In our intro article, we review recent contributions on the ecology & evolution of wild plant pathogens 🌱🦠🌳 and introduce the articles in this theme issue, emphasizing their relevance to agriculture 🌽🌾🧑‍🌾 and the broader field of disease ecology 🦇🦌🦋🤒👩‍⚕️: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Really cool to see this issue on Wild Plant Pathosystems Philosophical Transactions B with my picture online. royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3... Articles on topics from community ecology, to genomics. Co-edited with @fletcher-h.bsky.social @ebruns.bsky.social and Rachel Penzcykoswki.

Another #PlantScience job opening here at @kwsgroup.bsky.social! We are looking for a #Phytopathology Scientist at our station in Murcia, Spain. As I have already written in one of last posts: Our vegetable division is expanding & it's a good time to get on board! #PlantSciJobs #PlantScienceJobs

Die Prioritäten dieser Bundesregierung: ca. 1.000–1.500 Mio. € jährlich für die Pendlerpauschale ca. 660 Mio. € jährlich für das Dieselprivileg ca. 100 Mio. € jährlich für das Dienstwagenprivileg 250–350 Mio. € sollen bei Unis gekürzt werden. Das ist kein Sparzwang. Das sind falsche Prioritäten.

We are looking for a sugar beet breeder here at @kwsgroup.bsky.social to work on insect/pest resistance traits. This is a full-time, permanent position here in Einbeck (remote work possible) You will most likely get a chance to work with me on #PlantImmunity! #PlantScienceJobs #plantscijobs

Game over, phylogeneticists! New DNA foundation model "Carbon" reconstructs the tree of life. 🙃 huggingface.co/spaces/Huggi...

Kiel University can renew its "KiTE" postdoc fellowship program. If you are interested in developing a postdoc project and applying for this fellowship to join my group, please get in touch! www.uni-kiel.de/en/universit...

Your time will come. 🗃️🎓

Thrilled to see this finally out!! Our new work suggests #Starships helped #Colletotrichum acquire the genes needed to infect lupin. A glimpse into how fungal pathogens emerge through horizontal transfer and genome reshaping. biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #Fungi #Genomics #Pathogenicity #evolution

The preliminary programme of International Conference of our German Society for #PlantSci, the Botanik-Tagung, is online botanik-tagung.de/programme.html 📆 6-10 September 2026 📍Bochum, Germany Makes it easier to plan your participation. Register today! botanik-tagung.de/registration...

A highly recommended read for all plant people :)

“the very prospect of challenging a luminary in the field serves as a deterrent for entry by outsiders. Indeed, most of the entry we see occurs in those fields that lost a star who was especially accomplished.” pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

PhD or Postdoc from the US and interested in expanding experience with quantitative disease resistance? The German State Ministry of Research now offers "hop-on" fellowships. These can add extra expertise to some ongoing projects, by supporting fellowships for up to 3 years. Interested? DM!

Agri-food coalition: Don’t label precision-bred crops like GMOs🚨🌾 31 EU orgs say swift NGT adoption = climate-ready farms + food security. Extra rules for Category 1 NGTs would hurt competitiveness. Other countries already moved. EU can’t wait. #plantscience www.isaaa.org/kc/cropbiote...

Don’t reach for ChatGPT Images or Nano Banana as your first option when creating scientific images There are multiple free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations. #plantscience @stephenturner.us blog.stephenturner.us/p/free-open-...

PhD or Postdoc from the US and interested in expanding experience with quantitative disease resistance? The German State Ministry of Research now offers "hop-on" fellowships. These can add extra expertise to some ongoing projects, by supporting fellowships for up to 3 years. Interested? DM!

Hoheneder F, Steidele CE, Gigl M, Dawid C, Hückelhoven R ( 2026) Transcriptome and hormone regulations shape drought stress-dependent Fusarium Head Blight susceptibility in different barley genotypes. PC&E 70566 doi.org/10.1111/pce....

Someone in the Arabidopsis/clock community seems to deeply dislike my work on research culture. Just want to say: whoever you are, please write & debate me directly instead of cowering behind anonymous grant reviews that threaten my students’ work. (2nd year in a row)

Thinking about this more, the 2 and 3 year bans are real career killers… who’d hire a tenure track candidate, or an (associate) professor that has one of those hanging around their necks?

We are hiring! We’re excited to recruit a postdoc to our lab at UC Davis to work on plant immune engineering and single-cell analyses of plant pathogen interactions. Apply by June 1. Please repost. www.coakerlab.org/postdoctoral...

In case you want to see the different views on the same question. From the host's perspective www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... From the pathogen's perspective www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... From the interactive perspective www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Three Botrytis/Eudicot papers accepted. A reevaluation point on a question about generalism started with @katherinedenby.bsky.social 's sabbatical 24 years ago. Continued by a broad team of undergrads to post-docs including @annajomu.bsky.social @ccaseys.bsky.social and more not on bsky.

And another kind of field season also started! Collecting Alternaria from cultivated tomato and other crops in Peru to compare with our collection of Alternaria from wild crop relatives. 😁

Field season is starting!

Resequencing hundreds or thousands of individuals from the same species has become routine... but processing all those genomes efficiently? Still a headache! Here's my solution that used to be lab-internal but that I am happy to share: crolllab.github.io/genomepanel_...

Krankenkassen jammern über Milliardenlöcher – aber zahlen weiter für Homöopathie ohne Wirkungsnachweis. Wilde Idee: Vielleicht fangen wir mit dem Sparen einfach da an, wo es medizinisch exakt nichts bringt?!

Our new experimental evolution study across 30+ locations using the plant Arabidopsis thaliana —— we direct "see" adaptation and extinction to different climates at the genetic as it happens! Read it in Science dx.doi.org/10.1126/scie... @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social @hhmi-science.bsky.social

Great to see this out! It was really nice to be part of this from setting up the field near Munich and on the Alps all the way to final publication.

#GiveGenesAChance in UK 🌾 www.rothamsted.ac.uk/news/rothams...

For our project in the context of the Excellence Cluster GreenRobust @greenrobust.de we look for 2 PhD students and 1 postdoc in the area of plant molecular and evolutionary ecology. Deadline: 15 April Reposts are welcome #plantjobs #plantscijobs

Scientists: In the hypothetical situation that you were invited to present a proposal for a large ECR grant and you would have to present yourself, your career, ánd proposal in 15 minutes; would you or would you not include 'academic metrics,' and why? I lean to no, but am not sure what's common.

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

What if a super successful fungal plant pathogen has little evidence of structural variation, horizontal gene transfer or their ilk? It’s just a nice Mendelian meiosis and inheritance, etc. does that make it the odd one?

Good. We need more. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/o...

China increases science funding again (by at least 7-% over the next 5 years) as it pledges billion-dollar spending boost for science 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Zehn von zehn Alle noch im Wettbewerb befindlichen Exzellenzuniversitäten bestehen die Evaluation. Was die Entscheidung der Exzellenzkommission über Selektivität, Strukturpolitik und die Zukunft des Wettbewerbs verrät. Im Wiarda-Blog: www.jmwiarda.de/blog/2026/03...

Hey fellow scientists, I'm just letting you know that if you're promoting something with some junky AI image, I'm not gonna click. You've got a workshop, a conference, a new paper? Just not gonna bother. You want a bespoke image? Hire an illustrator.

New Preprint: Alternaria atra from distinct ecological roles share functional genomic repertoires www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A while ago we sequenced A atra collected as pathogen from wild tomato. We compared this with new genomes of strains that grew endophytic in Tillandsia.

That's a good name for software: MKado: a toolkit for McDonald-Kreitman tests of natural selection www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Please share with potentially interested colleagues :) #Bioinformatics #Genomics #EvolutionaryBiology

🌾 We have an open postdoc position in Plant Genomics in our group at HHU Düsseldorf! If you enjoy computational biology, asking big questions, and the satisfaction of code working on the first try, check out schneebergerlab.org/career/ Apply by Mar. 31 | 3-year postdoc | German skills required

Hey everyone joining us @ #MBP2026 in mid March, we just released the conference program. Please check it out here: syncandshare.lrz.de/dl/fiPnsPinb... we are super excited to see you all soon and to talk 🌱🔬🥼 over 🍻all night long!

After a long drive into Central Java, we set up the mobile lab in the plantation office

We have a new insect parameter set for unmasked genomes and a new fungal parameter set for unmasked genomes. Both deliver accuracy superior to previous models for insects and fungi. #genomeannotation #geneprediction github.com/Gaius-August...

<steps to microphone> <taps microphone> Most microbes do not coevolve with *hosts* even when found associated with hosts

Wondering why there was so much noise coming from the department kitchen... Turns out both the uni HPCs aredown, so it's break time... 🙈

PhD opening Join a collaborative, interdisciplinary project the Excellence Cluster Future Forests @uni-freiburg.de, working on CRISPR/Cas in poplar to understand how trees cope with climate stress. Apply here: uni-freiburg.de/en/job/00004... @dompsfr.bsky.social @biologyunifreiburg.bsky.social

Professorship Molecular Botany. Bremen, Germany. #plantscijobs #plantscijob www.academics.de/jobs/profess...

Need a genome sequence of your favourite plant? We laid out instructions for a complete workflow based on ONT sequencing: "Cookbook for plant genome sequences" doi.org/10.1186/s128... #Genomics #LongReads #PlantSciences #Bioinformatics @puckerlab.bsky.social @unibonn.bsky.social

Applications for our MSc programme Agrigenomics are now open! Are you interested in learning about genomics methods (molecular and computational) in the context of agricultural sciences (either on crops or animals), consider applying! www.uni-kiel.de/en/aef/study...