Is anyone having good weather at the moment? Storms from the Arctic are making the news in my hemisphere, but the temperatures in Australia seem horrific at the moment. My sympathies to everyone suffering from cold, heat, rain and drought.

There’s just the one item on site this week. It’s due to a combination of migraine affecting what I can do, and the forthcoming switch to Ghost as our platform. This is proving to be a lot of work, so we might not have a lot out during February. I have an increasing list of actual botany I want to work on once the bulk of coding and data management is out of the way. This week’s surprising side-effect of the transfer is that I might be able to improve how we work with ORCiD under the new system. This is an ID system for researchers. I wrote something about it over ten years ago, so it’s probably time to revisit it. But not this week.

However, even if the workload stops me from writing anything this week, there will still be another email of the papers and the news stories you’re sharing on Mastodon and Bluesky at the same time next week. Until next time, take care.

Alun (webmaster@botany.one)

On Botany One

More Heart than Logic: What Drives a Scientist to Pursue Botany?
A study of botanists’ pathways shows that if we want experts capable of addressing tomorrow’s challenges, we must start by cultivating their curiosity and awe.

…and last’s week’s Week in Botany with protective spirits, urban jungles, close contact and more.

News & Views

Joshua trees are flowering in the Calif. desert. That’s bad news.
Joshua trees normally start flowering in February. This year, the bloom started in late October.

Thousands of scientists inflate their CVs with self-published studies that cost millions of dollars of public money
An analysis of 100,000 special issues of academic journals reveals that one in eight is filled with articles written by the editor, particularly at the publisher MDPI.

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.

U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office
A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies.

Sex without crossovers mimics clonal reproduction in the holocentric plant Rhynchospora tenuis (FREE)
Meiotic recombination ensures accurate chromosome segregation and promotes genetic diversity by generating crossovers between homologous chromosomes. While essential in most sexually reproducing organisms, recombination is variably regulated and can be absent in some lineages, a condition known as achiasmy. However, obligate achiasmy in both sexes of a sexual species has not been previously documented. Zhang et al investigate the beak-sedge Rhynchospora tenuis, a holocentric plant with the lowest known chromosome number among flowering plants (n = 2) and inverted meiosis.

OpenAI’s latest product lets you vibe code science
Prism is a ChatGPT-powered text editor that automates much of the work involved in writing scientific papers.
Reception of this has been sceptical, in much the same way that the Great Wall of China is a bit of a stroll.

What Americans Lose If Their National Center for Atmospheric Research Is Dismantled
Five ways dismantling NCAR will cost the American people, and two ways to save it.

Plant Breeding Innovation Clears Next Hurdle for EU NGT Framework
The European Parliament’s Committee on the Environment (ENVI) has approved, by a strong majority, the compromise text on the NGT Regulation agreed in trilogue with the Council and the Commission in early December. This vote is an important step toward formal adoption.

How tree rings help scientists understand disruptive extreme solar storms
Scientists have long relied on tree rings to learn about ancient solar storms—rare bursts of high-energy particles from the sun that can disrupt satellites, power grids and communication systems across the planet. When these particles hit Earth’s atmosphere, they create a radioactive form of carbon that trees absorb and store in their wood. A study published this week in New Phytologistshows that trees don’t all record this carbon in the same way.

Can pollen save coral reefs?
Sporopollenin, a tough substance found in pollen, inspired the creation of a new sunscreen. This sunscreen, made from tea pollen microgel, effectively blocks UV-B rays and prevents coral bleaching, unlike traditional sunscreens.

What are ‘exploding trees’? The winter phenomenon may not be what you think
John Seiler was strolling across Virginia Tech’s campus with his students Thursday morning when something stopped them in their tracks: a sweet cherry tree with an unusual jagged scar running along its trunk.

This Week in Botany

5 Years Ago: Coffee and the Leaf Economics Spectrum: size matters

10 Years Ago: Burning trees? Give me a break…

15 Years Ago: Agriculture that’s out of this world

Scientific Papers

Linking Community-Climate Disequilibrium to Ecosystem Function ($)
Stemkovski et al develop a simple theoretical model to address both of these problems by linking community-climate disequilibrium with ecosystem functioning. They show how disequilibrium can impair functioning in the near-term even when climate change is expected to enhance functioning in the long-term.

Contrasting pathways to tree longevity in gymnosperms and angiosperms (FREE)
Brienen et al assemble a global database of maximum longevity for 739 tree species and analyse associations between longevity and climate, soil, and species’ functional traits. Their results show two primary pathways towards long lifespans. The first is slow growth in resource-limited environments, consistent with the “adversity begets longevity” paradigm. The second pathway is through relief from abiotic constraints in productive environments.

Antagonistic interactions between CLAVATA receptors shape maize ear development ($)
Meristem activity is controlled by the CLAVATA (CLV) signaling pathway, which involves a suite of leucine-rich receptor (LRR) receptors, receptor-like proteins, and CLV-EMBRYO SURROUNDING REGION (CLE) peptide ligands. FASCIATED EAR 3 (FEA3) is a leucine-rich receptor (LRR) receptor-like protein important for meristem maintenance in maize and acts independently of canonical CLV receptors. To identify FEA3’s interaction network, Lindsay et al used TurboID-based proximity labeling in Zea mays meristems and identified a putative co-receptor, BARELY ANY MERISTEM 1D (BAM1D).

Decoding plant defense signaling using the defenseless mutant (FREE)
Can plants live without defenses? Mutant analysis in Arabidopsis thaliana has identified numerous regulators of biotic, abiotic, and hormone-based defenses, but the redundancy among separate defense pathways remains unexplored. Baral & Brosché constructed an Arabidopsis mutant, defenseless, lacking six canonical defense pathways using abi1-1(abscisic acid), coi1 (jasmonic acid), sid2 (salicylic acid), ein2(ethylene), eds1 (biotic defense signaling), and rbohD(apoplastic reactive oxygen species production), enabling dissection of defense network resilience.

The global extent of the grassland biome and implications for the terrestrial carbon sink ($)
Land cover data are commonly used to model the terrestrial carbon (C) sink, yet these data have wide margins of error that significantly alter estimates of global C storage. MacDougall et al demonstrate this data vulnerability in grasslands, which are critical to C cycling but whose estimated distribution has varied by >50 million km2 (3.5–42% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface).
Read free via ReadCube: https://rdcu.be/e1KLa

Global functional shifts in trees driven by alien naturalization and native extinction ($)
Guo et al analysed functional traits and environmental niches of 31,001 tree species worldwide, comparing naturalized, threatened and non-threatened species to assess current patterns and project future shifts under intensified extinction and naturalization.
Read free via ReadCube: https://rdcu.be/e1KXA

From growth potential to drought survival: a trait- and time-based framework for plant water economics across vascular species (FREE)
Volaire et al built a three-phase physiological model incorporating both plant traits and time as a gradient of decreasing water availability, which allowed the identification of traits involved in maximizing growth potential (Phase I), growth/turgor maintenance during drought (Phase II – drought resistance), or survival after growth cessation (Phase III – drought survival).

Aging drives a program of DNA methylation decay in plant organs ($)
DNA methylation typically represses the expression of transposable elements. Studying this process in a short-lived plant, Dai et al. found that epigenetic silencing of transposable elements declined as organs aged. However, this epigenetic aging did not occur in the self-renewing stem cell pools of shoot apical meristems, thereby resetting the aging clock in newly formed organs.

GLADE: Accurate inference of Gains, Losses, Ancestral genomes, and Duplication Events for comparative genomics (FREE)
Belcher & Kelly present GLADE, a tool that accurately reconstructs gene gains, losses, and duplications for a set of species under consideration and uses this information to infer ancestral gene contents for every speciation event in the species tree. GLADE requires as input only a standard OrthoFinder results directory, and outputs the full evolutionary history of every orthogroup, including branch-specific changes and reconstructed ancestral genomes.

Paralleled Dynamics of Arabidopsis Root Exudation and SynCom Assembly in a Controlled Environment (FREE)
Joller et al compared two microcosm systems commonly used in either root microbiome (clay particle-based) or root exudate studies (glass bead-based) for their suitability to simultaneously monitor both aspects. They evaluated these systems based on plant performance, bacterial growth, and time-resolved community and exudate profiling.

Germline fate determination by a single ARGONAUTE protein in Ectocarpus (FREE)
ARGONAUTE (AGO) proteins are central regulators of gene expression in multicellular eukaryotes, mediating developmental processes through interactions with small RNAs. While extensively studied in plants and animals, the diversity of AGO function across independently evolved multicellular lineages remains poorly understood. Using brown algae as a comparative model, Bukhanets et al demonstrate that a single AGO protein can direct key developmental transitions and germline specification likely through posttranscriptional regulation.

In AoBC Publications

Careers

Note: These are posts that have been advertised around the web. They are not posts that I personally offer, nor can I arrange the visa for you to work internationally.

PhD, Watering the flowers: gene x environment control of water use during Brassica napus inflorescence development, Durham
When to water the flowers? As climate change starts to affect our world, drought and warming are already affecting agricultural productivity. Oilseed rape is a major crop, and warmer winters affect the development of its flowers and its productivity. Drought can also reduce the number of flowers the plant produces as it tries to conserve water, reducing yields. We have already used state-of-the-art timelapse photography and computer vision techniques to explore the development of the flowering shoot with warmer and cooler ‘winter’ treatments, looking at a wide range of oilseed rape genotypes in a glasshouse. In this project, we want to analyse the water use of these plants over time, using a range of existing data to identify and characterise the genes controlling these traits, using bioinformatic techniques like Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) and Associative Transcriptomics (AT).

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Oxford
The Mosher lab is searching for a postdoctoral research associate to lead a project visualizing small RNAs during seed development. Plants produce abundant siRNAs from a small number of loci during reproduction. These siRNAs are produced in parental somatic cells and influence development of fertilized tissues (10.1073/pnas.2001332117, 10.1093/plcell/koac197), however the precise location of their expression and action are unknown. This project aims to understand the spatiotemporal expression of these siRNAs at the cellular level through imaging approaches.

PhD position (m/f/d, E13 TV-L, 65%), Tübingen
Our newly established group studies the structural basis of the changes occurring in molecular complexes during cellular transitions. Specifically, this project will investigate the cellular architecture of the appressorium, a specialized cell used by fungal pathogens to invade the host. You will apply cutting-edge imaging technologies such as volumetric EM, cryo-ET and state-of-the-art image segmentation to study changes in the cellular architecture of diverse fungal pathogens during the establishment of infection.

Postdoc position (m/f/d, E 13 TV-L, 100%), Tübingen
Our newly established group studies the structural basis of the changes occurring in molecular complexes during cellular transitions. Specifically, you will investigate the structural basis of the formation of the appressorium, a specialized cell used by fungal pathogens to invade the host. You will apply cutting-edge imaging technologies such as volumetric EM and cryo-ET to study macromolecular complexes within Magnaporthe oryzae, the causal agent of the destructive blast disease decimating rice and wheat crops worldwide.

Full Professor and Chair Laboratory of Biophysics, Wageningen
The position of chair at the Laboratory of Biophysics offers you the opportunity to shape and expand your own research lines in synergy with the group’s staff, while also developing your academic leadership profile. In this role, you are responsible for both the academic and operational management of the group. Your responsibilities will include setting up the research strategy together with your team, guiding a diverse team of scientists, lecturers, and support staff, and further strengthening the group’s national and international standing. In addition, you will contribute to high-quality education at the BSc, MSc, and PhD levels and help drive innovation in teaching.

Assistant Professor in Biology, Uppsala
We welcome you if you are a researcher or teacher in biology in the broadest sense. You will contribute to the development of research and teaching at one of the departments of Cell and Molecular Biology, Ecology and Genetics, or Organismal Biology