The Week in Botany August 11, 2025
I’m enjoying Carlos’s series of interview posts. We’ve had some good ones recently with Laura Lagomarsino, Itumeleng Moroenyane, Ana Bedoya and last week, Duarte Figueiredo. This week it’s Juliane K. Ishida, and once again there’s some encouragement about what to do, when things don’t go as you hoped.
I’m hoping I won’t need that encouragement, as this week I plan to move the mailing list across to WordPress from Buttondown. If all works as it should, you should notice no difference. If something glitches, then you’ll be listed as receiving EVERY post as an email, which at 11 posts this week, would be much more than you signed up for. My plan is to switch the list over on Friday afternoon, just before the last post of the week comes out. If the system behaves, I get the weekend off. If it doesn’t then I have the weekend to work out either how to fix or else reset the mailing list so it does work properly.
So I’m hoping the next email you receive from me will be another email of the papers and the news stories you’re sharing on Mastodon and Bluesky next week. Until next time, take care.
Alun (webmaster@botany.one)
On Botany One
Why won’t Marion Island’s stubborn soil feed its starving plants?
Only invasive weeds thrived when scientists warmed island soil, while native plants stayed hungry despite being surrounded by potential food.
Dear Substackers
An explanation of why we don’t use Substack for our mailing list, and maybe you shouldn’t too.
Juliane K. Ishida: From Grandmother’s Garden to the Frontiers of Parasitic Plants
Botany One interviews Dr. Juliane Ishida who has gone miles —literally — to undercover the mysteries of parasitic plants.
No need to put a ring on it
Digital images of herbarium specimens can be used to non-destructively measure woody plant growth and assess response to climate change in the Arctic.
When Pollinators and Flowers Have Timing Issues
Some plants don’t flower at the same time as their pollinators are most active, and this mismatch can actually help keep a wide variety of flower shapes and sizes in nature by changing which traits are most useful at different times.
…and last’s week’s Week in Botany with a plant that's gone its own way, how you can know a tree as an individual and Duarte Figueiredo on the hidden complexity of plant biology.
News & Views
‘Sponge City’: How Copenhagen Is Adapting to a Wetter Future
Climate change is bringing ever more precipitation and rising seas to low-lying Denmark. In response to troubling predictions, Copenhagen is enacting an ambitious plan to build hundreds of nature-based and engineered projects to soak up, store, and redistribute future floods.
For farms struggling with commercial bee loss, California native plants and bees could be key
California is home to 1,600 species of native bees — nearly 10% of the world's bee species. These pollinators evolved alongside local ecosystems, crops and climates — and are responsible for pollinating the vast majority of flowering plants. But for decades, U.S. farms have relied on just one fragile species: the European honeybee.
Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds
A statistical analysis found that the number of fake journal articles being churned out by “paper mills” is doubling every year and a half.
See also: A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise
‘Seek Funding’ Step Added To Scientific Method
The Onion, again demonstrating its serious news chops.
The Talipot Palm Produces 24 Million Flowers, “The Most Prolific Sexual Spectacle Of The Plant Kingdom”
Not a plant I was familiar with.
The Biology of Plants Coloring Textbook
The Biology of Plants Coloring Textbook was created by Dr. Rachel S. Jabaily (Colorado College Dept. Organismal Biology & Ecology) and M.G.B. Hurst (Colorado College class of 2025) with a grant from the Charles L. Tutt Library Open Education Curriculum Development Grant. The BPCT is meant to serve introductory level undergraduate students. The BPCT is structured as a condensed textbook, lab manual, and interactive workbook designed to engage the students before, during, and after the in-class sessions. And it’s free to download.
h/t Karolina Heyduk
The peer-review crisis: how to fix an overloaded system
Journals and funders are trying to boost the speed and effectiveness of review processes that are under strain.
By changing our diets now, we can avoid the food chaos that climate change is bringing
Climate change is pushing up the prices of the food that we buy and therefore changing what we eat. One-third of UK food price increases in 2023 resulted from climate change, according to research by agricultural economists. This extra cost contributed to food price inflation and the UK’s cost-of-living crisis.
How researcher visa curbs threaten science careers
Anti-immigration sentiment is fuelling a drive to slash international student and worker numbers, but at what cost to researchers and countries leading the charge?
This Week in Botany
5 Years Ago: 3D aquatic plant carnivory by the waterwheel plant and deformed snap-traps
10 Years Ago: Where have all the Botany degree Schemes gone?
15 Years Ago: Bacteria and plants entangled in Research Blogging
Scientific Papers
Phylogenomics and metabolic engineering reveal a conserved gene cluster in Solanaceae plants for withanolide biosynthesis (FREE)
Withanolides are steroidal lactones from nightshade (Solanaceae) plants with untapped drug potential due to limited availability of minor representatives caused by lack of biosynthetic pathway knowledge. Hakim et al combine phylogenomics with metabolic engineering to overcome this limitation. By sequencing the genome of the medicinal plant ashwagandha (Withania somnifera) and comparing it with nine Solanaceae species, they discover a conserved withanolide biosynthesis gene cluster, consisting of two sub gene clusters with differing expression patterns.
The unique morphological basis and repeated evolutionary origins of personate flowers in Penstemon (FREE)
Depatie & Wessinger examined the morphological basis and evolutionary history of personate flowers in a clade of Penstemon species that includes three personate-flowered species. They characterized floral morphology and inferred phylogenetic relationships for 13 species in this group to examine the evolutionary history of personate flowers.
Tree rings reveal persistent Western Apache (Ndee) fire stewardship and niche construction in the American Southwest (FREE)
Indigenous fire stewardship—the practice of using controlled fire to achieve cultural goals—was well documented in contemporary communities and in the ethnographic record but has often been undetected in historical fire records. Roos et al use well-replicated tree-ring records from Western Apache homelands in Arizona to show that fire regimes here were structured by Indigenous fire stewardship for centuries even as many fire regimes elsewhere in the region were driven primarily by lightning ignitions and climate over the last few millennia.
The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly ($)
Numerous recent scientific and journalistic investigations demonstrate that systematic scientific fraud is a growing threat to the scientific enterprise. In large measure this has been attributed to organizations known as research paper mills. Richardson et al uncover footprints of activities connected to scientific fraud that extend beyond the production of fake papers to brokerage roles in a widespread network of editors and authors who cooperate to achieve the publication of scientific papers that escape traditional peer-review standards.
Nurse plant shading is more important than soil fertility for dryland plant recruitment and diversity ($)
Using reciprocal soil transplants among pairs of unvegetated interspaces and neighbouring shrubs in combination with cover treatments—open interspace, shaded interspace, intact shrub canopy and trimmed shrub canopy—this study aimed to disentangle the influences of shading from soil properties in native plant recruitment under the foundation species of shrubs Larrea tridentata and Neltuma glandulosa in the Chihuahuan Desert, NM, USA.
Anthropogenic warming drives earlier wildfire season onset in California (FREE)
Using a comprehensive fire occurrence dataset, Madakumbura et al analyze fire season onset and climate controls on its variability and change during 1992–2020 in 13 California ecoregions. Northern California ecoregions show stronger trends toward earlier onset compared to more arid southern California ecoregions.
Antagonistic interactions between CLAVATA receptors shape maize ear development (FREE)
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. Weak alleles of fea3 can increase yield-related traits in maize, so understanding how FEA3 controls inflorescence development can maximize its potential as a crop improvement target. To identify FEA3′s interaction network, Lindsay et al used TurboID-based proximity labeling in maize meristems, and identified a putative co-receptor, BARELY ANY MERISTEM 1D (BAM1D). BAM1D and FEA3 proximity labeling proteomes shared over 100 proteins, including many signaling proteins, suggesting they feed into a common signaling pathway.
Optical observations of embolism in three conifers overestimate the vulnerability of stem xylem to hydraulic dysfunction (FREE)
Hydraulic failure due to drought stress is a major cause of forest decline. Many techniques have been developed to test the vulnerability of trees to drought-induced xylem embolism, each with advantages and limitations. Losso et al quantified drought vulnerability using optical vulnerability and ultrasonic acoustic emission (UAE) techniques by performing simultaneous measurements on branches of three conifers (Picea abies, Pinus sylvestris, and Pinus cembra).
The Moment Symmetry Breaks: Spatiotemporal Dynamics of CYCLOIDEA Expression During Early Floral Development (FREE)
The establishment of bilateral symmetry in flowers depends on the precise regulation of CYCLOIDEA (CYC) gene expression along the dorsal-ventral axis. Although auxin and BLADE-ON-PETIOLE (BOP) have been implicated as regulators of CYC, when, where, and how they affect CYC expression remains unclear. Min et al combined transgenic manipulation and fluorescent confocal imaging to capture the spatiotemporal dynamics of the Mimulus parishii CYC genes (MpCYC2a and MpCYC2b) in relation to FM growth and auxin activity maxima in both wild type (WT) and bop mutants (mpbop).
An in planta single-cell screen to accelerate functional genetics (FREE)
Genetic screens in whole plants are a powerful tool for functional genetics. However, elucidating gene function in highly redundant genetic programs such as signaling pathways remains challenging in both model and non-model plants. Lowensohn et al report a single-cell screening platform, PIVOT (Protoplast Isolation after Virus Overexpression in planTa), to accelerate identification and functional characterization of plant genes.
In AoBC Publications
Divergent evolutionary trajectories of male and female investment in the Brassicaceae (FREE)
Thermal behaviour of lipids in short-lived seeds of Australian rainforest species (FREE)
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.
Teaching & Research Lecturer in Forestry/Agroforestry, Bangor
We invite applications to a full-time, permanent Lectureship in Forestry or Agroforestry. We welcome applicants with expertise in forestry and agroforestry systems, restoration, urban forestry or in forest/tree health (including the biology of tree pathogens or pests). The focus of their teaching and research at Bangor will be to use this expertise to underpin sustainable agroforestry and forest management for the delivery of multiple ecosystem services and key international policy objectives.
Community Manager, the Node, Cambridge
The Company of Biologists and its journal Development are seeking to appoint a new Community Manager to run its successful community website ‘the Node’ and the journal’s social media activities.
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Oxford
The Department of Biology is seeking to recruit a Postdoctoral Research Associate for 6 months (ending no later than 18th April 2026 currently). This post is financially supported by funds from a BBSRC grant awarded to Prof Francesco Licausi. The work is to be conducted in the Life and Mind Building, Department of Biology, University of Oxford. The postholder will work on the molecular mechanisms that control the response to low oxygen conditions in Marchantia polymorpha. They will contribute both to the practical work with plants but also some bioinformatics work on protein structure and function prediction.
Research Associate, Oxford
The Department of Biology is seeking to recruit a Research Associate for 12 months. This post is financially supported by funds from the ARIA project OPTIMiSE. The work is to be conducted in his lab in the Department of Biology, South Parks Road Building. The postholder will support the group with general lab activities and plant growth. The group works with a variety of plant species including Solanum tuberosum as models to investigate opportunities to improve crop yield under heat and high-light conditions.
JYU Visiting Fellow Programme 2026, Jyväskylä
The University of Jyväskylä (JYU), Finland, invites applications for the JYU Visiting Fellow Programme 2026. The programme supports researchers with a doctoral degree, who are from outside Finland, to visit JYU for one (30 calendar days) to three months (90 calendar days) in 2026.
Doctoral Researcher (15 positions), Joensuu or Kuopio
In the position of a Doctoral Researcher (PhD Student), you will work at the Faculty of Science, Forestry and Technology of the University of Eastern Finland. The duties of a Doctoral Researcher (PhD Student) include working on their doctoral dissertation within the doctoral programme in accordance with their approved research proposal. The aim is to complete the doctoral degree within 3-4 years of full-time study, regardless of the funding source. The topics of doctoral research must be linked to the fields of research represented in the faculty.
PhD student in Plant Molecular Biology (M/F/X), Strasbourg
This project aims to investigate how small RNA mobility contributes to plant stress adaptation, with a particular focus on long-distance transport from maternal somatic tissues to reproductive tissues. Using transgenic DNA hairpins and sensor constructs, we will explore whether small RNAs can move from the mother plant (sporophyte) into the next generation (gametes, endosperm, or embryo). The PhD student will characterize this movement and study the vascular and cytoplasmic connections in reproductive tissues using electron and confocal microscopy, with a focus on ovules and seeds where vascular tissues terminate.
Researcher in Plant Molecular Biology (M/F), Strasbourg
The successful candidate will work on bacterial infections in Arabidopsis, conducting a broad range of genetic and molecular analyses including PCR, qPCR, genetic crosses, and phenotypic assessments. They will perform standard molecular biology techniques such as cloning and RNA and DNA extraction, as well as carry out epigenomic and transcriptomic experiments to investigate how chromatin modifications influence plant defense. The role also involves classical and confocal microscopy of plant tissues, with an emphasis on developing imaging approaches specifically adapted to studying infected plants. In addition, the candidate will help establish FACS protocols, generate transgenic lines, and integrate diverse datasets to advance the objectives of the project.
Group leader (m/f/d) | Plant Development and Diversity, Cologne
The successful applicant will be expected to build an independent research group to study plant development and/or its natural variation and to collaborate on active research projects in the Department. Of particular interest are candidates that incorporate computational approaches in their research, and dry lab scientists are also welcome to apply.
Postdoctoral researcher Enabling plant protein concentrates for extrusion, Wageningen
Are you a talented doctoral graduate who has a passion for doing research on development of sustainable processing technologies for making plant protein ingredients? Do you want to perform dry fractionation and agglomeration trials to improve functionality of legume ingredients? Do you want to understand rheology of hydrated ingredient blends to predict extrusion behaviour for meat analogue processing? We have a vacancy for a postdoc position at the Laboratory of Food Process Engineering!
Tècnic/a de Comunicació, Barcelona
L’IBB busca un/a Tècnic/a de Comunicació altament motivat/ada per donar suport, durant un any, a la comunicació interna i externa del centre. Les seves funcions inclouran accions de divulgació científica, educació ambiental i relacions públiques, amb l’objectiu de reforçar la visibilitat i el posicionament del centre, així com de fomentar la cultura científica. El perfil ideal combina formació científica o en comunicació, amb habilitats en redacció, disseny gràfic i gestió de continguts multimèdia.
Associate Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Resistance Biology, Alnarp
The Faculty of Landscape Planning, Horticulture and Plant Production Sciences is announcing a position as an Assistant Professor in Resistance Biology. The Assistant Professor will be based in Alnarp at the Department of Plant Protection Biology, an interdisciplinary constellation where research in resistance biology, integrated plant protection and chemical ecology develops sustainable use and management of biological resources.
Faculty Position in Life Science Engineering, Lausanne
The School of Life Sciences at EPFL invites applications for a faculty position in life science engineering. Appointments will be at Tenure Track Assistant Professor or at Associate Professor level. We seek individuals who will develop and lead a research program at the forefront of the discipline and who will also be committed to excellence in undergraduate and graduate teaching.
Three NOMIS Fellowships 100%, Basel
eikones - Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the University of Basel. The center invites applications from outstanding junior and senior researchers in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences for three one-year NOMIS Fellowships beginning September 1, 2026.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Canterbury
Lincoln University (NZ) offers a two-year fixed term role to advance sustainable agriculture through innovative research on fungal-plant interactions in a collaborative, cross-disciplinary environment.