The UGA Plant Biology Department is hiring! Please help spread the word. We have an opening for an Assistant Professor in Plant Synthetic Biology for Strategic Resources Research. See ad for details – and join us here in Athens, GA!

We're excited to welcome Christopher Topp to the Plant Resilience Institute! Dr. Topp uses powerful imaging tools to envision the future of sustainable agriculture, and he will soon bring his expertise in root biology to MSU. Read the full story: plantresilience.msu.edu/pri-news/202...

Open faculty position in computational plant synthetic biology at @universityofga.bsky.social Dept. of Crop & Soil Sciences. Join us in Athens and be a part of UGA's emerging Institute of Synthetic Biology! 👉 Apply: www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/429... #SynBio #PlantScience #FacultyJobs

Two CENH3 paralogs in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii have a redundantly essential function and associate with ZeppL-LINE1 elements onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... beautiful insights into the Chlamy LINE-based centromeres from the Umen and Dawe groups @corncolors.bsky.social

Amazing study from Jill Anderson, Megan Demarche and colleagues, integrating species distribution models, reciprocal transplants, snow manipulation and more to test whether a montane plant can adapt to climate change. The sad answer: not without human intervention. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Five weeks into what has been a constant onslaught on science, working on a paper seems like such a privilege, which many of our recently fired colleagues no longer have. And a rebellious act. But mostly it's self-care. (Give yourself permission to turn off the news for the weekend.)

The National Science Foundation is one of America's most precious gems

Yibing Zeng used synthetic centromeres to break chromosome 4 into two separate chromosomes (4a and 4b), raising the diploid chromosome number of maize from 20 to 22. The resulting plants grew and reproduced normally. We call this process engineered chromosome fission www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Meghan Brady showed that one of the kinesins (Trkin) on the Ab10 meiotic drive haplotype does not serve a useful function in drive or fitness. Anjali Gupta and Rob Unckless used modeling to show that Ab10 Trkin should not persist. Something strange is going on www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Rebecca Piri showed that the maize centromere repeat CentC likely does not have a role in centromere function, whereas knob repeat arrays (involved in meiotic drive) have conserved higher order repeats (HORs) and huge repeat units of ~1 Mb that are shared among knobs www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I am pleased to introduce three papers from our lab this week, describing the structure of repeat arrays, the fitness effects of a key meiotic drive gene, and karyotype engineering.