Happy to have been a part of the worldwide effort to assemble a pan-genome and pan-transcriptome for oat! A great cereal crop with lots of health benefits. We hope this resource will advance oat quality improvement, resilience, and sustainability as well as provide a foundation for basic research.

Watson's troubling B-side

Their longevity I've wondered about for a long time. Harder to decipher the lifespan of the Greenland Shark, maybe 500 yr.

A mechanism that I and certainly many others have wondered about has now been revealed.

Happy International Coffee Day. Here is a new EFSA study, but don't lose sleep over it.

Who would have guessed? Why it's worth exploring the various branches of the tree of life.

How about we call genome edited crops "barely mutant"? Seems to be a nice workshop below btw!

The perfect cacio e pepe, how to stop shoe odor, and zebra-stiped cows! arstechnica.com/science/2025...

🫛 SPECIAL ISSUE REVIEW 🫛 Johansson et al. ✍️ Redox-active molecules such as ROS, RNS, and RSS orchestrate legume responses to diverse (a)biotic stresses and symbioses, offering novel strategies to enhance crop resilience in changing environments. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/jxb/... #PlantScience 🧪

Heads up on this one.

Nice to see a genome assembly emerge for this barley wild relative. Hopefully, we'll learn how to improve barley's drought tolerance while maintaining yield.

"I’ve never heard as many colleagues saying things like 'CDC is dead’ as I have today," an agency employee told STAT. www.statnews.com/2025/08/28/c...

I miss the old brand #CDC

Pangenome reveals structural variant-driven variation in expression of in winter oilseed rape. Framework enables population-scale SV-eQTL discovery beyond traditional SNP-based approaches - major advance for functional genomics. Read more here:

New Zealand had some of the most restrictive laws when it came to genetically engineered food crops. This move once again demonstrates how the NZ Government makes Science-based decisions. Take note, European Union! #PlantGMOs #PlantNGTs #PlantScience #Agroculture #Sustainability #PlantBreeding

Really interesting to see this systematic and broad study on an important leaf trait.

The campaign against science by the Trump administration through grant slashing has reached FlyBase. There is an effort to crowd-fund this vital database:

Happy to announce our current scan of the risk environment for NGT (gene editing) in animals, just published today. doi.org/10.2903/j.ef...

Interesting aspect to ABA: the role of poly-ubiquitination and mono-ubiquitination to post-transcriptionally regulate ABA receptors

Summary Table of the massive defunding of biomedical research in the United States www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

DNA virus infections shape transposable elements activity in vitro and in vivo doi.org/10.1101/2024...

Hot off the press: our analysis of the proposed EU limits to NGT1 category of genome editing in light of recent data on genomic diversity. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

This bizarre rejection of health science is not incidental: MAGA represents a raging revolt against the very foundations of modern society which are roundly rejected as illegitimate impositions and a personal affront to the prerogative of the MAGA patriarch to decide what is true and what is real.

Even given possible response bias, this is pretty shockingly high. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Nature reporters' ongoing coverage of Trump 2.0 impacts on science and scientists is collected here: www.nature.com/collections/... Reach me at alexwitze.01 on Signal, or witzescience[at]gmail.com, with tips, feedback, follow-ups, anything we should be covering, etc.

Despite dire predictions, we're not there yet. But it's a cute beast and makes great copy.

This will have far-reaching and negative consequences for everyone. When it comes to pandemics, what goes around certainly comes around. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/h...

For a presentation I am giving, I made a wordcloud of the titles of the NIH grants that were canceled. It is clear about the unscientific goals of this administration

If you are a member of the UK or international scientific community, you can sign the open letter from this link. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

"Pressure growing on the Royal Society to expel Musk after more >1000 scientists sign open letter" www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

A warning from Harold Varmus about the consequences of the current American administration's dismantling and hobbling of research as well as public health measures in the US and worldwide. Where is the protest of this? bit.ly/42WGfAE

Difficult to speak Truth to Power when Power tries to gag the speakers. The National Nature Assessment seems to contain facts that Trump would like to suppress. bit.ly/417N8xu

Well, the Freeze has been unfrozen, and grant money will flow for now. The idea was to put Woke to sleep, but instead many researchers woke up, wondering what to do about their impending flight and conference or the reagents they needed for an ongoing experiment. www.bbc.com/news/live/cw...

Heterodichogamy or alternate dioecy, or serial transgenderism, in more common parlance, well that's just nuts! And it's now finally understood. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Certainly gets the creative juices flowing! Simulating 500 million years of evolution with a language model | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Researchers at CDC: no travel, external meetings or communications. Apparently their paymasters believe magical thinking will keep viruses at bay. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

Seen in Helsinki. I knew that viruses self-assemble, but didn't know it was also true for sandwiches. Remarkably, they can do this and experience emotion at the same time.

Cool graphic from KWS on the #GenomeEditing timeline. Impressive how few years passed between the first use of CRISPR/Cas9 in a crop plant (2013) to the first release of an edited crop ( #GABATomato ) (2021). Trad. #PlantBreeding can take decades! 😮 www.kws.com/corp/de/inno... #PlantScience

Seems to include one who published and perished, but no skeletons in the closet.

I will pod-cast this: an interesting aspect in legumes worthy of further investigation.

Low-GI rice: a great idea with potential health benefits for a large segment of the world's population.

Low GI rice: great idea with potential health benefits for a large segment of the world's population

A novel gene with significance for drought tolerance, likely formed by action of HGT and TE-driven processes, to "weird" subjects for many biologists (not me) but nevertheless the grist of evolution.

A breath of fresh air to read a good opinion piece in a major newspaper www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

A call for greater investment in research—including genebanks, breeding programs, and biodiversity-friendly farming practices. Science helps us better understand the complex relationships between biodiversity, ecosystem services, and agricultural productivity. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

"Crown Shyness" is not about royal abdication but rather the tendency of apparently only some tree species to develop dissected canopies in forests. Something new for me!

A stunning illustration of what can be done with a model system.

This is a really useful approach where data is scarce or unavailable. Would be one way for tracking e.g. Syria's economic status under the current circumstances.

One Health not only needs ecological research, but major funders, e.g the EU, need to make integrated funding calls, rather than isolating Health from Climate from Agriculture and Environment in separate Pillar II Clusters, if we are to make progress. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A warning that we should not follow Alice through the looking glass, or at least not bring back what we find there. A large working group has concluded that synthetic life with mirrored chirality would be too risky to synthesize and chance release into our biosphere. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...