🚀 New lab preprint on #SexChromosomeTurnover is out on @arxiv.bsky.social Huge congrats to lab thesis student for submitting his PhD @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social fellowship: big milestone and fingers crossed 🤞 and to all students for the submissions🤞🤞 More to come soon… 🐸🧬 arxiv.org/abs/2602.23624

#TEsky EDTA-GUI: a plant-optimized graphical implementation of the EDTA pipeline enabling lineage-level classification and analysis doi.org/10.1186/s128...

New paper with @vsudbrack.bsky.social. Using pop gen modelling, we show that partial selfing makes selection on tandem repeats more efficient, reducing the associated load across different scenarios. Thanks to @snsf.ch @dee-unil.bsky.social @fbm-unil.bsky.social ! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Regulatory sciences are criminally underappreciated in philosophy of science, especially considering the impact they have on our everyday lives. I'm glad the talented HyeJeong Han is working on changing that! There's much to learn about the roles of institutions in shaping research processes

orthogene: a Bioconductor package to easily map genes within and across hundreds of species www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #Rstats bioconductor.org/packages/ort...

Blinded by the lights? Re-examining the adaptive role of transposable elements in plants with population genomics #TEworldwide #TEsky www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨Hiring a postdoc! Are you interested in #evolutionarygenomics, #sexchromosomes, #transposableelements & #Sexspecific #recombination in 🐸🧬? Join my lab @vubrussel.bsky.social 🔹 @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social funded up to 3y 🔹 Deadline 10/3/2026 🔹 Start ~1/6/2026 Apply 👉: jobs.vub.be/job/Elsene-P...

Are you a postdoc in plant biology? 🌾🧪 We invite you to join a community of 500+ postdoctoral researchers around the world. plantpostdocs.com/join-us/

Who among us hasn’t produced five pages of crappy writing and then considered defacing the keyboard? Very relatable.

Interested in virome sequencing on @nanoporetech.com instruments? Check out our latest paper where we publish Twist-ONT, a modified protocol for the Twist Comprehensive Viral Research Panel (by @twistbioscience.com) so that it can be used with ONT. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧵1/7 🧪

Up this week: Proteaceae. Flowers are 4-merous, stamens fused to the uniseriate perianth, 1 carpel with a long style & pollen presentation. This Gondwanaland family is found throughout the S. Hemisphere but is most diverse in Australia. 📷: Leucospermum sp/cv. #Proteaceae #Botany 🌾🧪🌱

'This video is the culmination of several yrs attempting to: (1) Figure out best practices for modeling ptn-ptn interactions; (2) Understand the outputs of programs like AlphaFold & adjacent software including quantitative metrics;(3) Communicate my thoughts to unwitting victims through workshops'

One of my concerns with AI-assisted research in biology is that we're already looking only in the lamplight and AI incentivizes us to narrow the beam. Seems like it's happening... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#TEsky Host Factors Promoting the LTR Retrotransposon Life Cycle in Plant Cells: Current Knowledge and Future Directions doi.org/10.3390/ijms...

searching a #postdoc for #theoretical research at the interface between #physics, #biology and #popgen to study the #evolution of plant self-incompatibility. @hebrewuniversity.bsky.social www.friedlander-lab.net see application link in next post. Please share with relevant candidates.

Aleksey Zimin presents EVIANN (Evidence-based Annotation) While it does not drastically increase the accuracy over existing tools, its speed is ultrafast, can use ONT transcripts, creates UTRs and lncRNAs. #Bioinformatics #Genomics #Coding #PAG33 #PAG2026

Are you working on ancient plant DNA? 🌿 We are organising a symposium on Ancient plant genomics at #SMBE2026 in beautiful Copenhagen 🇩🇰 Join Nathan Wales, Shuya Zhang, Marcela Sandoval Velasco, me, and our fantastic speaker Logan Kistler from the Smithsonian Institution. Help us spread the word!

My co-conspirator and fellow PhD student Lila writes for The Conversation about how plants have separate sexes, sometimes. Ever wondered something about plant sexual systems? How to start learning about it? I'd say start with this.

🧵 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

The pardon for Hernandez makes an obvious & absolute mockery of each & every attempt to rationalise, or even justify, Trump's treatment of Maduro. I'm not sure this single, simple point can be stressed enough. Once again, he proves his critics right & reduces his supporters to epic moral corruption.

Have we been overstating the role of transposable elements in adaptation to local or rapidly changing environmental conditions? Happy to share my (somewhat unpopular?) opinion paper on this matter: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Thanks to those who already shared the link!

Greetings! I decided to make a YouTube video of my AlphaFold workshop that I've given a few times in the past year. Caveats aside, people seem to find this useful for thinking about how to model protein interactions and how to interpret various AF outputs 1/2 www.youtube.com/watch?v=u63o...

Buenos días, Hoy hace un año, el Dr.Hussam se puso delante de los tanques de Israel para impedir que atacaran el hospital Kamal. Está en la cárcel, sin cargos, ni juicio, desde entonces. No olvidemos a Palestina.

This story is absolutely wild. Did you know that avocados change sex over the course of a day? And that it's controlled by a single ancient balanced polymorphism? This is flat our crazy

if tumblr dies I need this video to make it's seasonal rotation here instead just in case, Happy holidays 🎄

“A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known" - Bertrand Russell, 1976. Time-lapse video of Vampyrella lateritia eating Spirogyra algae from Science Source/Oliver Skibbe. 🦠

"The only kind of thinking that matters in science is structured thinking. The only way to give structure and substance to your thoughts is to write them down. Writing. Is. Thinking." Thinking about this in the context of AI tools....

✨Call open for a fully-funded PhD position✨ Looking for an enthusiastic student to join my upcoming Ambizione research group (🌱 Epigenome Diversity Lab 🌱, www.epidiversitylab.org) at ETH Zürich, starting August 2026! Apply here ↘️ jobs.ethz.ch/job/view/JOP... Application deadline: January 31st, 2026

Wow. Cells ratcheted up the Transposon Arms Race a notch further than we'd realised.

WOW! Very promising new tool to facilitate collaborative manual curation of TEs link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Wendy Valencia-Montoya and team uncover thermal infrared as one of the most ancient pollination signals uniting plants and animals. From the field to single proteins. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New paper out. If you like colorful birds, hybridization, and phylogenetics, read on! 🧵https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003501

Can we tune a plant’s epigenetic toolkit to disrupt plant homeostasis in ways that enable phenotypic innovation? 🌱Check out our new Opinion Paper with @thanvisrikant.bsky.social discussing this topic in @cp-trendsplantsci.bsky.social! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Have you ever wondered how new DNA methylation patterns are established? Paradigm shift ahead! We discovered a new mode of DNA methylation targeting in plants that relies on transcription factors and sequence motifs rather than chromatin modifications to regulate the methylome. rdcu.be/eQ6L5 1/8

📢 Read this timely review in #NARCancer! 🧬 Gueble and Menon highlight the critical role of #DNAhelicases in linking #DNAdamage recognition with #repair. The review includes a curated table of #clinicaltrials on #helicaseinhibitors. Read it here: doi.org/10.1093/narc... @yalepress.bsky.social

We are very excited! Jan Baedke received an @erc.europa.eu Consolidator Grant for his project “Botanical Legacies: Towards a New History and Philosophy of Virtual Herbaria”, linking the history of local plant knowers with current digitation trends & biodiversity issues. #ERCCoG #HPS #PhilSci #HPBio

A new study shows that over 90% of insect biomass declines are driven by shrinking species numbers, posing a risk to ecosystem function. www.idiv.de/majority-of-... #biodiversity

Out after peer review, collaborative study from Nordborg & Weigel labs with help from many others. Not the largest collection of new Arabidopsis thaliana genomes, but we hopefully put forward some good ideas for how to think about pangenomes and their analysis! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧪 Great advice 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼

Super cool story - viruses keep translation up by preventing mRNA circularisation! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The fall of a prolific science journal exposes the billion-dollar profits of scientific publishing english.elpais.com/science-tech... (& so many don’t realize that none of these profits come to the authors, who even have to pay $$$ themselves to make the work open access) #highered #academicsky

Protist–bacteria partnerships are more common in wastewater treatment plants than we thought. In this ISME communications paper, we uncovered widespread denitrifying endosymbionts inside ciliates, their global distribution, and their temporal dynamics across WWTPs.🦠 academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a...

1. The European Parliament’s attempt to ban plant-based foods from being sold as “sausages”, “burgers” etc is a direct response to livestock industry lobbying. This is a short thread on how utterly bleeding ridiculous it is. 🧵1/6

Preprint alert! It is my great pleasure to announce the first manuscript from the lab, a story that started @gmivienna.bsky.social and was mainly accomplished by the intrepid @gesahoffmann.bsky.social at @mpi-mp-potsdam.bsky.social. A brief thread with our findings www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se

How do new centromeres evolve while staying compatible with the division machinery? Discover it in our new Nature paper! We show centromeres transition gradually via a mix of drift, selection, and sex, reaching new states that still work with the kinetochore. 👉 doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09779-1

🪱 Selfish genes are everywhere and drive some of biology’s biggest innovations (CRISPR, antibody recombination, epigenetics). Yet almost no one asks the obvious question: how does a selfish gene begin? Our new manuscript uncovers how selfishness can emerge directly from the host genome.

How does messenger RNA (mRNA) get out of the nucleus to become a protein? Eukaryotic mRNA is packaged, exported, and then translated in the cytoplasm. But how do these steps work? And what are open questions? Check out our new review for our take: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... (1/3)