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?

"Little Flower" A Cryo-SEM portrait of my micro-rose depicting the flower as a sculpture of cells, fractured and frozen in time. Full image is 10k x 10k pixels.

Starting a Friday Flower Concepts ✨ 🌹 series next week that explores the aesthetics and science behind Natures greatest flower designs! The artist I’m working with is a master with markers and pokemon sketches 🙌

Introducing the 1,000 Flower Collection 🧬🌹 I’m creating 1,000 genetically designed flowers each crafted with new colors, patterns, and shapes. Here’s how I’m making it happen… and how you can join me on this journey 🧵(1/7)

Happy to share that I’ve been awarded a grant from @osventuresllc.bsky.social to develop a genetic toolkit for flower design! Here was my 1-minute pitch. More details of what I'm building coming soon 🌹✨

Showcasing the awesomeness of flower genetics at The Royal Norfolk Show along with artist @hsuanpai.bsky.social @thesainsburylab.bsky.social

Testing samples for a Flower Biodesign clothing line 🧬 🌹 More coming soon..

Thrilled to share that I’ve moved to the UK to join the brilliant Kamoun group! Excited to dive deep into the world of NLRs and plant pathogens 🧬🦠—and of course, to keep breeding my collection of Arabidopsis roses 🌹✨

Got to present my art project on flower genetic design to a room full of chaotic and charismatic scientists at Woodstock Bio2 in Prague 🤘 Life is cool. #TCTeAC #theconferencetoendallconferences

Don’t miss my talk today on flower design in session 7! #theconferencetoendallconferences #TCTeAC

Finally, some plants at the Natural History Museum of @UZH_en! 🌱 Beautifully designed installation and honored to have some of my videos included!

Giving away all my textbooks except for these two masterpieces. They’re all I need 🌱 🔧

Happy Monday everyone!

Figure 1. Custom Micro-Roses, engineered in Arabidopsis thaliana 🌹 Top: Visible light, Bottom: Fluorescence (a) White: no pigment (b) Magenta: betalains (c) Pink champagne: betalains + betaxanthins (d) Champagne: betaxanthins

Genetically engineering Micro-Roses is the best bio side project ever :) Can't wait to share these with you all ✨

Just some Arabidopsis roses ✨

Hybrid vigor

I brought back the dire lotus from extinction by using CRISPR in Arabidopsis! Same Arabidopsis thaliana species, just four mutations..

Busy week in Berlin - built some timelapse gear, gave two talks, and presented a poster on flower design 🤟 Thanks @icips.bsky.social for the opportunity :)

Returned to Zürich to see some nice new blooms 😁

Very nice poster showing genetic engineering of Arabidopsis flowers @icips.bsky.social conference by @nickdesnoyer.bsky.social - great for teaching and outreach

Spent today teaching and building Timelapse equipment in Berlin! Conference tomorrow on evolution of plant reproduction 🌺🧬

Hello friends, the high school iGEM team I’m advising is incredibly talented and motivated, but they don’t have the funds to register for the competition: gofundme.com/f/help-team-... They’ve got a real shot at winning, they just need a bit of help to get there🧵

A lab mate gave me this Monet painting postcard. It’s the little thoughtful things that mean the most 🙂

My favorite part of biology is the part where you design flowers that spark happiness 🧬 🌹

Agamydopsis superpetala

Still need a name for these… Ara-Roses?

Not my most beautiful flowers, but I find these so thought provoking… Meristems as engineer-able control centers for plant organ growth 🛠️🌱