Russell R. Geiger Professorship of Crop Science www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/russell... @cam.ac.uk @camplantsci.bsky.social

Great sessions at #IFBC25 on fungal manipulation of ant behaviour (Charissa de Bekker) and nematode behaviour (@fungi_worms and Reinhard Fischer) -highlighting the complex cellular eukaryotic processes that fungal effectors can perturb -remarkable insights from effector biology

Cell cycle checkpoints are critical to plant infection by rice blast - great to see @osesmir.bsky.social building a research programme in Pamplona to address this #IFBC25 #CelebratingAlumni

Nice to see Theophrastus taking centre stage over Galen and Hippocrates - need to show some funders this to remind them how important plants are! Cool being in Greece with the old gods #IFBC25

Chania, Crete for #IFBC25

📣 IFBC-2025 is just around the corner! Join us this Sept in Chania, Crete 🇬🇷 to connect with the fungal biology community 🍄 📅 Abstract deadline: July 25 🎓 Fee waivers for PhD students 🔗 ifbc2025.maich.gr Let’s shape the future — together 🤝 #IFBC2025 #FungalBiology #Greece #Conference

📣 Meet our speakers! 🎤 🍄 Session 1 at IFBC-2025 explores fungal metabolism & development with top researchers in the field. 🧬 Join us in Chania, Greece this Sept! 🗒️ Submit abstract by July 25 🔗 ifbc2025.maich.gr #IFBC2025 #FungalBiology #Greece #Chania #Conference

The great Claudio Scazzocchio- fungal geneticist and polymath - giving keynote first talk in Chania - on the evolution of nitrogen utilization in eukaryotes #IFBC25

Engineering flowers as a means for public outreach and art! Dr. @nickdesnoyer.bsky.social reimagines Arabidopsis with new colors and shapes, blending plant biology, synthetic biology and creative arts! Hear him speak at SB 8.0 at the iGEM Grand Jamboree! jamboree.igem.org/2025/program...

Yesterday, @vgeshkovski.bsky.social and I were thrilled to officially introduce ourselves to @thesainsburylab.bsky.social 😎🔥 Food pictures were a highlight as usual 🍽️🍝

My department at UC Davis is hiring a mycologist, broadly interpreted. Please repost, share, and consider applying. recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07339

I am very sad to hear this news about Steve Long who I admired greatly and had the pleasure to work with on several occasions on various panels. He was a wise man of great intellect, a kind and thoughtful nature, and was an exceptional scientist. www.essex.ac.uk/blog/staff/p...

Sad news. Plant science has lost a global champion with the passing of Steve Long. His recent work on engineering enhanced photosynthesis portends future breakthroughs in crop yield and food security. Here is a tribute from the Uni Essex where started 🧪 #plantscience www.essex.ac.uk/blog/staff/p...

Merton College Chapel on rather an important day

We were delighted to welcome the President of the South China Agricultural University to TSL, as well as SCAU Deans and Deputy Deans, and share our exciting vision for plant-microbe research & innovation.

Multi-omics of barley Fusarium Head Blight converge on pathogen-triggered biosynthesis of aromatic amino acid derived chemical defense compounds https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.08.674812v1

Double-header @IPMBSinica agrofest seminars today @TheSainsburyLab with Erh-Min @erhminlai and Chih-hang @AdamWu9527 🇹🇼 #Agrobacterium #agrobacteria

Now we have Chih-hang Wu @IPMBSinica Taiwan 🇹🇼 at #PPATH2025 — Fast and Furious: What happens after helper NLR immune receptors are activated to cause hypersensitive cell death. See paper doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Next up at #PPATH2025 is Erh-Min @erhminlai all the way from @IPMBSinica Taipei 🇹🇼 / optimising Agrobacterium for plant gene editing; cool use of a RUBY red readout assay See the preprint doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Next up #PPATH2025 is Leena @Leena_Tripathi all the way from @IITA_CGIAR Ibadan, Nigeria 🇳🇬 on biotech solutions to Banana Streak Virus 🦠 and Banana Xanthomonas Wilt

BSPP Presidential address @bspp.bsky.social right now! Matt Dickinson on the lack of culture. That’s is phytoplasmas and rust fungi. #PPATH2025

Next at #PPATH2025 is Evans Lagudah @lag002 all the way from @CSIRO Australia 🇦🇺 to review disease resistance to wheat rusts

Everybody needs a friend! Elin Falla from the University of Cambridge is talking about companion plants to control non-persistently transmitted plant viruses.

Really cool new results from @fritzlaylin.bsky.social , they got actual working homology-directed transformation working in a chytrid fungus! There are so, so many interesting questions that still need explaining in this group, and molecular genetics can answer a lot! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Extreme views are heavily over-represented on social media Social platforms’ tendency to reward hostile content creates incentives that systematically reward simplistic messages and extreme positions and this fuels populism www.ft.com/content/9251... via @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

We bid farewell to Mauricio Contreras @mpcontreras4, who contributed so much to @TheSainsburyLab — not only through his outstanding science but also by fostering an open, collaborative, and supportive culture among students and postdocs. We’ll miss him!

🚨 Save the date! Thrilled to be co-organizing the next iteration of the @embl.org Symposium on the Cellular Mechanics of Symbiosis (📅 March 17-20), w/ @floravincent.bsky.social, @hassansalem.bsky.social & Tom Richards. www.embl.org/about/info/c... #EESSymbiosis #Symbiosis #SymbioSky #MicroSky 🦠

Random bench lichen assemblage, Shouldham churchyard this afternoon.

We have several open positions in my group, funded from the ERC Grant on the Early Sequestered Germline of Fungi. We search broadly for applicants at both PhD and master-level, with a dedicated interest in fungal evolutionary biology. Please forward and RT! Find the positions here: su.varbi.com

The stone keep of Norwich Castle dating from about 1094-1121. Still looking impressive! And another good habitat….

Gravestone of John Kett in Wymondham, probably a descendent in the family of the famous Kett’s Rebellion against Henry VIII - now a great habitat for lichens.

The most important news from today's reshuffle:

Now here is a statistic to keep me working for another decade or two....Alexandre Antonelli from Kew telling the Gatsby Network about the hidden potential of plant and fungal biodiversity

Gatsby Plant Sciences Network Meeting at Queen's College Oxford - some excellent and exciting PhD talks as always.

Winter barley already up only a few weeks after the spring barley was harvested. #Norfolk

Monolinia fructigena- doing what it does!

I don't think we fully grasped yet how important solar will be as an energy source. Great graph @carbonbrief.org based on @iea.org data.

Lichen-rich roof shingles on this Alpine hut in Slovenia. Love those red-top Cladonias.

The Trump tariffs are now costing companies and people their jobs in other countries. Lotus in the UK is cutting ~550 jobs or about 40% of their manufacturing workforce because of the tariffs. www.roadandtrack.com/news/a659221...

Stunning cryo-ET from Peijun Zhang lab: Direct visualization of HIV-1 nuclear import! Hundreds of viral cores captured entering the nucleus. The NPC dilates to let the capsid through. A masterclass in correlative microscopy that makes it quantitative. A leap for structural virology! @emboreports.org

New imaging setup for my micro-rose color prototyping 🌸🔬 This design has a wine red (#a53841) center radiating into muted salmon (#d47989) along the fringes ✨ 🧬

NEWS - Professor Yiliang Ding awarded prestigious Royal Society Faraday Discovery Fellowship These long-term @royalsociety.org awards are worth £8m over 10 years to support exceptional mid-career research leaders in the UK. Congratulations @yiliangding.bsky.social 👏 👉 www.jic.ac.uk/press-releas...

First a pentamer, then a hexamer… now an octamer! The riddle of the enigmatic CCG10-NLR immune receptor family cracked open 🔥 Congrats Guanghao @GuanghaoGuo He Zhang @mhz1989 Selva @M__Selvaraj et al. #NLRbiology #plantsci #immunology

Scientists uncovered how the immune protein ZNFX1 enables cells to walk the fine line between fighting infection & avoiding autoimmune damage. ZNFX1 can ubiquitinate & compact host & viral RNA into molecular condensates, extending ubiquitin biology to RNA itself. More: www.imp.ac.at/news/article...

New opportunity in the lab for a research assistant (technician), to support our BBSRC and @erc.europa.eu funded project @microclockerc.bsky.social on the Bacillus subtilis circadian clock. For this, we're looking for microbiology research experience #chronobiology www.jic.ac.uk/vacancies/re...

So excited to see our review on how to detect horizontal gene transfers and their impact on plant functional evolution finally published in @theplantcell.bsky.social! Great teamwork between @lrsv-toulouse.bsky.social and LGDP-Perpignan 😎🥳🌱 academic.oup.com/plcell/advan...

🌱✂️ How do plant cells decide where to divide? Our work shows that actin can override the geometric rules—guiding cells to divide in alternative orientations. #PlantScience #CellBiology #Arabidopsis @camilagoldy.bsky.social @rdplab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Rusts and Powdery Mildews aplenty today!

The King Oak at Fairhaven, Norfolk is almost 1000 years old- it would have been a sapling at the time of the Battle of Hastings in 1066.