Honored to have been selected for this award! 😊 Happy national postdoc appreciation week everyone!

‪This was a fun story to write. Last year, environmental police in Brazil stumbled upon thousands of climbing bumblebee catfish. Scientists know almost nothing about this species, which only became known to science in 2017. 🧪🌿🌎

🌿Plant pangenomes🌿 have a LOT of genomic presence-absence-variation. Or do they??? A new @jgi.doe.gov preprint by @tomasbruna.bsky.social @jotlovell.bsky.social @avril-m-harder.bsky.social Avinash Sreedasyam takes a closer look www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Weirdly this doesn't mention that the woman Trump put in charge of reviewing the Smithsonian is his Florida criminal defense attorney who didn't like some of the museum's exhibits when she visited after the inauguration so she convinced Trump to sign an executive order putting her in charge

Very happy to share our preprint on sorghum strigolactone diversity! 🌱 Sorghum naturally varies in strigolactones, plant hormones that can sometimes protect against the parasitic plant Striga. We asked if this diversity could be connected to potential trade-offs in host resistance strategies.

Excited to see our pangenomic breeding network preprint out www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This began as a @jgi.doe.gov Community Science Program (CSP) project in 2017 with the goal of uniting the diverse sorghum breeding and mapping populations in the framework of a 'pangenome'. Thanks to a huge efforts across many stakeholders, the article was preprinted today. A 🧵 w/ what we found:

I'll never get over this poem a child wrote with one of my poetry prompts.

Branching out...🎋🌼 Kuno et al. show that #Arabidopsis CYP722A1 synthesizes a noncanonical SL that specifically regulates floral transition, suggesting structural diversification of #strigolactones are required for specialized functions in #plantdevelopment 🆓🔗 doi.org/10.1093/pcp/... #PlantScience

Talking Biotech 459 - where did the key domestication mutations in corn come from? Were they present in resident gene pools waiting to be selected, or new mutations? I discuss with @jrossibarra and his student Regina Fairbanks. @aspb @ASHS_Hort @UF_IFAS share.transistor.fm/s/bed2ffa6

Very excited to see this PhD project get published in @natcomms.bsky.social! Our paper on modeling maladaptation in cereal crops following a scenario of rapid climate change is out! 🌾 🧵👇

Wow, the cover looks great! Nice work Patrice and @roederlab.bsky.social The GENESPACE plot uses our new @jgi.doe.gov Pennycress and Brassica rapa genomes built in collaboration with @spicybotrytis.bsky.social & Katie Greenham, hosted on phytozome

It's all in the timing: vegetative phase change alters selection under drought and contributes to local adaptation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.13.653704v1

Ancient pangenomic origins of noncanonical NLR genes underlying the recent evolutionary rescue of a staple crop https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.11.648396v1

In 1825, a skilled Black artisan taught a young medical student, Charles Darwin, how to preserve animal specimens via taxidermy, a skill he used in his exploration of the Galapagos. John Edmonstone was born a slave in Guyana, but freed when the family who owned him moved back to Scotland.

Happy International Day of Women in Science. The National Science Foundation’s list of flagged words includes both “Women” and “Female.”

“Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic,” they said. “That means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice and a third, a fourth. Then what happens?”

New preprint featuring my favorite maize-relatives, the Andropogoneae! We sequenced the genomes of 27 species, including lemongrass, kangaroo grass, little and big bluestem, and more -- key species that shape grasslands and prairies worldwide. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Evolution of species' range and niche in changing environments https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.16.633367v1

Redlisting genetics: towards inclusion of genetic data in IUCN Red List assessments link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Super happy to share that our perspective piece on why and how genetic data should be incorporated into IUCN Red List assessments is published! This was a passion project that came out of a grad-level class taught by @jillahamilton.bsky.social 🌿🦇🐞🪼🦧🌳🧬 link.springer.com/article/10.1...