Today an international student said that she saw my "any person/any study/from any country" banner as she walked around campus on her 1st day in Ithaca. She said she felt relieved & welcomed, in an era when US has deserved reputation for being anything but welcoming. The banner stays. 2/2

Time for this again apparently

“Between January 2025 and February 2026, STEM and health employees at science-focused agencies saw nearly 15,000 jobs cut. The rate outpaced cuts among other federal workers.” OPM data - Figure from Wash Post article 19 April. (Where US science has been hit hardest.) NSF at -42%!

I don't know who needs to read this, but you can simply say "use." You don't need "utilize." You really don't. (Yes I know they have slightly different meanings, please resist the urge to "well actually").

They can pose a threat to human health — yeast infections are but one example. Scientists say not enough attention is paid to their ability to develop resistance to medications that treat them.

That time of year again! If you'd like an example of job apps in academia or industry, here's a good resource. If you got a job in industry or academia in the last few years, please consider adding yours! github.com/RILAB/statem...

I’m looking for an automated way to read others’s scientific data without giving credit or acknowledgement, and also claim full credit for insights from it. And I want it to have a fitting name OAI: say no more

LLMs are very powerful tools in computational biology, if you're willing to take your time, use them to check and stress test your work, and learn. But very very foolish tools if you use them just to take shortcuts and move faster than you ought to.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds over 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 institutions across all 50 U.S. states, supporting roughly 390,863 jobs and driving $94 billion in economic activity. I am one of them and am thankful to all who pay the taxes that support this enterprise 🧪

Polishing off the eugenics lecture for class soon. Even though it gets more intimidating to teach this each year, I always have students say thank you that I cover it. And given North Carolina's history with eugenics in this country, it is a necessary part of learning Genetics. 🧬

There is a new volume in The Fungi Sessions!! I loved the first album by Hannah Read that she performed at Fungal Genetics two years ago. So excited for a part 2 and there are microscope videos of hyphae accompanying the songs in spotify 😍. 🍄🎶 open.spotify.com/album/5uGh16...

I had a list of small things to get done today. And I did them.

There is a new volume in The Fungi Sessions!! I loved the first album by Hannah Read that she performed at Fungal Genetics two years ago. So excited for a part 2 and there are microscope videos of hyphae accompanying the songs in spotify 😍. 🍄🎶 open.spotify.com/album/5uGh16...

Where's the push back? Trump orders the dismantling *without authority*

Update: I am definitely hiring 2 PhD students; preference to those who can start spring 2027, but reach out if you’re looking to start in Fall 27. Want to start earlier? Reach out and we can talk about technician positions starting as early as this summer.

2) Being apolitical IS political. Staying out of politics doesn’t keep you “above the fray” but instead endorses the status quo. (Which right now, is bad for both science and democracy.)

There are two kinds of academic. Ones that apply their most severe skepticism to their own work and opinions and ones that apply their most severe skepticism to others.

“We’ve lost out on the ability to continue to improve this work to make it more effective, and to explore how to apply it to other areas…There are a lot of different ways that genetics has been used to justify prejudice and…that human-made social categories interface with biological categories“🧪

How do I work through this unprecedented time I mutter to myself for the 20th time this year.

📉 FY2026 is worse. NIH has made 10,195 awards so far. NSF has made 613. Six hundred thirteen. Congress appropriated the money. The agencies are not spending it. Grant freezes. NOFO collapse. Staff RIFs. Review cancellations. You can win the budget fight and still lose the funding war.

What will happen to the 82 USFS experimental forests around the country? Many sites have decades-long experiments that are tracking how forests are changed by timber harvesting practices and climate change. As I say here, “you can't just pick up an experimental forest site and move it to SLC.”

Giving folks a sense of what the cuts to NSF funding in the 2027 President's Budget Request actually looks like. Note the significant cuts across domains--even to research security! STEM and NCSES aren't captured for prior years, so they appear to be cuts, even though they are not.

Grad students & postdocs: how is funding uncertainty affecting you right now? SSE's GSAC is collecting anonymous input to inform advocacy and conversations at Evolution. Share your perspective by May 1, 2026 and pls RT!

Matthew A. Tancos, Jami L. Thomas, and Sydney McCauslin present the first documentation of a novel pathogenic #Alternaria species identified from the introduced range of the invasive weed garlic mustard: https://doi.org/10.1094/PDIS-03-25-0653-SC

Also want to remind everyone that North Carolina hasn’t passed a budget in 260 days.

The latest episode of #Plantopia is live! Host Matt Kasson talks with Madeline Wade (Brumidi Group) about how advocacy really works in D.C.—from advancing policy priorities to navigating Capitol Hill and the growing role of social media in politics. 🎧 https://www.plantopiapodcast.org/70

Apply to be an editor at an ASM Journal! Open call for editors at mBio, mSphere, mSystems, and Microbiology Spectrum. This is a very fulfilling way to share your expertise and give back to our society journals. @asm.org journals.asm.org/asm-call-for...

You know what all teams in the men's Final Four (and both women's teams in so far) have in common? HERBARIA. UConn is threatening to cut the staff of our nat history collections (plus many other awful budget cuts). If only we cared as much about biodiversity as we do about buzzer beaters!

While the situation is grim at NIH, it's closer to catastrophic at NSF. They're just not able to move any money out the door. It appears OMB has them on lockdown. www.science.org/content/arti....

AI can't pay my grad students or postdocs. AI can't do our experiments, collect really any of our data, make our lab reagents, fix our broken machines as they age. I'm just so, so tired of this.

anyway if you write bioinformatics software and include in your documentation any examples of the input and output file formats, I will buy you a beer if we ever run into each other IRL

I guess the fun about teaching genetics is that each office hour question is like "I need help with the squash problem. The hedgehog one, I understood." And they all hate the goat problem. 🐐

Since 10/1/25 and as of 3/25/26: 219 standard, non-collab, new awards (inc. EAGER, RAPID, MRI, and other standard grants) 1 RET and 7 REU awards 70 CAREER 19 travel 76 conference 153 new collaborative awards (for ~100 projects) 120 continuing awards 3 cooperative agreements = 668 awards

Now out! We show that TEs can be horizontally transferred between fungal species via Starships. Once transferred, these TEs can become active, changing the genome organization and affecting the lifestyle of the recipient fungus. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @oggenfussursula.bsky.social #TEsky

Me to everyone: Give yourself some grace! Cut yourself some slack! You're doing great, the world is a lot. Me to myself: How could you possibly screw up this tiny and insignificant thing? GARBAGE. You probably should be demoted.

Everything feels bad and it is really hard to focus on science and being a positive force for students right now, just putting that out there #NewPI

A new chapter for open science 🧬 Plasmidsaurus is excited to announce a four-year strategic partnership with @addgene.bsky.social Open science runs on verified materials. Learn more: plasmidsaurus.com/news/a-new-c...

Just in time for IBWS2026, Nathalie Aoun pre-printed her study "Evolutionary and functional genomics reveal that #Ralstonia wilt pathogens actively deploy antimicrobial warfare while leveraging physiological adaptations during plant infection" Multi-strain TnSeq! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Some reflections on #Fungal26 This was a great meeting as always but set against some turbulent times of course, which meant many regular attendees were not present. This thread is mainly for them. However, the proportion of first-time attendees was very high and very international. #Fungal26 1/15

Flavia Rogerio discusses what the genome of Bipolaris can tell us about it's transition from grass🌾 pathogen to hemp pathogen #fungal26

Morning #fungal26 and giving and getting some morel support with Greg Bonito

Benjamin Wolfe @benwolfe.bsky.social celebrates the discovery of the interaction between Penicillium 🍄 and bacteria 🦠 But how do these fungal-bacterial interactions occur in complex real communities... Like cheese 🧀!? Or cheese gone awry! #fungal26

Hi folks, there is a high likelihood I will be recruiting 1-2 PhD students to start in Spring 2027. Trying to get the word out early; please share broadly with your networks and encourage your students to reach out early. Info can be found on my webpage. fuesslab.wp.txstate.edu/opportunities/

I just had that conversation earlier this week. The college dean is deciding if they will (dis)continue the bioinformatics training program for grad students. An argument for discontinuation is that students will use GenAI to help them code, so they don’t need to learn bioinformatics.

Our Developing & Validating Seed Health Assays course is designed for professionals working across the seed health landscape. Researchers • Industry professionals • Regulatory specialists • Editors and reviewers Start learning today: https://bit.ly/3ZDIVAS #seedassay

Powerful opening by Aleeza Gerstein to Javier San Juan Galan’s work calling the scientific community to think about how we can include peers who are unable to attend meetings due to visa issues. 🌐🫶 Also - really fascinating work on the variation within clinical populations of C. albicans! #fungal26

This drives me nuts. It matters what species you work on.

When I started my last project in the lab, I had an idea to collect all my qPCR plates to see how many I ran. This photo is the outcome of that idea (it's 31 plates for those counting)

@lablabella.bsky.social shares how we can utilize machine learning to understand patterns of codon usage bias across phenotypes in Saccharomycotina. #fungal26

I will be presenting my poster on endohyphal bacteria and key genes in their symbiosis, today’s session (7:00-10:30pm) at #fungal26 !