures of adaptation across the sorghum pangenome https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.01.667986v1

🚨 We're looking for a #postdoc to join our team at the Center for Bioenergy Innovation at Oak Ridge National Labs, TN 🚨

Project: Advance poplar bioenergy by understanding adaptive trait/genomic variation — breeding/pop gen/bioinformatics

Apply by 18-Aug

Apply here: jobs.ornl.gov/job/Oak-Ridg...

👏👏👏

Ancient pangenomic origins of noncanonical NLR genes underlying the recent evolutionary rescue of a staple crop https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.11.648396v1

(S+) Deutschland und Donald Trump: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft wirbt um US-Spitzenforscher Ist Deutschland am Ende Nutznießer von Trumps Feldzug gegen die Wissenschaft? Die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft meldet viel mehr Bewerbungen aus den USA als früher. Präsident Patrick Cramer will dort geziel...

Patrick Cramer, president of the German Max-Planck Society, tries to recruit top US scientists for his institution after anti-science campaign of new administration.

www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft...