Omar Kamileen

Conserved and Divergent: Salicylic Acid Biosynthesis and Signaling Pathways across the Plant Kingdom #review #MolecularPlant cell.com/molecular-pl...

Bee-hunting beetles are the first animals known to fake the smell of flowers Study of parasitic blister beetles reveals a new form of chemical deception

How nature borrows ideas from nature. Ahh... beautiful work from Ryan Alam, a colleague and a dear friend of mine :)

Bee-hunting beetles are the first animals known to fake the smell of flowers | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Democratizing CRISPR? Legal complexity, access and the right to science - Nature Biotechnology How do intellectual property rights and licensing structures influence access to CRISPR technologies? Could the right to science act as a complementary legal instrument to promote socially beneficial ...

Democratizing CRISPR? Legal complexity, access and the right to science - @zlsr-unibas.bsky.social go.nature.com/4rZjTYt

A Stable Isotope Tracing Primer for the Mass Spectrometrist Metabolic function plays a key role in our understanding of both biological and pathophysiological processes. Metabolism is a complex combination of intrinsic processes and environmental cues across a...

A Stable Isotope Tracing Primer for the Mass Spectrometrist - Annual Review of Analytical Chemistry www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... @annualreviews.bsky.social

A dual role of Arabidopsis PAL nuclear localization in fine tuning flavonoid biosynthesis PAL’s dual localization links metabolism with transcription, revealing feedback that fine-tunes phenylpropanoid regulation.

Interesting paper: Metabolic enzyme PAL can go into the nucleus in response to high product build up and sequester an activating TF of the pathway, thus acting as a feedback inhibition loop.

From: www.science.org/doi/full/10....
#PlantScience

Paclitaxel saved my life. New discoveries could boost supply After decades, scientists have finally pieced together the 23-step biosynthetic pathway to produce this cancer drug

Lovely C&EN @cenmag.bsky.social story on the history and personal impact of the cancer drug Taxol. After spending recent years deciphering how yew trees, our source for Taxol, synthesize this lifesaving drug, it’s so nice to see it in the larger context #secmet #medsky
Plants are amazing chemists.

A geometric foundation model for enzyme retrieval with evolutionary insights - Nature Catalysis Predicting the function of enzymes remains difficult and current computational methods require improvement. Now EnzymeCAGE, a geometric deep learning model, has been developed to more accurately predi...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Synthetic Biology of Plants and Microbes for Agriculture, Environment, and Future Applications Agriculture is under pressure to provide food for a growing population and the feedstock required to drive the bioeconomy. Methods to breed and genetically modify plants are inadequate to keep pace. W...

Synthetic Biology of Plants and Microbes for Agriculture, Environment, and Future Applications | Chemical Reviews pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Expanding enzyme functionality through site-specific incorporation of noncanonical amino acids Enzymes are nature’s catalysts, capable of performing complex chemical transformations with remarkable precision and efficiency, yet their potential is confined by the chemistry of 20 canonical amino ...

Expanding enzyme functionality through site-specific incorporation of noncanonical amino acids: Trends in Biochemical Sciences www.cell.com/trends/bioch...

Spatial barcoding reveals reaction radii and contact-dependent mechanism of proximity labeling - Nature Chemical Biology A DNA nanoruler platform enables precise measurement of the labeling radii of TurboID and APEX2, uncovering their contact-dependent mechanisms. These findings redefine the enzymology of proximity labe...

Proximity labeling users: check out this study by @zhixingchen2.bsky.social and Peng Zou, which establishes how much contact-dependence vs. diffusion is responsible for biotinylation — tl;dr TurboID has a much smaller effective radius! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/2

Mass spectrometry imaging: principles and applications in plant research Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) is an advanced analytical technique that combines mass spectrometry with spatial mapping, enabling the direct, label-free detection and visualization of molecular dist...

Mass spectrometry imaging: principles and applications in plant research nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... @newphyt.bsky.social

Dopamine biosynthesis in plants https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.10.693491v1

Scikit-bio: a fundamental Python library for biological omic data analysis - Nature Methods Nature Methods - Scikit-bio: a fundamental Python library for biological omic data analysis

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Nicotine biosynthesis completed by cryptic activating glucosylation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.04.692101v1

Biosynthesis of biologically active terpenoids in the mint family (Lamiaceae) Covering: 2000 to 2025 The Lamiaceae family, the sixth largest among angiosperms, is renowned for its rich diversity of terpenoids, many of which exhibit remarkable bioactivities, including…

🔓Don't miss in our latest issue this #OpenAccess review by @maximilianfrey.bsky.social & co. @ipbhalle.bsky.social, @unihalle.bsky.social & @mpi-ce.bsky.social looking at the biosynthesis of biologically active terpenoids in the mint family #naturalproducts #secmet

Next-generation method for preparing plant cells for single-cell RNA sequencing - Nature Methods The plant cell wall makes the preparation of high-quality cells for single-cell RNA sequencing challenging. To tackle this issue, we developed FX-Cell, a method that enables the enzymatic digestion of...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A cloning strategy as depicted in the OpenCloning website

#OpenCloning is a an Open Source alternative to SnapGene/Benchling that supports automation and integration with other software

✅ Free
🔓 Open Source
🧬 More cloning methods than SnapGene
🤖 Can be automated with python
👨‍🔬 Built by a researcher — for researchers!

👉 Check it out at opencloning.org

Manufacturing the world's tiniest light-emitting diodes Researchers from ETH Zurich have manufactured organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) on a nanoscale – that’s around a hundred times smaller than a human cell. This not only enables ultra-sharp screens ...

Researchers have manufactured organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) on a nanoscale – that’s around a hundred times smaller than a human cell. This not only enables ultra-sharp screens and microscopes, but also opens up entirely novel possibilities for wave optics applications. ethz.ch/en/news-and-...

How does messenger RNA (mRNA) get out of the nucleus to become a protein? Eukaryotic mRNA is packaged, exported, and then translated in the cytoplasm. But how do these steps work? And what are open questions? Check out our new review for our take: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... (1/3)

CRISPR-Cas–mediated heritable chromosome fusions in Arabidopsis The genome of Arabidopsis thaliana consists of 10 chromosomes. By inducing CRISPR-Cas–mediated breaks at subcentromeric and subtelomeric sequences, we fused entire chromosome arms, obtaining two eight...

And now we have Arabidopsis plants with 8 chromosomes instead of 10 and no obvious phenotypic differences, this week in @science.org
#PlantScience
Paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Perspective here:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Multimodal learning enables chat-based exploration of single-cell data - Nature Biotechnology CellWhisperer uses multimodal learning of transcriptomes and text to answer questions about single-cell RNA-sequencing data.

Multimodal learning enables chat-based exploration of single-cell data - @bocklab.bsky.social @cemm.oeaw.ac.at @meduniwien.ac.at go.nature.com/3WPGJnW

How to write your paper like a page turner Working my way through scientific articles I often lose my focus.

Tension, suspense, or narrative arc in a story is the stuff that keeps the reader going. But how do you introduce suspense in a scientific article? That is what my latest post is all about.
aboutacademicwritingandzo.substack.com/p/how-to-wri...

#AcademicWriting #WritingTips #NarrativeArc #Suspense

Growth-coupled microbial biosynthesis of the animal pigment xanthommatin - Nature Biotechnology A growth-coupled biosynthetic pathway enables xathommatin synthesis in the soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida.

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Really fabulous work! Animal pigments engineered in bacteria.

Binary vector copy number engineering improves Agrobacterium-mediated transformation - Nature Biotechnology Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of plants and fungi is enhanced by plasmid copy number variants.

Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of plants and fungi is enhanced by plasmid copy number variants go.nature.com/3CdewQS
rdcu.be/eNaje

Excited to see our paper online! We combined scMS and scRNA-seq from the same plant cells 🌱 — a step toward true single-cell multi-omics in plants.
Overview 👇

Discovery and engineering of the biosynthesis of rotenoids - Nature Synthesis Rotenoids are natural insecticides from Fabaceae plants. Here the complete biosynthetic pathway to make rotenoids is elucidated in Amorpha fruticosa and Tephrosia vogelii, revealing a unique Fe(II)-de...

Discovery and engineering of the biosynthesis of rotenoids www.nature.com/articles/s44... @natsynth.nature.com

Discovery of iridoid cyclase completes the iridoid pathway in asterids - Nature Plants Iridoids are terpenoid metabolites found in thousands of plants. Using single-cell transcriptomics, the authors discovered an unexpected enzyme that has been neofunctionalized to catalyse the cyclization required to form the iridoid scaffold.

Very exciting to finally see our iridoid cyclase ICYC online @natplants.nature.com!
A joined effort with Robin Buell’s lab with Josh Wood generating snRNA-seq, and my student Chloée Tymen performing the initial experiment.
#natprod
#PlantScience
@mpi-ce.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Mapping multi-substrate specificity of Arabidopsis aminotransferases Nature Plants - Systematic characterization of Arabidopsis aminotransferase family enzymes uncovered many previously unrecognized activities and revealed their multi-substrate specificity, aspects...

Our new study in Nature Plants maps how "multi-tasking" enzymes in plants transfer nitrogen, a key step toward improving crop N use efficiency. 🌱

Big thanks to our collaborators from Max Planck, Hokkaido Univ, & MSU, and for support from @NSF and @DOE.

Learn more: rdcu.be/eFOFN

#PlantMetabolism

Discovery of homoharringtonine pathway enzymes reveals a whole plant model for coordinated biosynthesis Plants have evolved to produce diverse molecules that inhibit protein translation. A lead example is homoharringtonine (HHT), both a key tool for ribosomal profiling and an FDA-approved treatment for ...

Beautiful work by Yaereen and former lab member Kevin! Learn more about the anti-cancer compound homoharringtonine and its'biosynthesis in plants here 🌿https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.26.672243v1

The multilayered regulation of aromatic amino acid biosynthesis in plants The shikimate and aromatic amino acid (AAA) biosynthetic pathways are crucial for the production of L-phenylalanine (Phe), L-tyrosine (Tyr), and L-tryptophan (Trp), as well as vitamins, hormones, and ...

The multilayered regulation of aromatic amino acid biosynthesis in plants: Trends in Biochemical Sciences www.cell.com/trends/bioch...