The🇨🇭Classics in full glory 🚴

This is so exciting news, Megan!! Switzerland🇨🇭 is lucky to have you (again) and I am so looking forward to have you soon as a colleague close-by. We'll make sure to have you visit my beloved University of Neuchatel soon!

Call for a tenure-track position at our Department of Plant Molecular Biology in Lausanne! We are searching for promising early-career researchers in the broad field of plant-organismal interactions. Deadline: November 30, 2025 - Please re-post! career5.successfactors.eu/career?caree...

Cycling home time gets the autumn glow-up! 🚴‍♂️🍁

What an amazing story of gut bacteria-fungi interactions! New paper out in Nature by @judith-behnsen.bsky.social's lab www.nature.com/articles/s41...

University of Calgary is hiring a tier I CRC professorship in crop genomics. Come work in one of the most beautiful corners of the world! careers.ucalgary.ca/jobs/1668764...

There's a lot happening in AI, and we made a way to keep up. @genomelybio.bsky.social will now post weekly reports about AI (& beyond). Eg, we examined & summarized 166 articles, 56 community posts (eg, from Reddit), and 10 trending topics (eg, from Bluesky) genomely.substack.com/p/ai-weekly-...

I am excited to share the news that Cristina Barragan @cbarragan.bsky.social got awarded an Emmy Noether Fellowship to start her own research group in my department @uni-kiel.de to explore population dynamics of fungal cereal pathogens!

We have several open positions in my group, funded from the ERC Grant on the Early Sequestered Germline of Fungi. We search broadly for applicants at both PhD and master-level, with a dedicated interest in fungal evolutionary biology. Please forward and RT! Find the positions here: su.varbi.com

Super excited and honoured to have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant for CooPAIRation! How do plant immune receptors work together to trigger an immune response? Can we modulate immune responses for disease resistance? We will tackle these questions in CooPAIRation Positions to be announced soon!

Reproduction in ants 🐜 just keeps blowing my mind 🤯 But this here is the crown for sure... for now. www.nature.com/articles/s41... (go also check out obligate chimerism, social chromosomes, clonal production of females and males, and much more...)

I’m super happy to present the first discoveries of the RIKEN-Cambridge Joint Crop Symbiosis Research Team, based in Japan 🇯🇵 doi.org/10.1101/2025... A thread 👇

Thrilled to share that the final chapter of my PhD with @rokaslab.bsky.social is now out in @natcomms.nature.com 🎉 Read it to find out how population structure impacts pathogenicity in Aspergillus flavus, a fungus that infects humans 🧪 rdcu.be/eAToj

That is amazing tenacity! My success rate with zero ERC submissions and zero awards remains “undefined”.

📣 NEW PREPRINT 📝 We identified evolutionary origins of many fungal effectors! We show that fungi secrete lots of antimicrobial proteins, and that some of them were repurposed by plant pathogens for host immune suppression. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... cc @teamthomma.bsky.social

Looking forward to attending my first #ESEB meeting in Barcelona next week #ESEB2025! Interested in the adaptive potential of transposons? I’ll be presenting my latest work in the Ecological Genomics of Coevolution satellite symposium on Weds 20th - feel free to join! #TESky #TEworldwide

Could not agree more…

Tobias Baril (@tobybarilbio.bsky.social‬) and I are very excited to share our Opinion piece in Trends in Microbiology. We were struck by the convergent phenomenon of hypermutation in fungal pathogens and hope that our piece helps connect puzzle pieces. Please check Toby's story below and share.

A pangenomics-enabled platform for the high-throughput discovery of antifungal resistance factors in crop pathogens https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.18.665620v1

Bring your #PlantScience publishing questions for our Editors! Catch Holly on our stand at #2025ISMPMI with @hacquardst.bsky.social, Ralph Panstruga, Ari Sadanandom, @pietrospanu.bsky.social and Ertao Wang! 📅 TODAY ⏰ 13:00–14:00 🗺 New Phytologist Foundation stand, poster hall

Want to find out more about publishing your work in @mpmijournal.bsky.social? Please visit us at our @ismpmi.bsky.social stand at #2025ISMPMI

Fascinating talk by Dr. Talia Karasov (University of Utah) on how plant pathogens weaponize phage-derived tailocins to wipe out bacterial rivals. Microbes fighting microbes—nature’s own biotech. #ISMPMI2025 #Tailocins #MicrobialWarfare

On my way to Köln for #2025ISMPMI watching a beautiful sunset after Mannheim. Looking forward to Monday!

I very much appreciate the point you are making. With fixed budgets, my experience is that maintaining some non-tenure positions often helps people make the jump to a tenured position. We surely agree though that institutions need to do a lot more to support non-tenured academics on their path.

🔥Postdoc opportunity 🌱 The Legris lab at the University of Neuchâtel 🇨🇭 is looking for a Postdoc to work on the regulation of branching by warm temperatures. If you have a background on plant physiology and development, and you're interested in shoot thermomorphogenesis, apply now!

I am grieving the barbarism that is going to unfurl from all this. People are going to die. Livelihoods gone. All to feed a corrupt kleptocracy. I see every day up close how different it is from the first time around. There are no guardrails. A disaster. I’m sorry we have to live through this.

“… they will have the ability to consult legal rights if they have that…”

The first paper of my PhD is now available as a preprint! 🎉 Transposable elements (TEs) don't just jump within fungal genomes, they also move extensively between species. In this study, we screened over 1,300 fungal genomes and found a conservative estimate of 5,500+ horizontal transfer events.

Thrilled to share that I'll be starting my lab @uofguelph.bsky.social this September! I'll be joining the Department of Food Science and I'm so excited to study yeast diversity in this context!

Oded, our conveyor of painful truths... But it's early morning here though, so I am chilling at this lake here for the moment.

Amazing to see @hannajohannesson.bsky.social on this list here! Big congratulations! Very much looking forward to your discoveries!

Happy Barbara Day, happy #TransposonDay2025 to all that celebrate! Every day we get to work on transposons is such a privilege and joy, and I will never not be amazed by these jumping weirdos -the neutral, the bad and the good. Share some black walnut brownies with your friends today!

After 15 years of research, we're excited to share that the causative agent of White-Nose Syndrome/Disease is actually two cryptic fungal species, each showing host specialisation. We've also traced the introduction to North America back to Podillia, Ukraine.

Amazing opportunity in an outstanding department! Could not recommend this place enough. Not least because of the amazing location. 🇨🇭🌊⛰️

New tenure track assistant professor position in molecular microbiology in our department @dmf-unil.bsky.social @unil.bsky.social! We are casting a wide net for an experimental molecular microbiologist. Apply here: wwwfbm.unil.ch/releve/appli...

super-happy, three TE invasions in Dmel during the last 30 years; the crazy thing - Transib1 spread in just 2-3years in global populations academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-... great work everyone @rpianezza.bsky.social @almoroscarpa.bsky.social @signor-molevol.bsky.social Anna Haider

Amazing talk this morning #efpp2025 by @tatsuyanobori.bsky.social on spatial multiomics in plant pathogen interaction!

Day 2 of #efpp2025 kicking off with Armin Djamei on gall formation in the Ustilago maydis / maize pathosystem

Our next speaker #efpp2025 is Antonio Di Pietro presenting a beautiful experimental evolution approach to track TE movement in Fusarium.

Daniel is looking for postdocs. Highly recommended if you're interested in plant pathogen evolution!

Next plenary speaker #efpp2025 is @danielcroll.bsky.social about the importance of geographic breadth and migration in plant pathogen evolution

Next up #efpp2025 is Sarah Gurr talking about challenges in food security caused by the global spread of plant pathogens

#EFPP Antonio di Pietro shares his insight on Fusarium oxysporum how flexible it is in its different hosts and how its adapting to them.

#EFPP Daniel Croll points out the fast decline of chemical control and host resistance

#EFPP Thorsten Langner presents past and future of pathogen genomics... starting with smut fungi😀

We dive into the dynamics of #starships 🚀 in a fungal pathogen to ask: how might these giant #transposons impact human health? We find they drive genome-wide variation, encode clinically-relevant traits and even transpose within the same strain! 🍄🧪 out today in mBio #goteam doi.org/10.1128/mbio...

Big congrats, Amelia!! So well deserved!

Such elegant work by @teresaomeara.bsky.social 's lab!

To the MPMI community: Cast your vote for Wenbo Ma for President! 🗳️ A vote for leadership grounded in excellence, inclusion, and integrity. The change we need, the voice we deserve! 👏 Check full statement here: www.ismpmi.org/members/Page...

It is sad that even basic research needs to be defended with utility. For me, basic research is in the same category as art: civilized societies can't do without it, because we all want to know who we are and what our place in the natural world is -- questions that only science can answer.