📢 Three new #bioRxiv preprints from our team on holocentric chromosomes. Together, they connect centromere repeat evolution, karyotype dynamics, and meiotic recombination outcomes, revealing how holocentric genomes evolve and function. 🧬👇

FastGA -> ALNview; step into the centromeric matrix! github.com/thegenemyers Probably the best dot plot software on the planet...

Wonderful (and humble) essay on mentorship by Brandon Gaut, on occasion of Brandon receiving the inaugural Mentorship Award of @genetics-gsa.bsky.social. I hope this will be widely read! academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

Happy to share our new work with exciting findings, incl. different centromere organisations and all kinds of weird polyploids giving rise to the mysterious carnivorous sundews! Great word led by my postdoc Laura in collaboration with @plantgenomes.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our new preprint on somatic TE transposition in A. thaliana is out! It looks like TEs jump like crazy! Led by the amazing @heenaa02.bsky.social and with Hans-Wilhelm Nuetzmann from Exeter www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

6/ 🙏 Huge thanks to the amazing collaborators and co-authors who made this work possible! 🧑‍🔬 Basile Leduque, Leandro Quadrana, Keith Slotkin, Alexandros Bousios (@abousios.bsky.social) & Hans-wilhelm Nuetzmann

5/ 💻 Surprise package! We developed a custom pipeline, deNOVOEnrich, to profile somatic TE insertions from TEd-seq short-read data. Using split-read mapping, we pinpoint new somatic insertions at base-pair resolution 🧬🔍 Check it out: github.com/hAmbreen02/d...

4/ 🔥 Somatic insertion hotspots of the EVADE transposon are enriched at environmentally responsive genes 🌄 - including Resistance gene and biosynthetic gene clusters. Is stress guiding TE activity, or are TEs tuning stress responses? Somatic genome plasticity 🧬

3/ 🧬 Our work shows somatic TE activity in Arabidopsis is non‑random and family‑specific. Different TE families prefer distinct genomic niches - is it driven by underlying epigenetic code, or are they avoiding conflict in a shared genome ecosystem? 🤔

2/ Combining distinct experimental conditions, we traced a roadmap of expected TE movement in somatic cells 🌿, capturing ~200K new TE insertions across multiple families in the process.

1/📢News from TE diary - Somatic transposition in Arabidopsis is more explosive than we imagined! Thrilled to share our latest findings - TEs make new somatic insertions en masse, reshaping the somatic genome🧬with surprising frequency🍃 @abousios Hans-Wilhelm Nuetzmann www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1/2 Somatic TE transposition in plants is getting traction again (70 years after McClintock's discovery of "controlling elements")! A very large collection of somatic TE insertions in A. thaliana described by Ambreen et al.(www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...).

2/2 See also @movillome.bsky.social's paper from my lab on using PacBio long-read sequencing to discover somatic TE insertions with high sensitivity and specificity in an unbiased manner -- an excellent complement to powerful short-read based enrichment methods (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...)

1/7 I am very excited to announce our🌹NEW PAPER OUT IN 𝑁𝐴𝑇𝑈𝑅𝐸!🌹 𝐃𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐒𝐔𝐑𝐕𝐈𝐕𝐄: Bimodal centromeres in pentaploid dogroses shed light on their unique meiosis With the Ritz and Kovařík labs we show a potential role for centromeres on 𝘙𝘰𝘴𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘢 bizarre reproduction! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Nature research paper: Bimodal centromeres in pentaploid dogroses shed light on their unique meiosis https://go.nature.com/407PRGm

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.

💥🥳 At long last, our latest paper is out! Gag proteins of endogenous retroviruses are required for zebrafish development www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Led heroically by Sylvia Chang & @jonowells.bsky.social A study which has changed the way I think of #transposons! No less! 🧵 1/n

📢 Excited to share our work out now in @nature.com! 📢 We present the phased pan-genome of tetraploid European potato, based on 10 historical cultivars representing 85% of European potato diversity. Learn more below! 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/7

Excited to share our preprint on the molecular architecture of heterochromatin in human cells 🧬🔬w/ @jpkreysing.bsky.social, @johannesbetz.bsky.social, @marinalusic.bsky.social, Turoňová lab, @hummerlab.bsky.social @becklab.bsky.social @mpibp.bsky.social 🔗 Preprint here tinyurl.com/3a74uanv

1/ Transposable elements are often called "jumping genes" because they mobilize within genomes. 🧬 But did you know they can also jump 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 cells? 🤯 Our new study reveals how retrotransposons invade the germline directly from somatic cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A short thread 🧵👇

This Editorial by Brandon S. Gaut and Claudia A. M. Russo provides some nice insight into how #SocietyJournals work, and why it pays for Scientists to publish with #SocietyOwned Journals. 👇 A Message From the Editors-in-Chief academic.oup.com/mbe/article/... #PlantScience #SciencePublishing

🚨New paper published in @nature.com! Using pan-genetics across the Solanum genus🍅🥔🍆we reveal why gene duplications🧬are major contingencies in crop engineering. My postdoc work in the Lippman lab @CSHL, collab. with @katiejenike.bsky.social @mikeschatz.bsky.social chatz.bsky.social and many others!

Join us for the first seminar in a new series by @IntlGeneticsFed! "Biodiversity Genomics – African & European Perspectives" 📅 March 4, 2025 at 12:00 GMT 🔗 Register now: forms.office.com/r/e1MgVyfCvs

Another piece to add in the emerging golden era of centromere research. Our review of centrophilic transposons in plants @annualreviews.bsky.social with @hendersi.bsky.social and Tetsuji Kakutani. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Centrophilic Retrotransposons of Plant Genomes www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... new review @annualreviews.bsky.social from @abousios.bsky.social, Tetsuji Kakutani, and myself on my favourite type of mobile genetic element

PRESS RELEASE - Professor Uauy appointed as Director of the John Innes Centre Following an international search, we are delighted to announce that Professor @cristobaluauy.bsky.social has been appointed as the next Director of the John Innes Centre. www.jic.ac.uk/press-releas... @ukri.org

We present Rfam-based RNA structural alignments and other structure-based inputs for RNA 3D structure prediction by deep learning. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happy to share our recent work about 🥔 pangenome. With HiFi and HiC together, we explore the 31 accessions genome of clonal propagation crops. Not surprisingly, large haplotype diversity hidden on the genome. Lots of breakpoints are TEs. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/7

Postdoc jobs in the Gaut lab! Brandon isn't on here, so I can be frank: he is fantastic. I did my postdoc with him and he is not only an amazing scientist but one of my favorite humans. I would have happily stayed in his lab forever if that was feasible. recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF08999 #plantscijobs

Happy to share our Tansley insight published in @newphyt.bsky.social nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... #plantscience #chromosome #centromere #meiosis

Beautiful collaboration led by Tetsuji Kakutani and Sayuri Tsukahara on unravelling the fine changes that can make a centrophobic TE become centrophilic and vice versa! The devil is in the details for these TEs. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Natural variation modifies centromere proximal meiotic crossover frequency and segregation distortion in Arabidopsis thaliana biorxiv.org/content/10.1... new work from us on centromere inheritance and organisation @matt-naish.bsky.social @plantevolution.bsky.social @genomeevolution.bsky.social

Announcing a curated collection of long-read genomes for Arabidopsis thaliana: The 1001 Genomes Plus Project. Currently 453 unique accessions/almost 600 assemblies. Interested in contributing? Please contact us! #plantscience www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...