Been away from BlueSky for a bit but just received tenure! Big thank you to my many many mentors and colleagues. And, of course, my family. Truly a team effort. Also, this video took like six tries to get right 🫠

How was the wheel invented? I discussed this in my first ever article for @us.theconversation.com Check it out. theconversation.com/how-was-the-...

I have a thousand positive memories of Greg. At the bar, playing music, talking science. RIP and thank you for everything

How moss makes a spiral of leaves through a rotating asymmetric division of the apical cell meristem--our paper is out @currentbiology.bsky.social today! @soestrauss.bsky.social Richard Smith, Joe Cammarata www.cell.com/current-biol...

This was a fun project for which Mattie @mschwall95.bsky.social visited our lab to try root live imaging. Of course the roots wouldn't grow during the week she was here until the last day, but she got it to work when she got back. Cool results.

Thanks for the invitation, Sunil! Very nice to be back. Also, it was 79 degrees in Riverside and Philly was like 0 degrees, so….yeah😂

Thanks Carolyn! Very nice to be back in my old stomping grounds 😄

Excited to share our latest review on hydrosignaling: moisture-dependent molecular pathways that help plants grow towards water. Insightful review of the literature and discussion of moisture sensing mechanisms by Will Dwyer and @hhtormar.bsky.social. Enjoy! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Please stop saying the bill allows "no more multi-year funding" - or at least be clear the 'more' is in reference to disastrous FY25 levels. The bill allows 39% MYF, same as in FY25, which contributed substantially to a 24% drop in new research. The bill has some wins. MYF is not one of them.

Given the described activators of cambium growth, we reasoned repressors were needed to balance the system. Here they are! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Discovery: Xing, Jingyi, Emma, Riikka, Anne-Maarit, Julia, Qing, Hanan, Raluca, Joanna, Yuqi, Wiki #plantscience #plantdev

It was good to catch up on my reading for this dispatch in Current Biology. Sjoerd Woudenberg in the Weijers lab, Wallner et al. In the Dolan lab and Flores Sandoval et al. In the Bowman lab have done a great job! Evolution and development: What makes a merry stem?: www.cell.com/current-biol...

Does the noncoding genome actually carry more genetic information than coding seqs? Motivated by this question we mutated every bp in the 10kb MYC locus. Results are even more exciting: Decoding the MYC locus reveals a druggable ultraconserved RNA element www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Absolutely delighted that our paper on epigenetic dynamics during plant aging is out today in Science! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

XTH genes impact growth habit determination of twining common bean vine revealed by brassinosteroid treatment Hunt et al. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/FVDTFB...

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/JAIVZX... Excited to share my latest work in @newphyt.bsky.social. Here, we used TurboID proximity labeling with CLAVATA receptors FEA3 and BAM1D in maize meristems to better understand the signaling pathways important for meristem regulation. #PlantScience

Thanks Vincent E. Cerbantez-Bueno for a great conversation. @naascarabidopsis.bsky.social www.arabidopsiscommunity.org/news-events/...

Congrats to my colleague Doris Wagner and her excellent team! Special shout to Tian Huang for his outstanding work

Out First Release in @science.org this week: A feedback loop allows two shoot stem cell populations to respond differently to environmental conditions: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #plantscience

A developmental timer coordinates organism-wide microRNA transcription https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.21.700890v1

This is a very special paper for me. I had the idea of combining transcription factor binding with chromatin in 2016/8. It took some time, but thanks to Fred and Vikas, we can finally share the story in @plos.org Genetics looking at chromatin states in Arabidopsis and Marchantia. #PlantScience

Functional and developmental differences between adaxial and abaxial #stomata in amphistomatous #leaves A #ResearchReview by @hanna-horak.bsky.social 👇 📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #LatestIssue

If we continue to compromise with people whose stated goal is to destroy NIH, then we will not be successful in saving it.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Paper is here and preview is below. This is case where the long back and forth between authors and reviewers is illuminating and touches on the historical literature elifesciences.org/articles/105...

Someone got Cas9-Turbo to work. It's like basically Y1H but with proteomics. It however requires transgenic plant expressing Cas9-Turbo and gRNAs, which is still cumbersome for many plants that are not Arabidopsis. #PlantSciences

Happy to share the pre-print on GEMMIFER, a novel ERF required for the initiation of gemma in Marchantia. One of the coolest phenotypes that I have ever seen. Congratulations to Yuki and Go, who led this research. #PlantScience @biorxiv-plants.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

NSF needs to hear from you. Among other points, I suggested: keep politics out of science; stop using the threat of cancelling scientific grants to try to control universities; increase NSF funding for fundamental research. Pls send around. Deadline is January 27. Thanks www.nsf.gov/od/updates/n...

We should only fund research that will have huge impact and not fund research that won't. Fortunately, these are easy to distinguish. - Populists anytime they look at government research funding

💀😂

In the latest on Unprofessoring, I argue that I--and we--need ways to talk about the sensations of thinking and learning! unprofessoring.substack.com/p/towards-a-...

Can we design mutations that bias proteins towards desired conformational states? Today in @science.org, we introduce Conformational Biasing (CB), a simple and scalable computational method that uses contrastive scoring by inverse folding models to identify conformation-biasing mutations.

It's finally out!... Using single-cell and spatial transcriptome data, and data imputation, we created BARVISTA, a website able to perform almost genome-wide information on gene expression profiles at single-cell resolution in barley spikes! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧵 Just out in Cell after more than 10 years in the making! 🎓 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... Plants and animals evolve radically different body plans. Do they also operate under fundamentally different molecular evolutionary constraints during organ formation? @cellpress.bsky.social

This is why we always have to push back. This is why we don't take breadcrumbs: either we all make it, or no deal. No complacency, only sense of duty and community 🧪

The U.S. NSF has announced changes to its highly regarded system of reviewing the some 50,000 grant proposals received each year. The move has created uncertainty and anxiety across the U.S. scientific community. Here are five things to know about the changes. ⬇️ https://scim.ag/4aCoSZQ

New episode of #No_Time_To_Read_podcast! 🎙️ I had a wonderful discussion with @ajeetchaudhary.bsky.social Ajeet about his recent Molecular Plant paper. His work made it to the cover as well. Podcast: tinyurl.com/3ppeys36 Article: www.cell.com/molecular-pl...

Dr. No: how to tell your PI to chill out cuz you just passed candidacy and you totally got this

Post tenure, my research will be exclusively on zany shit like this ☺️

“In this study, we identified independent loss-of-function mutations in a WUSCHEL-LIKE HOMEOBOX transcription factor, WOX1, as the genetic basis of the prickleless S locus in both blackberry and red raspberry”

(1/3) Any problem we see around us, somewhere some organism is smart enough to solve this problem already Here is a great example from liquid-stabilizing mechanisms of pitcher plants; Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

TMO5 orchestrates organ patterning in plant shoots This Research Highlight showcases work by Abdul Kareem, Carolyn Ohno and Marcus Heisler (@heisler-lab.bsky.social): journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Hey all, I reached out to the PO of my NIGMS MIRA to ask if the gov't shut down, and rescheduling of study sections, might allow for some accommodation to the standard rule that PIs cannot resubmit a MIRA while their MIRA (or other RPG) is under review (waiting in scores or summary statements) 🧪

Live thread of the NSF biology virtual office hour: 🧵

Fusion genes as emerging regulators of plant development and adaptation Hamid et al. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

"cis-regulatory evolution involves turnover of thousands of individual binding site instances while largely preserving transcription factors’ binding preferences." From: academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

Bryophyte-friendly tenure-track position in the UBC Botany department! Deadline on the 19th botany.ubc.ca/job-postings...

A very nice and skillful work by Agata Burian and colleagues characterizing the development of vascular strands around the Arabidopsis shoot apex: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

So structural biology is not dead after all 😋 Not a big surprise The title of this article is exactly in line with what I think. Same applies to LLMs for scientific writing.

@pravrutharaman.bsky.social got super intrigued about EZHIP/CATACOMB, previously identified as a histone H3K27M mimic of PRC2. You can read about her efforts here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We hope these analyses will help spur more analyses in this very cool gene! 1/