So wild. Ein Bundesministerium, das seine Position auf den tendenziösen Umfragen von NGO und wirtschaftlich involvierten Labelbetreibern aufbaut 🫣 Man stelle sich ein solches Vorgehen bei anderen neuen Technologien vor, z.B. bei Impfstoffen oder regenerativen Energien. Ist doch crazy

With help of international colleagues at @jgi.doe.gov, @oregonstate.edu, and @stockholm-uni.bsky.social, we are relasing new parameters for Tiberius. Thx to Lars Gabriel, @tomasbruna.bsky.social, Samuel Talbot, @chriswheat.bsky.social, @masta.bsky.social - and many others. github.com/Gaius-August...

The university updated my institute's website. It looks great. www.phytopathology.uni-kiel.de I am just a bit disappointed that the stock image they used contains a hydroxyl group instead of a cyclic ring... 😅

Structural basis for heat tolerance in plant NLR immune receptors. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.17.694812v1

Just decline the peer review invitation. What are you people even doing?

Fabbri et al. studied the Apennine brown bear population, which has coexisted with humans in Central Italy for millennia, showing these bears have reduced genetic diversity and selective signatures at genes associated with reduced aggressiveness. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf292 #evobio #molbio

New Preprint! As part of a MSc thesis we went to Serbia (support @daadworldwide.bsky.social) to collect small-spored Alternaria from potato and tomato and compare their populations and virulence properties with those from Germany and Poland! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🌱 2x David Sainsbury Career Development Fellowships at @slcuplants.bsky.social Unique opportunity for early-career researchers to launch their own independent research programme in quantitative plant development, with generous support & world-class facilities. www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/david-s...

New Preprint! As part of a MSc thesis we went to Serbia (support @daadworldwide.bsky.social) to collect small-spored Alternaria from potato and tomato and compare their populations and virulence properties with those from Germany and Poland! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

👏 Congratulations, Dr. Farooq Ahmad​! The postdoctoral researcher from the Institute of Phytopathology receives extensive #BMFTR funding to investigate forest adaptation strategies to climate change using the concept of assisted tree migration. #KielLifeScience #KielPlantCenter #KiTE #BioKreativ

Comment in @nature.com: "Food will be more affordable — if we double funds for agriculture research now" www.nature.com/articles/d41... A global drop in public and private investment in agricultural science in the past four decades is partly to blame for high food prices, an analysis reveals.

More great news! Farooq Ahmad has received funding to establish a junior research group in my department @uni-kiel.de He will focus on assisted tree migration to combat forest pathogens in a changing climate. www.uni-kiel.de/en/details/n... He will be looking for PhD students soon!

Now officially published in Current Biology 🥳🥳 @mfseidl.bsky.social @binfutrecht.bsky.social www.cell.com/current-biol...

Literally anything else more effective than AI for learning www.cambridge.org/news-and-ins...

Two really cool PhD positions available with Christina Barragan on Plant Pathogen evolution! Our dept. just moved to a brand new building with great facilities and we have an absolutely amazing team!

The EU will #GiveGenesAChance! 🇪🇺💚 www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/pres... #Trilogue #NGTs

Europa bekennt sich zur Wissenschaft! 💚 Natürlich sind noch nicht alle auf dem gleichen Stand. Deshalb stehen wir bei @oekoprog.bsky.social natürlich für alle Fragen bereit! 😌 #GiveGenesAChance www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/v...

2025 AG @rstam.bsky.social lab retreat success! Great science and company, seaside views, and a music quiz that revealed way too much about our teenage time... 😅🕺

AI model Helixer predicts eukaryotic genes ab initio, directly from a plain text FASTA file. No RNA-seq. No protein homology. No repeats, hints, or curated evidence. Raw genome → accurate gene models. Deep learning + HMM, published in @natmethods.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Europe cannot afford to fall behind on innovation! We join 25 EU agri-food organizations urging policymakers to conclude #NGTs trilogue talks now. Science-based rules = resilient crops & global competitiveness. Act today! 🌱 euroseeds.eu/app/uploads/...

Did you ever wonder how #Solanum plants evolved quantitative disease resistance/ #QDR? I am really excited to share our recently published manuscript, where we tried to contribute to addressing this question! 🌱https://tinyurl.com/2vz23ck6

TUM Offers a professorship in Crop Production. Geat opportunity! portal.mytum.de/jobs/profess...

gggenomes: A Grammar of Graphics for Comparative Genomics thackl.github.io/gggenomes/ #Rstats

The department of biologie #usherbrooke is hiring. Faculty position open in the area of #Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology. www.usherbrooke.ca/emplois/offr...

I'm offering a PhD project together with Sarah McKim on temperature-controlled stomata formation within EASTBIO DTP www.findaphd.com/phds/project... #plantscience #plantscijobs Deadline 15 Feb. Please share/RP

Honoured that our article is now also accompanied by a commentary article. If you don't have time to read the whole paper, Ng does a great job summarizing! academic.oup.com/plcell/artic...

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's *scientific publishing*. We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?

UF researchers coauthor more papers with authors based in China than with those based in any other other country in the world. This policy would wreck US science.

Google scholar citation count has just tipped over the 2024 number so that's the start of my christmas break i don't make the rules

My team is adapting to work in Northern Germany. Besides tomato, we started a project on Quantitative Disease Resistance in Rapeseed. The field's looking good, let's catch some pathogens!

Two really cool PhD positions available with Christina Barragan on Plant Pathogen evolution! Our dept. just moved to a brand new building with great facilities and we have an absolutely amazing team!

Our new paper in Ecology Letters, led by Jan Divíšek, shows that non-invasive alien plant species that successfully establish within local plant communities tend to resemble the resident native species. In contrast, invasive alien species usually differ from native plants. doi.org/10.1111/ele....

"Hey boss, I have some stock photos here for the article that shows that longer walks beat several shorter walks. Which one do you want?" "Uh, good, just whichever one is on top" "I dunno, this one has a guy with a walker taking his pony..." "I said WHICHEVER ONE IS ON TOP."

Applications due by Dec. 1

Shout out to people routinely working in their 2nd or 3rd language. Yesterday I gave a 1-hour research seminar in French. Afterwards, my brain was pretty much done for the day. Respect to the loads of scientists who do this daily (and usually a lot more effectively than me!)

Thrilled to share our latest review on receptor kinase processing in plants! 🌱 Huge congratulations to @adithya1972.bsky.social and Anna for leading this work, and a big thank you to our fantastic collaborator Martina-Ried Lasi for making this a truly rewarding team effort!

My new Emmy Noether Group is recruiting! 🔬 Two PhD positions in plant pathogen evolution 🧬 Start: April 2026 (flexible) 📍 Dept. of Phytopathology & Plant Protection @rstam.bsky.social @uni-kiel.de ⏰ Apply by 15 Dec 2025 🔗 More info: www.uni-kiel.de/personal/de/... Do get in touch or share 😊

Postdoc position in my lab in Cologne starting early next year or latest in spring to get this exciting project started. jobportal.uni-koeln.de/ausschreibun...

"Additionally, the author stated that they have used AI tools for generating some images, including Fig. 1." Reviewers and editors could not work that out for themselves. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The main value added by the publication is ostensibly the peer review and editorial curation process. If this sort of thing is passing review, what is the journal even for? How is subscribing to this journal any better than monitoring a preprints feed? Subscribers should demand their money back.

Want good Bioinformatics resources for Phytopathogens? Plant pathology community at @bspp.bsky.social and @britmycolsoc.org.uk please take the time to complete the Phytopathogen Genomics Resources Survey:- 🔗 zurl.co/gKjC1 Your input is important for FungiDB/@veupathdb.org & Ensembl @ebi.embl.org.

Good morning, sleepyhead. You asked me to remind you that your thesis won’t write itself, no matter how long you hide under the duvet.

Eigentlich irre, wie das so eine Meldung unter vielen ist. »Ein trauriger Tag für Deutschland. Wir haben einen Kulturgut, den Dorsch in der deutschen Ostsee, verloren.« www.deutschlandfunk.de/eu-fangquote...

I guess it’s testament to the vanity of scientists that the “Nature Scientific Reports” trick worked so well on us.

Nature Communications will publish ~10K papers in 2025 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov?term=%22Natu... That's ~$70M in revenue, while many of the non-profit journals that used to occupy that slot in the journal hierarchy have seen a precipitous decline in submissions in the 15 years it's existed.

🤫Registration for #MBP2026 will start very soon. Please tell all your friends 🌱.

We finally managed to take a lab picture! The last one was almost 2 years old. I'm so grateful to work with this amazing bunch of people!

NEW: Biofuels globally emit more than the fossil fuels they replace, our latest study shows. The first-of-a-kind study looks at global biofuels production today and the potential impacts of government biofuel targets. 🧵⤵️

Professorship in plant genetics. The Botanical Institute at Kiel University is advertising a W2 professorship. Great opportunity to do plant research in the north of Germany. See: www.berufungen.uni-kiel.de/de/dateien/o...