“The University of Illinois Just Released a Popcorn So Good It Doesn’t Need Butter
A crop scientist and two brewers spent nearly a decade breeding a better popcorn — and you can taste the difference.”
Excerpt From:
apple.news/A-iMFrAidRDS...
This is really beautiful work by PhD student Alexandre Porcher Fernandes (@alefern.bsky.social) on the evolution of reproductive strategies. I'm really keen to see where we can take this framework next!
Interactive XKCD 🔗
editor.p5js.org/isohedral/fu...
Schematic representation of the proposed processes of reverse translation: from peptides to DNA. Cleavage I: the aminopeptidase (blue) processively cleaves the peptide bonds at the N terminus of a peptide (pink), releasing free amino acids.
One of the most-viewed PNAS articles in the last week is “From peptides to DNA: All required steps can be catalyzed.” Explore the article here: https://ow.ly/Pa4q50YrSfY
For more trending articles, visit https://ow.ly/jUm050YrSg0.
I am SO THRILLED to share our first fully-lab lab paper!!!!!! Led by @hybridzones.bsky.social & @hagarsoliman.bsky.social, w/ a major assist from @pfschwarz.bsky.social!!!!!!!!!!!!! Read more below, if you're curious (you should be- it's AWESOME!!!!!!!)
link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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. 😭
Agrivoltaics follow traditional utility-scale solar layouts, modified to allow light penetration and accommodate crop growth, harvesting equipment, and farmer access beneath and between panel rows.
Putting solar panels on farms sounds like a possible win-win, but the mixed use of space can create competition for access to sun. A modeling study identifies semiarid places in the Midwest where the panels would help by mitigating heat and water stress. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/HJmF50YrTTu
Unseasonably warm temperatures, driven by #ClimateChange, are increasing severe storm risk across parts of the Midwest today.
What features are required to shape hypoxic niches enclosing meristems? We @viktoriiavoloboeva.bsky.social in collab @pieterverboven.bsky.social found that a combination of cuticle barrier, densely packed tissue and metabolic activity all uniquely contribute to maintain shoot apical meristem hypoxia
Congrats all!! Been fun watching this work come together from afar!
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/...
How to choose a sweet cherry tree. All of these are self fertile, hardy, and decent on disease/cracking resistance.
Lapin - Highest yield and more 'rich' flavor
Black Gold - Easy to grow, less yield than lapin, clean flavor
Sweetheart - Late season. Rich flavor
Stella - Early Season. Clean Flavor
Marie Maynard Daly co-discovered the link between high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and the clogged arteries that can cause heart disease and strokes. She also studied the damage that cigarettes have on the heart & lungs. adalovelaceday.subst...
Common Plant Proteins Found to Calm the Immune System 🧪 🧬 #AcademicSky #higherEd
www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @microbiometcell.bsky.social @rachellegaudet.bsky.social @dulaclab.bsky.social @rivaselenarivas.bsky.social @science.org @harvard.edu
I am also shocked by the lack of coverage of this fire. It’s so far only affecting the Union Street buildings, but one of those has partially collapsed, from what I can tell backwards into the station. And it’s not yet contained. This is major and more than halfway down BBC’s homepage.
🌿 Postdoc opportunity in plant evolutionary ecology/genetics!
My lab in the Dept. of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan is recruiting a postdoctoral researcher to start Fall 2026.
We study plant adaptation, using weeds as model systems.
#Postdoc #EcoEvo
Pls RT!
As someone who is a chronic pacer as part of my writing process, leg injuries are THE WORST…
A detailed digital composite image based on the 1947 historical photograph of geneticist Barbara McClintock. McClintock, with her characteristic short hair and round glasses, is seated at a microscope, using tweezers in a Petri dish. While based on the original photo distributed for her AAUW award, this image presents a significantly expanded and fictionalized laboratory environment. The simple wooden workbench is now densely populated with a vast, colorized collection of complex glassware, numerous amber-colored reagent bottles, intricate distillation columns, and botanical specimens relevant to maize cytogenetics, creating a rich, illustrative narrative of her "jumping gene" research context that was not present in the original photo. The expanded background shows complex vintage laboratory cabinetry. This image explicitly states it is a composite: a digital recreation where Seriously Scientific has taken the historical figure and placed them into an augmented, complex fictionalized environment. Based on original source from Smithsonian Institution Archives. Digital composite by Seriously Scientific.
Remembering Barbara McClintock on International Women's Day!
She discovered that genes aren't static, they can actually "jump" around on a chromosome.
Her discovery of transposons ("jumping genes") fundamentally changed how we understand evolution and the complexity of DNA! 🧬🌽
#WomenInScience
#SpatialTranscriptomics
Optimizing Xenium In Situ data utility by quality assessment & best-practice analysis workflows
Must-read for Xenium user🔥
👉Segmentation
👉Spatially variable feature selection
👉Imputation
👉Spatial domain identification
#NatMethods 2025
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🔊A long time ago in a microscopic galaxy far, far away....
🎬Episode IV - A NEW MICROSCOPE 🔬
"It is period of cellular rebellion. Arabidopsis root cells have won first victory against the dark forces of DNA damage"
Thanks to @dvonwangenheim.bsky.social and new i3 spinning disk @the.3i.social
Excited to share this preprint that describes my latest work on using GPUs to accelerate processing of RNA-seq data.
The title says it all: "RNA-seq analysis in seconds using GPUs" now on biorxiv www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... and github github.com/pachterlab/k...
Figure 1 shows they key result
HCR is gonna be such a fantastic technique for the field of developmental biology in the years going forward
Please check out our new preprint! Using single cell analysis paired with HCR to visualize transcript localization we have identified cell and tissue-specific expression of various genes encoding tubulins, kifs, and dyneins during neural crest development!
Ummm... Excuse me, can I help you find something?
If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!
Our work on #hornwort #pyrenoids is finally out in @science.org! 🎉 We uncovered how hornworts pack their Rubisco into pyrenoids and successfully recreated them in Arabidopsis. A key step toward engineering more efficient photosynthesis in crops @btiscience.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
An odd little plant—the hornwort—just gave scientists a blueprint for how to make crops more efficient.
New paper out today in Science from BTI, Cornell & the University of Edinburgh. Here's why it matters: btiscience.org/explore-bti/...
This Brazilian frog might be the first pollinating amphibian known to science Nectar-loving tree frog likely moves pollen from flower to flower
It’s the first time a frog—or any amphibian—has been observed pollinating a plant, researchers reported in 2023.
Learn more on #WorldWildlifeDay: https://scim.ag/4riUU1G
Researchers in the US might be having feelings about writing grants atm-I know I am!
We still need to write them. In this Evolution Exchange, I again chat with Sam Scheiner, who summarizes how to write a competitive proposal.
His advice is gold, and helpful regardless of funder. Pls RT!
<reads in Adam Sandler voice>
