Probably a reach here but I'm looking for someone (early career maybe) who would be willing to mentor me as I navigate the post-PhD life. I feel lost on a lot of things and would be grateful to bounce ideas and experiences with someone who's been through a couple of years post-PhD. 😭
🔥Fantastic paper!🔥
TE with a role in vegetative phase change and gametogenesis, mediated by 24-nt siRNAs acting in trans to a wide range of genes. Found by GWAS in A. thaliana 🌱. Congratulations to the authors! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
#epigenetics #plantscience
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
More than one senior faculty told me "it's gonna be okay Li, there is no way Congress will agree to the cuts to NSF & NIH by the White House." Guess what, the budget doesn't matter when Vought can just drag things out and not allocate funds to agencies.
Green leaves emerging through soil, creating cracks on the soil surface.
Pushing through the soil #Plants
A gel image with 9 lanes; construct 1: lanes 1-4; construct 2: lanes 5-8; ladder lane 9.
Haven’t been needing to do restriction digests for a while, but now I have to get back to it as a non-trivial portion of the clones didn’t have the correct assembly. 3/4 cut out the expected banding pattern for one construct and 2/4 for the other.
#JobAlert #PhD 🌱
We are offering a PhD project to explore how transcription factors have shaped the evolution of plant protective barriers.
We will support suitable candidates in applying to the @unistra.fr Graduate School competition.
Interested? Please get in touch for more information!
If we don't have an out for Vought, there is 3 more years of this nonsense.
Wow...So lucky that I landed a tenure track job 2025. Just learned that the NIH R01 that supported me at UGA (as a non-tenure track) hasn't been funded since Dec. 2025, as UGA didn't receive next year's funding from NIH. If I don't have my current job, I'd be out of funding & likely out of a job.
Or just take a picture, or make a graph. Good science is never short of good visuals. No need sloppy AI art.
🚨 PhD Position in Plant Molecular Biology 🌱
We are looking for a motivated PhD student to join our team to study root protective barriers. If you are interested in confocal microscopy, cell wall biology, and plant development, this project might be for you! Please share!
#PlantScience #PlantSciJob
The most impt change at #NIH and to US science this year is bigger than grant cancellations— it’s how the agency is governed.
For 75 years NIH has been largely independent of presidential control. That’s changed this year. New piece from me and @nataliebaviles.bsky.social in @nature.com
🧪
🌱 🚨Postdoc position – Plant Chromatin Biology (Strasbourg)
Grob and Jullien Lab - details attached
📅 Apply by March 30, 2026
📩 stefan.grob@cnrs.fr
Please share with anyone who might be interested!
#Postdoc #PlantScience #Epigenetics #Chromatin
Mutant alleles that affect pollen fitness can generate spatial inheritance patterns on maize ears – see the article by Ruggiero et al. Top Left: Maize pollen grains germinated on a silk, with pollen tubes (stained with aniline blue) growing into the silk interior. Image Credit: Caity Smyth. Bottom Left: Unpollinated maize ear with silks arranged to show that silks derived from ovules at the base of the ear are longer than silks from ovules at the ear apex. Image Credit: Elyse Vischulis. Right: Ear projection from a mature ear pollinated with the pollen from a plant heterozygous for the bag1*::Ds-GFP insertion, oriented apex-to-base top-to-bottom (as in bottom left ear/silk image). The GFP-marked bag1* allele is associated with a spatial pattern of fewer fluorescent kernels towards the base of the ear – i.e., kernels generated following pollen tube growth down the longest silks.
Very pleased to see this work from the group out in The Plant Journal - led by PhD student Diana Ruggiero from the Leiboff group, a truly collaborative project, addressing the question: how often does pollen genotype influence spatial patterns of inheritance? onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
First time ever for me: two constructs, each sent 2 clones for sequencing, nothing came back correct. Wow.
I am happy to announce the launch of a new Arabidopsis genomics resource! Check out arabidopsislyrata.org Now you can easily look at the natural genetic variation across the entire species range of A. lyrata and A. arenosa.
A blob of white signal staining the nuclei of kalanchoe foliar embryo
Close up of the foliar embryo with mRNA detected by fluorescence in situ hybridization. Green and red signals can be seen at the base of the embryo.
#MicroscopyMonday A kalanchoe foliar embryo emerging (white signal staining for DNA). STM (green signal) and WUS (red signal) mRNA can be detected at the basal region of the embryo. WUS has a more narrow expression domain.
Kit manufacturer: The reaction volume is 20 uL for 10 reactions.
Me: Hey everyone, the reaction volume is 5 uL for 40 reactions!
Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating).
A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)
Fluorescence microscopy image of a spherical cluster of chloroplasts, showing magenta-stained interiors surrounded by bright green outlines against a black background.
Moss (Physcomitrium patens) protoplasts (wallless cells) transformed with chloroplast envelope protein tagged with mGFP (green). The chlorophyll autofluorescence is in magenta.
The protrusions of the chloroplast envelope are called stromules.
#microscopymonday, #plantcells, #plantmicroscopy, #moss
A line graph showing the success rates for fiscal years 2015-2025 as a function of percentile score. The curve for fiscal year 2025 is substantially lower than for previous fiscal years.
With these results in hand, we can now reproduce the graph that @joshuasweitz.bsky.social posted.
It is still shocking, but we can now understand why it looks the way it does: The number of R01 and R56 awards were down while the number of applications were up.
16/20
The Jo Lab website is up!
thejolab.org
I expect to announce 1 PhD position and 1 Postdoc position in the spring of 2026 (April-May).
Stay tuned!
OpenAI announces ChatGPT is now at the level of real scientific reviewers, “It just tells you to do single-cell RNAseq in response to every query” says Sam Altman
New Article: "An NLR–transposase fusion gene from rye provides broadly effective resistance to stripe rust in wheat" rdcu.be/e7z39
Broad-spectrum stripe rust resistance gene Yr83 coned from rye; encodes a unique NLR–transposase fusion protein. #PlantScience
What should I look for as a reviewer for a manuscript that is a review article? I was asked to review a review article.
In animals with large genomes, finding cis-regulatory elements can be very challenging. Enhancers can be located tens/hundreds of kb away from their target promoters. We face this challenge in Parhyale, with >3 Gbp genome.
We just published a preprint describing how we are tackling this problem. /1
WRKY motifs are enriched in promoters of DE genes in WT but not in rrtf1 mutant. There is regulatory link between RRTF1 regulated genes and WRKY regulated genes.
rrtf1 mutant retained most of the core touch-responsive program. However, DE genes in rrtf1 mutant are enriched for WRKY binding sites. Pulling published DAP-seq data, we showed that there is a strong overlap btw RRTF1 regulated genes & genes bound by WRKY & touch responsive genes. #PlantScience
Sungkyu worked on AtRRTF1, a TF that is strongly & rapidly induced by touch (within 10 min after a single touch). rrtf1 displayed less touch-induced stunting under prolonged mechanical stimulation. While RRTF1 is induced by exogenous JA, applying exogenous JA did not rescue the phenotype.
