Tracking the evolutionary trajectory of a young hybrid plant pathogen. New preprint on how triticale powdery mildew evolved in the ~25 years since its emergence. Congrats to @jigisha1.bsky.social and all coauthors! doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Check out our new pre-print! ✨ We cloned AvrWTK4, the first wheat powdery mildew effector recognised by a tandem kinase protein, and show that an HMA-like integrated domain in WTK4 acts as pathogen decoy. Discover the whole story on bioRxiv ⬇️

Scientists’ role in defending democracy | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

📣 NEW PREPRINT 📝 We identified evolutionary origins of many fungal effectors! We show that fungi secrete lots of antimicrobial proteins, and that some of them were repurposed by plant pathogens for host immune suppression. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... cc @teamthomma.bsky.social

Incredibly proud of this work where we developed a method for understanding the information contained in millions of genomes. Another example of NIH funded research.

I am happy to share my second paper with @samyeaman.bsky.social and collaborators! If you are into hybrid zones and tree genomics, this is for you! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

SLiM 5: Eco-evolutionary simulations across multiple chromosomes and full genomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.07.669155v1

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community. reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

"Off-season sex in #Zymoseptoria tritici: little room for late encounters" @biorxivpreprint, sharing our latest study on sexual reproduction in Z. tritici — its epidemiological determinants & impact — may interest those working on plant pathogen dynamics. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Global temperatures would have risen by 12.2 °C (!) since 1990 if everyone in the world had emitted like the wealthiest top 0.1% in world. Fascinating new study in @natclimate.nature.com by Schöngart et al: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Population genetics of plant fungal threats: Insights from wheat powdery mildew" I wrote this Primer inspired by the great work of @jigisha1.bsky.social , @fmenardo.bsky.social and colleagues journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... @uclnews.bsky.social @plosbiology.org

Agricultural diseases threaten sustainable food production. @jigisha1.bsky.social @fmenardo.bsky.social & co show that the population structure of #Blumeria #WheatPowderyMildew can be predicted by prevailing wind patterns (& reveal genes under recent selection) @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/43qfH9F

Very happy to see our paper online: "Population genomics and molecular epidemiology of wheat powdery mildew in Europe". Congrats to @jigisha1.bsky.social and all coauthors! doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Very excited with @tobybarilbio.bsky.social to share this preprint about his latest work on TEs! We knew that TEs were very pretty active in this global fungal pathogen of wheat. Now with nearly 2000 Illumina genomes available, we could finally ask questions about historic TE activation waves.

The collaborative paper on adding selection to stdpopsim is out! Learn about how to easily simulate realistic population genomic data with background selection and sweeps, plus some benchmarking of methods for demographic history, DFE, and sweep inference. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our paper on the evolution of fungicide resistance in wheat powdery mildew is now published! Congrats to all coauthors! doi.org/10.1111/mpp....