#Viewpoint: From growth potential to drought survival: a trait- and time-based framework for plant water economics across vascular species Volaire et al. 👇 📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #LatestIssue #PlantScience

The results are finally in! 🏆💻🧬 I'm thrilled to announce that the manuscript for the Bits to Binders protein design competition is out on bioRxiv! Here's a summary of our findings, including some simple criteria that nearly *double* success rates when applied as a filter 🧵

Join @berasymbionts.bsky.social , @tatsuyanobori.bsky.social and us for a postdoc on the remarkable developmental biology of symbiosis! Applications are due March 25th 🪲🦠 @johninnescentre.bsky.social @thesainsburylab.bsky.social

Enhanced rock weathering (ERW) on agricultural soils is being considered as a carbon dioxide removal strategy. However, uncertainties remain regarding feedstock availability, plant-soil impacts, CDR efficiency, and socio-economic considerations, limiting large-scale deployment. 🧪

There's been a lot of debate within the Democratic establishment about what rhetoric to use via ICE. Well, an incumbent doesn't lose by 48 percentage points very often—and her vote on collaborating with ICE was the defining issue here.

ViroiDoc MSCA Doctoral Network announces workshop: What: Don’t Perish! A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing a Scientific Paper When: Thursday, 2 April 2026, 9:30–12:30 CET Where: online, Webex This event in English is open free of charge. Registration will open soon. www.viroidoc.eu/b/dont-peris...

A team led by ecologist @christinakaiser.bsky.social has discovered that mycorrhizal symbiosis is sensitive to imbalances of certain nutrients in the soil. The data come from an experiment that has been running for over 70 years. www.univie.ac.at/en/news/pres... 🧵1/3 #PlantScience

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal families and exploration-based guilds exhibit distinct responses to long-term N, P and K deficiencies and imbalances 📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... by Jenab et al. @christinakaiser.bsky.social @ter-cemess.bsky.social #PlantScience

Hannah Spencer being sworn in as a Green Party MP this afternoon, after winning the Gorton & Denton by-election last week. Photo: House of Commons

Pacific Northwest #mycology folks, note that one of our most recognisable #fungi Phaeolus schweinitzii (dyer's polypore) is now considered misnamed. Most (but not all) in the PNW are P. occidentiamericanus.

AM fungi challenge a core assumption of cell biology. They can lose a core DNA polymerase (Polɛ) and survive for 360 million years! This blew my mind this weekend! Reductive evolution of the DNA replication machinery in endosymbiotic fungi | bioRxiv www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Just a reminder that our TSL Summer Conference in Plant-Microbe Interactions is taking place this summer in Norwich! ⏰ APPLY by 30 March 2026 More info on our website: www.tsl.ac.uk/tsl-summer-c...

If you’re part of any creative groups, unions or other organisations in the uk you should be passing news like this along and spreading the world. News like this gets has the chance to be overlooked but if enough organisations kick up a fuss things can change.

A great opportunity for ecologists working in nature recovery: @savebutterflies.bsky.social Limestone Grassland Landscape Officer, in Co. Fermanagh, N Ireland. 3-year fixed-term post, deadline for applying is 23 March. butterflyconservation.livevacancies.co.uk#/job/details... #GenerationRestoration

Really pleased to be speaking at this event. Come and join us in Switzerland!

AI has huge promise for genomics -- but it has consistently failed at microbiome-based prediction. My new post on why simple models keep winning, where deep learning actually earns its place, and where the field is headed blekhman.substack.com/p/ai-keeps-f...

The first version of FigTree was released nearly 20 years ago and it is still widely used (including by me). But there are currently 85 issues on the GitHub repo (github.com/rambaut/figt...) and some of them I don’t really like the look of.

Discovery and cultivation of prokaryotic taxa in the age of metagenomics and artificial intelligence #microbiology #prokaryotes #archaea #bacteria @isme-microbes.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/isme...

Rhizoglomus clarum inoculation enhances drought tolerance and photosynthetic performance of maize in sterile and natural soils | Research Square

Host plant phylogeny predicts arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities, but plant life history and fungal genetic change predict feedback | PLOS Biology

mGem: Applying microbiome therapeutic learnings to next-generation agricultural bioproducts

Progress in plant rhizosphere microbiome research for improved growth, nutrient uptake, and disease resistance - ScienceDirect

Holobiont works -> Phyllosphere and rhizosphere microbiomes empower Nicotiana tobacum complex traits dissection and prediction | bioRxiv

🌱Today the Call for Abstracts for the International Grassland Congress (IGC) 2027 opens! Theme: “100 Years of Grassland Research – Pathways to the Future” 📅 13–18 June 2027 | Leipzig ⏰ Deadline: 2 October 2026 igc2027.org/call-for-abs... Submit your contribution now! #IGC2027

🚨 BREAKING 🚨 The Green Party has over 200,000 members. More members, more councillors, more MPs. The Green Party just keep growing. Join us ⤵️

I enjoyed reading this paper. Many hypotheses focus on plant performance only, treat the mycorrhizal fungi as interchangeable. When should fungal identity and fitness should be front and centre in theory and experiments? doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...

Overlooked and overexploited: Extensive conversion of grasslands and wetlands driven by global food, feed, and bioenergy demand @pnas.org 🌐 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The LIN and LINL E3 ligases redundantly regulate AM symbiosis and nodulation Lu et al. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/3MJMQK...

Apologies to all of Hannah's customers! Something exciting is happening. Be a part of it ⤵️

The British Green Party has won their first parliamentary by-election, and their first seat in the North of England. The party lead the Gorton and Denton votes with around 41%, while Reform UK came second with near 29%.

More than 70% of global ecoregions lack soil data on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, key partners to most land plants. Congratulations to @thecrobe.bsky.social & team on winning the 2025 Best Article Award in @femsjournals.bsky.social. Read the paper highlighting those data gaps: buff.ly/7RP6q29

🔎 Plant diversity increases microbial resistance to drought and soil carbon accumulation🌱 These results highlight that higher plant diversity can enhance microbial growth resistance to drought and C accumulation of both microbial and plant origin 🦠 🪴 📖 buff.ly/WqWLXIz

Very much in agreement with the concerns raised by The Wildlife Trusts here. Maize is incredibly damaging to floodplains. tinyurl.com/2tvz8xfw

Best practices for moving from correlation to causation in ecological research @natcomms.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨JOB alert🚨 We have three (yes, THREE) 🌟lectureships🌟 advertised in the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol. Broad remit, including #AnimalBehaviour & #GlobalChangeBiology ⏱️Deadline: 8th March 2026 🙏Please circulate widely 😊Come join us! Full #job details: tinyurl.com/y3us95rc

🌾 Identifying and quantifying the contribution of #maize plant traits to nitrogen uptake and use through plant #modelling by Jie Lu, Tjeerd Jan Stomph, Guohua Mi, Lixing Yuan, Jochem Evers doi.org/10.1093/insi... #PlantScience

These people are poison. They will unleash racist thugs on the streets of this country and call it security. They will subjugate us to the US and call it patriotism. They must be stopped. There is no more important task in politics.

Our latest paper shows that most aerosol sampling methods may underestimate infectious virus in air. We observed 100x more infectious flu virus and SARS-CoV-2 if it deposited directly on cells (more realistic) rather than in liquid first and then transferred to cells. pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

Some news: I’m joining Umeå Plant Science Centre at Umeå University next month as a group leader! Expanding the mycorrhizal adventures to new systems, forests, collaborations & opportunities. I’ll recruit students & postdocs soon Very much still part of the HIE! with my research continuing there

My only Wuthering Heights take is that it feels telling of Emerald Fennel's classism that Heathcliff and low-class female servants had setting 'accurate' Yorkshire accents but nobody who was expected to be a feminine object of desire or well to do did oops

Interesting tool to study AM fungal lifestyle -> Intricate asymbiotic hyphal interactions of Rhizophagus irregularis revealed with single-plane observations in a new microfluidic device | bioRxiv

I am hiring a research assistant (vampire bats), a Panama fieldwork coordinator (vampire bats), and also considering postdoc apps (social behavior, any species): socialbat.org/2026/02/19/h...

A new study finds Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip killed far more Palestinians than initially reported. Writing in The Lancet medical journal, researchers found there were over 75,000 violent deaths in the first 16 months of Israel’s assault.

Reminder that the deadline to apply for this great role as BSBI Wales Officer is midnight on Monday 23 February. Interested? Apply here: bsbi.org/about/people... Sounds good but not for you? Please share this post and help us spread the word!

Typeset version just dropped for all y’all’s enjoyment this weekend! 🤓🪻 @astragaler.bsky.social @tribblelab.bsky.social www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Invasive plants optimize leaf nitrogen allocation in photosynthesis Griffin-Nolan et al. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Arbuscular mycorrhizal colonization does not improve root hydraulic supply in tomato and pea (Jiacan Sun , Timothy J Brodribb , Eloise Foo , Ibrahim Bourbia) doi.org/10.1093/plph... #PlantScience @aspbofficial

My department at CSU Northridge is hiring a vertebrate functional morphologist! We've got a great EEB group, and we're looking for someone to carry forward a tradition of enriching organismal courses and community-engaged research. App review starts March 15 csucareers.calstate.edu/mob/cw/en-us...

All coexisting species ☘️🌿🌾 follow a single power function 📈 linking their temporal variability to their mean abundance 🤯 — 💥Taylor’s power law💥. This exceptionally strong law in community #ecology shows how dominants play a key role in stabilizing ecosystems worldwide 🌍🌐 🔗🔓 doi.org/10.1002/ecog...