Friday Flower 009: Nigella arvensis ✨ Nigella’s flowers form a morphologically complex display with ornate bracts and blue sepals. The true petals have diverse patterning with intricate, nectar-bearing structures that look alien.

Stepped into the “room of rare books” @JohnInnesCentre today and was blown away… Les roses by Redouté, Origin of species by Darwin, and a 1511 book on mythical beasts!

Last week I toured Neoplants, a biotech company engineering houseplants! 🧬🌱 Hidden just off the streets of Paris, their lab is the most beautiful biotech space I’ve ever seen.

🎃 Why are (Halloween) pumpkins orange – and not pink or blue? This secret is explored by @bpucker.bsky.social, @nancy-choudhary.bsky.social and Marie Hagedorn. Their research examines how carotenoids took over, making Jack O’Lanterns forever orange: www.uni-bonn.de/en/news/colo.... Happy Halloween!

@igemhq.bsky.social and SB8 was unforgettable. Would love to supervise a team on flower design for the new art/design village 🎨🌹🧬

Don’t miss my presentation @iGEM tomorrow at 14:00 main stage! I will be throwing out bio-designer shirts to the back row 🧬🤘

Thank you Rainer 🙏

Genetically engineered color-changing Arabidopsis 🧬📷- attempt #3 I think I finally nailed it with this one.

Friday Flower 008: Tulip 🌷 Tulip’s pastel colors and waxy cuticle that scatters light give them a soft watercolor look. The “broken” petals of Semper Augustus, created by a virus, became some of the most famous and valuable flowers in history... and their genome is 34Gb 🤯

"Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions" -Albert Einstein

One of my Arabidopsis micro-roses next to its wild type sister ✨ Now just to make it rainbow 🧬...

Flatworms are the golden retrievers of the microbe world🔬

Fantastic hosting the @GoogleDeepMind team at TSL with @kamounlab.bsky.social 🌱 From AI in plant health to building scientific capacity, our missions clearly resonate! Tools like AlphaFold can accelerate scientific breakthroughs in our field -holding real promise for global food security 🌍

Thanks for the support! Boas is a level 99 plant programmer 🧬

Ran into these AMAZING Stapelia grandiflora in our conservatory today. The patterns, colors, hairs, and the smell - carrion mimic to perfection. #Stapelia #plantjoy #iamabotanist

Heat-shock inducible CRE-LOX of RUBY making cool sectors in my primary transformants (though a bit leaky) 🌱🧬

Friday Flower 007: Petunia 💮✨ Petunias carry the active transposon dTph1, which powers mutant screens and paints stripey patterns as it jumps. Their five petals are fused, with diverse color designs tracing the corolla’s fusion seam.

Thermie really doing the most today

This little Arabidopsis fighting to keep up with the big ones 🥺

Fantastical flowers, synthetic biology, and storytelling. Giving an accessible science talk tomorrow at 10:40 UK time... come join! Register here for the link 👉 jic.link/NBIAST2025

This is amazing

Friday Flower 006: Aquilegia 🌸🦋 Columbines vary in stamen number, making them a powerful model for how floral whorls expand. Darwin marveled at their long nectar spurs, which co-evolve with hawkmoth tongues to reward pollinators that brush the stamens ✨

I find that so many biologists are also talented artists. @hsuanpai.bsky.social is a skilled technician and apparently good at any artistic media she touches.. even LB.

I finally picked up my "Epi-Bouquet 2" by @nickdesnoyer.bsky.social As a former plant scienctist I am loving it! It's a great shirt! 💐 🧪 You can find more on Nick at his website: www.nickdesnoyer.com/about

Engineering flowers as a means for public outreach and art! Dr. @nickdesnoyer.bsky.social reimagines Arabidopsis with new colors and shapes, blending plant biology, synthetic biology and creative arts! Hear him speak at SB 8.0 at the iGEM Grand Jamboree! jamboree.igem.org/2025/program...

Synthetic biology and art go hand in hand 🧬 🌹 Thanks Moeez for the invitation to hang out with peeps at London Synbio network!

Meet "Little Flower". A genetically engineered flower, frozen in time and blown up over 150X. Here's the story (1/6 🧵)

Showing off my Arabidopsis flower shirt from @nickdesnoyer.bsky.social at @cbgpmadrid.bsky.social

Accidentally made “black” Arabidopsis seeds. Under the microscope they look like little raisins 👀

Color changing flowers 🧬🎨- attempt #2 Older flowers (bottom) show dark red/ orange tints whereas young buds (top) display strong fuchsia color. Getting closer..

Doing my homework 📚

Friday Flower 005: Arabidopsis thaliana 🌱✨ A tiny flower, but a giant in research, thale cress enabled our understanding of flower development through the "ABC Model". With this knowledge, their flowers can be essentially reprogrammed to produce micro-roses 🧬🌹

Happy to see my work “12 Little Flowers” and “Epi-Bouquet2” on the walls of my former institute :)

Friday Flower 004: Hibiscus trionum 🌺✨ Hibiscus trionum displays a dark bullseye in the center that acts as a landing pad for pollinators 🎯 The bullseye is made by a developmental boundary delineating distinct cell shapes and pigments.

Sneak peak of tomorrows Friday Flower! 🌺 Whoever guesses the flower correctly gets a gold star ⭐️

Plants and People conference was amazing! 2 days, not too big, diverse topics, panel discussion, 10:30 am start, glasshouse tour, excellent speakers and posters. 10/10 Max Planck Potsdam 👏

The "Florédex" ✨, a pokémon-inspired vector collection of the greatest flower designs and their science is coming along nicely 🌷🧬 All hand-drawn, digitalised, and animated.

Friday Flower 003: Antirrhinum majus 🐉✨ Snapdragons are icons of floral symmetry. Their corollas are bilaterally symmetrical with dorsal (d), lateral (l), and ventral (v) petals. Mutations in CYCLOIDEA produce peloric flowers with all ventral petals in radial symmetry.

Flower Butts #BlossomBottoms

Yori is an elite potato programmer 🧬✂️

Color changing flowers 🌺 🧬 From pink to white in 3 days. My first Time-lapse at @thesainsburylab.bsky.social

Inducible RUBY expression in independent transformant lines of A.thaliana over 4 days. Several lines (top) show induction everywhere except the petals... cool but I'd prefer the opposite!!

Friday Flower 002: Mirabilis jalapa🌺✨ Four O’Clocks, like other Caryophyllales, produce red (betacyanins) and yellow (betaxanthins) petal sectors through differential regulation of betalain biosynthesis during corolla development.

New imaging setup for my micro-rose color prototyping 🌸🔬 This design has a wine red (#a53841) center radiating into muted salmon (#d47989) along the fringes ✨ 🧬

1 month of liverwort growth in 12 seconds. The thallus of Marchantia polymorpha grows slow and steady, creeping over its substrate.

I made something pretty cool recently. Here’s a sneak peak 💛

🧬 🌹 ✨🤘

Friday Flower 001: Mimulus lewisii 🌸✨ Monkeyflowers are masterpieces of design with nectar-guide spots formed by an activator–inhibitor system of MYB transcription factors. These generate reaction–diffusion patterns across the ventral petal.

First of the Friday Flower Concepts series coming tomorrow! 🌹✨ Can you guess the first flower?