Fausto Rodríguez Zapata
@minorallele.bsky.social
📤 1042
📥 1657
📝 546
Color tierrita. Maize Genetics 🧬 🌽. Don't let poets lie to you.
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Fausto Rodríguez Zapata
Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra
about 1 hour ago
PEQG abstracts due tomorrow! Still frantically working on mine, but will have something to say about how awesome ARGs are for studying evolution (and what a pain they are to work with).
genetics-gsa.org/peqg-2026/ab...
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Abstract Submission - 2026 Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics Conference
Visit our website to learn more.
https://genetics-gsa.org/peqg-2026/abstract-submission/
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Fausto Rodríguez Zapata
Nature Plants
about 4 hours ago
New OA Article: "Large-scale multi-omics unveils host–microbiome interactions driving root development and nitrogen acquisition"
rdcu.be/e2g8f
In Brassica napus, identifying microbe-associated loci and a beneficial bacterium, Sphingopyxis, that promotes N uptake.
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Colin Carlson
about 12 hours ago
If the government really does rug pull us a third time in six months I really don't know where to go with my career. I can't plan ahead on anything. I have no idea how to pay for anything. I have no idea which projects to prioritize. I'm falling apart
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a grassland chase 🌾🌾🌾🌾
about 18 hours ago
Trying to find apt metaphors for the state of 🇺🇸 science rn I had been using “arranging deckchairs on the titanic” but that’s too doomer Right now I’m on “We’re arguing about how to saddle a horse when in reality we all ride emus now.” Things have changed but we’re still chasing the same standards
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Will Ratcliff
about 17 hours ago
New paper out! Here's a puzzle: phototrophy, the ability to use light for energy, is one of life's great innovations. It evolved early and transformed the biosphere. But it evolved 2x. Why not just once, why not more? Our work suggests the answer is priority effects.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
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Priority effects inhibit the repeated evolution of phototrophy - npj Complexity
npj Complexity - Priority effects inhibit the repeated evolution of phototrophy
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44260-026-00069-z
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Jill Harrison
2 days ago
It was good to catch up on my reading for this dispatch in Current Biology. Sjoerd Woudenberg in the Weijers lab, Wallner et al. In the Dolan lab and Flores Sandoval et al. In the Bowman lab have done a great job! Evolution and development: What makes a merry stem?:
www.cell.com/current-biol...
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Evolution and development: What makes a merry stem?
From tiny mosses to giant redwoods, around 450,000 species of land plants show a huge variety of forms, yet all land plants develop from stem cells in proliferative meristems. What makes a meristem? T...
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2825%2901687-2
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Nature Plants
1 day ago
New Article: "Amino-acid-transporter-mediated assembly of rhizosphere microbiota enhances soil organic nitrogen acquisition in rice"
rdcu.be/e14Uv
The japonica allele of LHT1 enhances organic N use efficiency by recruiting specific rhizosphere microbiota.
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Dr. K. Lotterhos
1 day ago
Slim 5 can now simulate genomes with multiple chromosomes like autosomes, sex chromosomes, mitochondria and chloroplast dna
academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...
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SLiM 5: Eco-evolutionary Simulations Across Multiple Chromosomes and Full Genomes
Abstract. Evolutionary simulations of multiple chromosomes, even up to the scale of full-genome simulations, are becoming increasingly important in populat
https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/43/1/msaf313/8342840?login=false&utm_source=etoc&utm_campaign=mbe&utm_medium=email&nbd_source=campaigner&nbd=13291442411
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Maddy Seale
2 days ago
Out in
@science.org
this week: A decline in epigenetic silencing of TEs in older plant organs but not in the shoot meristem. TCX5 and TCX6 help regulate DNA methylation in this context.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
#plantscience
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Aging drives a program of DNA methylation decay in plant organs
Plants display a wide range of life spans and aging rates. Although dynamic changes to DNA methylation are a hallmark of aging in mammals, it is unclear whether similar molecular signatures reflect ra...
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu2392
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David Ho
2 days ago
Very on the nose that in the US, a rodent has replaced scientists. It currently feels like 6 more years of winter.
add a skeleton here at some point
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Zack Labe
2 days ago
A data-driven mosaic of our warming planet - now updated through 2025 🥵 Download graphic at
zacklabe.com/climate-chan...
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Stephen Turner
4 days ago
How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills
www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...
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Bread and Chocolate
4 days ago
Fun debate 🤣
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International Society for Plant Low Oxygen Research
4 days ago
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
#plantscience
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MITOGEN‐ACTIVATED PROTEIN KINASE9 fine‐tunes hypoxia signaling by phosphorylating ERF‐VII transcription factors in Arabidopsis
In plants, hypoxia sensing is controlled by the stabilization of group VII ethylene response factors (ERF-VIIs), which are post-translationally activated by the mitogen-activated protein kinases (MA...
https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.70964
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Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
5 days ago
Please share! PhD position (4 years) available in my group
@zmbp-tuebingen.bsky.social
. We look for candidates with solid aptitude in computer science to cross disciplines and use cutting edge imaging to understand host infection by destructive plant pathogens.
uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet...
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Mark Riedl
4 days ago
“We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.” Props to Anthropic for studying the effects of their creation and reporting results that are not probably what they wished for
www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...
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How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills
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www.nature.com/articles/s43...
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Small farms contribute a third of the food consumed in high-income nations - Nature Food
The contribution of farmers to domestic food production is a poor proxy for their role in national food consumption. This study reveals that the importance of small farms in meeting the food needs of ...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01276-y
5 days ago
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bioRxiv Plant Bio
5 days ago
Rewiring vascular patterning through translational control in Arabidopsis
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.29.702522v1
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www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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A cross-population compendium of gene–environment interactions - Nature
A large cross-population atlas of gene–environment interactions reveals how age, sex and lifestyle shape genetic effects, heritability, prediction accuracy and disease biology, with implications for p...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10054-6
5 days ago
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Philip Ball
5 days ago
I had intended to post something about this new Google DeepMind paper that appeared yesterday in Nature, but the press coverage has added to what there is to say. So this is a long 🧵
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Advancing regulatory variant effect prediction with AlphaGenome - Nature
AlphaGenome, a deep learning model that inputs 1-Mb DNA sequence to predict functional genomic tracks at single-base resolution across diverse modalities, outperforms existing models in variant effect...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10014-0
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Fausto Rodríguez Zapata
6 days ago
ASPT is launching a free 5-part webinar series, “Taxonomy: What is it good for?” on the real-world impacts of systematics. Join us Feb 6 for
@sandyknapp.bsky.social
's “Of course taxonomy matters! The story of the mega-genus Solanum (Solanaceae).” Register and share!
us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
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Nature Plants
6 days ago
New Article: "Global functional shifts in trees driven by alien naturalization and native extinction"
rdcu.be/e1pvY
...pushing forests towards fast-growing, resource-demanding species and highlighting the need to protect slow-growing trees.
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Fausto Rodríguez Zapata
Nature Plants
6 days ago
New Article: "Unravelling the predominant genetic paths for asexual reproduction in Kalanchoe"
rdcu.be/e1pxI
With News & Views: "Genomic cradle for thousands"
rdcu.be/e1pxK
How ‘mother of thousands’ plants sprout new plantlets from their leaves.
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Fausto Rodríguez Zapata
Zack Labe
6 days ago
Comparing monthly average temperature anomalies in the Northern Hemisphere versus the Southern Hemisphere through all of 2025. The long-term warming trend in all months of the year can be visualized through the blue to red gradient. Data available from
@copernicusecmwf.bsky.social
ERA5 reanalysis
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Mario Vallejo-Marin
7 days ago
Join us at the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University. We’re searching for an Assistant Professor in Biology.
www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...
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bioRxiv Genomics
6 days ago
Predicting agronomic performance of maize landraces in various and future environments by combining genomic prediction and ecogenetics
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.28.699851v1
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Dr. Arun Sethuraman
6 days ago
Threw my comp-genomics class into a sea of Bayesian math today to explain base-calling algorithms. I think I might have lost and drowned a few of them in the process. 😞
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Plant Physiology
6 days ago
LETTER: The stunt of stunted silk: A novel pollination control mechanism in maize (Siddique I Aboobuckerصديق أبوبكر , Sidramappa C Talekar , Ursula K Frei , Bing Yang , Thomas Lübberstedt)
doi.org/10.1093/plph...
#PlantScience
@aspbofficial
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The stunt of stunted silk: A novel pollination control mechanism in maize
A single-gene mutation inhibits maize silk growth, delivering a novel genetic approach to pollination control with an attractive potential for application
https://doi.org/10.1093/plphys/kiaf625
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Fausto Rodríguez Zapata
Justine Karst 🇨🇦
6 days ago
Let's celebrate researchers of mycorrhizas! Several awards for a variety of career stages offered by the IMS. Pls see links below
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Bartosz Bartkowski
6 days ago
One day left to apply⬇️
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Mike Wiser
8 days ago
Rye is the most commonly cited example of this. (See, for example,
www.smbc-comics.com/comic/vavilov
). Oats are another. Both rye and oats have different environmental tolerances than wheat and barley do, so there are locations where they're a far more reliable crop than what they were mimicking.
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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Vavilov
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Vavilov
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/vavilov
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Mike Wiser
8 days ago
I'm thinking about this right now because of the most recent Eons episode. But it's really cool that humans domesticated a few crops that we were originally trying to *not* grow. Confused? Let me explain.
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Fausto Rodríguez Zapata
Darius Kosmützky
8 days ago
Having fun with the microscope lately. Here’s one of my favourite artsy and slightly psychedelic shots of
#Marchantia
chloroplasts and a fluorescent membrane reporter. (z-stack maximum projection)
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Dan Warren
9 days ago
ecology vs. ecological models
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Steve Voelker
9 days ago
Led by Roel Brienen, our paper in
@natcomms.nature.com
"Contrasting pathways to tree longevity in gymnosperms and angiosperms" is finally out and formatted. Other bluesky folks contributing to the paper were
@yellowbuckeye.bsky.social
and
@rmtrr.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Contrasting pathways to tree longevity in gymnosperms and angiosperms - Nature Communications
Tree longevity is thought to increase in harsh environments, but global evidence of drivers is lacking. Here, the authors find two different pathways for tree longevity: slow growth in resource limite...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67619-2
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Katie Langin
9 days ago
How many STEM Ph.D.s were lost from the U.S. federal government last year? My colleagues
@mghersher.bsky.social
and
@policyhound.bsky.social
dug into a recent data release to find the answer. A
@science.org
exclusive.
www.science.org/content/arti...
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Costa Samaras
8 days ago
It could take a generation to recover the talent lost from federal science. But it doesn't have to. We should be ready to scale up the Presidential Management Fellowship program to triple what it once was and rebuild U.S. capacity by 2030.
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Dr. Katja Thieme (she/they)
8 days ago
"The reason these aspects of our jobs have been so challenging to automate is that they rely on something even more precious than our time: namely, our capacity for scientific decision-making. It is worth considering what we lose when we cede that—and our agency—to machines."
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Jannice Friedman
8 days ago
Are you anywhere in the world (other than Canada) and want to do a PhD in my lab in Canada at Queen's University? We have a prestigious scholarship for 3-years of PhD funding. Get in touch, applications due early February. Must love plants and evolution!
friedmanlab.ca
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Friedman Lab
Visit the post for more.
https://friedmanlab.ca
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Journal of Experimental Botany
8 days ago
🦠🌽 RESEARCH 🌽🦠 Overexpression of LOX4 in maize enhances resistance to Fusarium verticillioides via a marked increase in the production of oxylipins together with activation of the jasmonic acid biosynthetic pathway - Ottaviani et al. 🔗
doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...
#PlantScience
🧪
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Fausto Rodríguez Zapata
Plant Physiology
9 days ago
NEWS & VIEWS: An unknown apocarotenoid signal alters plant development by modulating shoot and root apical meristem activities (James M Bradley)
doi.org/10.1093/plph...
#PlantScience
@aspbofficial
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An unknown apocarotenoid signal alters plant development by modulating shoot and root apical meristem activities
The plant body plan is directed via organogenesis from stem cell niches in the shoot and root apical meristems. The process of organogenesis is plastic and
https://doi.org/10.1093/plphys/kiaf448
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Jo Hepworth
9 days ago
PhD position available in my group at Durham! So exciting! PLEASE do email me if you're thinking of applying for tips on cover letters and to find out more about the lab, the uni and the project.
#phd
#plantphd
#plantscijobs
#plantsci
#crops
#climate
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
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Watering the flowers: gene x environment control of water use during Brassica napus inflorescence development. at Newcastle University on FindAPhD.com
PhD Project - Watering the flowers: gene x environment control of water use during Brassica napus inflorescence development. at Newcastle University, listed on FindAPhD.com
https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project/watering-the-flowers-gene-x-environment-control-of-water-use-during-brassica-napus-inflorescence-development/?p193850
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Shelly Gaynor
9 days ago
Just saw this new preprint - includes flow ctyometry on 45,000 silica-dried samples for 1135 species - this is amazing and such a great resource for anyone attempting to do flow cytometry:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.21.700804v1
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Rebecca Mosher
9 days ago
I am excited to offer a postdoctoral research position in my lab in Oxford studying the distribution of small RNAs during plant sexual reproduction.
shorturl.at/7Goxt
Reposts appreciated! Obligatory cat video to brighten your day. :-)
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Penelope Lindsay
9 days ago
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/JAIVZX...
Excited to share my latest work in
@newphyt.bsky.social
. Here, we used TurboID proximity labeling with CLAVATA receptors FEA3 and BAM1D in maize meristems to better understand the signaling pathways important for meristem regulation.
#PlantScience
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The Sainsbury Laboratory
9 days ago
The Sainsbury Laboratory is delighted to announce that it has received $2 million in funding as part of
Google.org's
$20 million AI for Science Fund to support organizations focused on cutting-edge AI for science research.
@kamounlab.bsky.social
@amiralito.bsky.social
www.tsl.ac.uk/news/the-sai...
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🌴 Scott Zona, Ph.D. 🌴
11 days ago
My most frequent interaction with Proteaceae is eating macadamia nuts! 😛 Here's Macadamia integrifolia. Note how the perianth curls back to reveal the exserted style. The tip of the style scrapes pollen from the anthers as it elongates & presents the pollen to visitors.
#Proteaceae
#Botany
🌾🧪🌱
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Ákos T Kovács
11 days ago
A quorum-sensing molecule from Pseudomonas aeruginosa induces defensive multicellularity in a coinfecting pathogen -in PNAS from
@anukharelab.bsky.social
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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A quorum-sensing molecule from Pseudomonas aeruginosa induces defensive multicellularity in a coinfecting pathogen | PNAS
Microorganisms commonly exist in polymicrobial communities, where they can respond to interspecies secreted molecules by altering behaviors and phy...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2513122123
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Marcus Chown
14 days ago
You are absolutely right. Paul Dirac, discoverer of antimatter and the Mr Spock of physics, was in the same class in school in Bristol as Hollywood movie star, Cary Grant.
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www.theatlantic.com/science/2026...
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Science Is Drowning in AI Slop
Peer review has met its match.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/01/ai-slop-science-publishing/685704/?link_source=ta_first_comment&taid=6973907d99c310000167551d&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawPhlVVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA80MDk5NjI2MjMwODU2MDkAAR7TumKSNrnrenrR1PQbkTHG0AD245vx45GV7HnElKzFHBTvHfqEQxlYXlFbKQ_aem_jkEuqUMu8MY6HTSZpLDaSQ
11 days ago
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