Lovely C&EN @cenmag.bsky.social story on the history and personal impact of the cancer drug Taxol. After spending recent years deciphering how yew trees, our source for Taxol, synthesize this lifesaving drug, it’s so nice to see it in the larger context #secmet #medsky Plants are amazing chemists.

Join the Reck-Peterson lab in NYC as a HHMI Research Technician! This role will support our new work on the cell biology of secondary metabolite production in filamentous fungi. Apply here: hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

Do you know what happens when you touch a carnivorous sundew plant? If the touch is strong and large enough, a cytosolic calcium wave will spread from the site of touch throughout the whole plant, but if you only touch one tentacle (see post below), the calcium wave will be local and less intense.

Out in @science.org The crazy sequence of events from planting maize in dense fields. Density-dependent linalool release triggers release of compounds into the soil affecting microbes and plants. Article: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Perspective: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #PlantScience

A truly enabling new approach by @taralowensohn.bsky.social Will Cody and @sattelylab.bsky.social to probe plant genetics at scale. Single-gene-per-cell delivery coupled to an effective transcriptional selection system www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

@cmcclune.bsky.social will be at the GRC for Single-Cell Approaches in Plant Biology! Be on the lookout for his talk on Wednesday (8/13) at 9.10 am. Talk will be about some new approaches and discoveries recently published in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41... #grc #singlecell #plantbiology

Elucidating #plant #Biosynthetic pathways: @jjjvanderhooft.bsky.social @marnixmedema.bsky.social &co develop #MEANtools, an unsupervised computational workflow that integrates #MultiOmics data to predict #metabolic pathways by linking transcripts to metabolites @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4odL94g

#plants #trees #history #botany #art 🌲 Taxus baccata - English Yew, Common Yew Folk lore has it that the English used Churchyard Yew longbows - not true. Spanish Yew was straighter and better quality. (Confirmed by an Olympian archer I knew.) Bows and trees: www.longbow-archers.com/longbow.html

Scientists, please take a moment to comment on these plans to limit animal testing in drug regulation and biomedical research. Use whatever experience you have to make your comments specific to you. The law requires regulators take these comments into account, so it might help. Mine is attached.

I just learned these this elephant-trunked-shaped cells, known as ciliate, put their sexy DNA into a special pocket (called a generative nucleus), and the rest of their DNA in a normal get-shit-done nucleus. It has functional specialization nuclei. Respectfully: holy shit 🧵🧪

I didn’t know this but apparently paclitaxel is still derived from the yew tree!? I had just assumed we had found a way to synthesize it. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Discovery of FoTO1 and Taxol genes enables biosynthesis of baccatin III | Nature

Thank you Carolyn Bertozzi @carolynbertozzi.bskyverified.social for highlighting our Taxol work!

Check out this amazing new work from @sattelylab.bsky.social along with collaborator and @stanford-chemh.bsky.social Institute Scholar @pollyfordyce.bsky.social ! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A friend of my compared gutting of federal agencies to a wrecking a car: if you remove 30% of the parts of the car, it does not go 30% slower. It stops working.

A million shades of green: understanding and harnessing plant metabolic diversity Rocky Payet, Anne Osbourn et al presents a step-by-step guide to starting a project that characterises plant secondary metabolites www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

Further advanced in synbio systems for expression of plant rubiscos in E. coli, exploring importance of Raf1 variants: academic.oup.com/jxb/article-... and accompanying perspective via @jxbotany.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...

It makes sense that skin microbes would have an intimate relationship with our immune cells. But engineering these bugs into topical vaccines still feels like sci-fi. Congrats @djenetbousbaine.bsky.social on the well deserved prize

Check out this prize-winning essay by postdoc @djenetbousbaine.bsky.social on her work with @mfgrp.bsky.social @stanford-chemh.bsky.social 👏

How plants sense injury in their barrier tissue, periderm? Painstakingly detailed and amazing work by post doc Hiroyuki Iida shows that wounding is sensed by the diffusion of two gases: ethylene and oxygen. @treebiocoe.bsky.social‬ @erc.europa.eu‬ 1/x 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Pithy coverage by @plantaeofficial.bsky.social of our recent Taxol work #chemsky #medsky

Plant Science Research Weekly -- Elucidation and recreation of the biosynthetic pathway for taxol (Nature) @cmcclune.bsky.social‬ (Summary by Mary Williams @PlantTeaching.bsky.social) buff.ly/miccEK3 #PlantaePSRW

How 🆒 is this?!? www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

🔓Don't miss this #OpenAccess Highlight in our MS Metabolomics themed collection by Brett C. Covington & Mohammad R. Seyedsayamdost at Princeton University looking at the evolution of high-throughput mass spectrometry in screening for cryptic natural products #natprod

Great article in today’s Stanford Report on our recent work deciphering how yew trees produce Taxol @sattelylab.bsky.social news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

Next preprint out from my work @oconnorlab.bsky.social @mpi-ce.bsky.social : the discovery or iridoid cyclase in asterids! Thread below. #PlantScience #natprod www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Exciting new work from Sattely lab with collaborator @pollyfordyce.bsky.social and coworkers @stanford-chemh.bsky.social, solving they biosynthesis of taxol! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to see this great coverage in C&EN of our work on how yew trees synthesize the chemotherapy Taxol #medsky 🧪

Nature research paper: Discovery of FoTO1 and Taxol genes enables biosynthesis of baccatin III https://go.nature.com/44eE3Va

A new transcriptomics method has identified eight enzymes enabling efficient biosynthesis of the Taxol precursor baccatin III in tobacco, supporting more sustainable cancer drug production. doi.org/g9p6qk

NIH funding supporting the HMMER and Infernal software projects has been terminated. NIH states that our work, as well as all other federally funded research at Harvard, is of no benefit to the US.

Thank you to @frankelab.bsky.social for his eloquent overview in Nature news on our Taxol paper. He deftly articulates the history of this longstanding biochemistry challenge. rdcu.be/eqwOy

Today in Nature we report a systematic strategy to activate & identify gene sets in plants. We identify 8 new genes from the yew tree's Taxol biosynthetic pathway, enabling us to engineer tobacco with 17- & 20-gene pathways to Taxol precursors baccatin III & deBz-deoxy-Taxol #SingleCell #secmet 🧬🧪🌾

New preprint out from the @oconnorlab.bsky.social department led by Moonyoung Kang, Anh Vu and Lorenzo Caputi. Metabolomics and RNA-seq on the same single cell! Or as we call it here in the lab: "the split-cell method"

I’m told this is a real letter. It basically says, “We’ll destroy Columbia unless you destroy it first.”

Excited to share that TRACeR stories are out🙌

Check out our last pub. from @mfgrp.bsky.social al lab! We discovered that skin commensal microbes induce systemic and local B cell responses upon colonization and took advantage of this knowledge to create topical vaccines using engineered skin microbes. Please read the thread for details.

discovery that a skin microbe can, without inflammation, induce a systemic B-cell response... and then engineering that microbe into a potent vaccine platform that can be applied as a topical cream. amazing work from @djenetbousbaine.bsky.social and @mfgrp.bsky.social! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

this looks very interesting. curious how well that could work in other plant species. #PlantScience

I made a Plant Natural Product Starter pack! Covering plant natural product discovery, structure elucidation, biosynthesis, engineering, regulation, and whatnot. I am missing many, so please nominate/self-nominate! #PlantScience go.bsky.app/9a7jtxR

Repurposing endogenous type I-E CRISPR-Cas systems for natural product discovery in Streptomyces www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"The only border that matters" (Nicole Stott)

Catharanthus (Madagascar periwinkle) petals is perfect for transient expression. I never get tired of these glowing petals. Infiltrate agrobacterium at 0.4 OD to petals, and then wait 2 days before checking them with a flashlight or fluorescent microscope. #PlantScience

Our Taxol pathway preprint! We developed a systematic strategy to activate and identify gene sets in plants. Used it to identify 8 genes in the Taxol pathway, enabling a 20-gene biosynthesis of a Taxol precursor. Biggest surprise: a new protein that helps our oxidases produce the correct product