The Week in Botany December 15, 2025
I feel like the end of 2025 is coming far sooner than it should and that it’s been a long year at the same time. Winter has definitely landed in the garden with the last leaves falling from the bushes.
We’re getting to the end of our work for this year here. Next week will be the last email of the year, with a return on January 5. I’ll be out of the office on the 7th, with a conference on imaging for plant scientists in Oxford.
Also coming up in the New Year is a free webinar Cross-sector innovation in microbiome-based protection from the RSB. This will be on February 3, discussing microbial solutions and alternatives to conventional pesticides and fungicides for sustainable crop protection.
There will 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
How Aging Flowers Boost Male Success
Flowers use subtle cues and steady resource release to maximise reproduction over their short lifespan.
What Lies Beneath Matters for What Grows Above in Grapevines
Choosing the right rootstock can dramatically reshape a grapevine's entire architecture, offering winemakers a powerful tool to match vines to challenging growing conditions.
Kasey Barton: “Seedlings Are Not Merely Smaller Adult Plants”
Botany One interviews Dr Kasey Burton, one of the editors of an upcoming Special Issue at Annals of Botany.
The surprising reason waterfowl make better gardeners when they’re airborne
Migrating ducks scatter plant seeds across continents, but research shows their botanical gift works best when the "wrapping" disappears.
Cannabis Cultivation: Scientific Advice to Reach New Highs
New research provides fascinating insights into the genetic and molecular basis behind the growth of two chemovars of Cannabis.
…and last’s week’s Week in Botany with butterflies in the urban jungle, fire-fighting mosses and more...
News & Views
56 million years ago, the Earth suddenly heated up – and many plants stopped working properly
Why the “plants like carbon dioxide, so why complain?” argument really doesn’t work if you fancy complaining about efforts to reduce climate change.
New critically endangered ‘fairy lantern’ discovered in Malaysia
Just 20 individuals of the unusual species are known to exist in the wild.
♻️ Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Forgotten Treasure at the Intersection of Science and Poetry
In an era when the scientific establishment barred and bolted its gates to women, botany allowed Victorian women to enter science through the permissible backdoor of art, most famously in Beatrix Potter’s scientific drawings of mushrooms and Margaret Gatty’s stunning illustrated classification of seaweed.
NIH shut out hundreds of young scientists from funding to start their own labs
Cuts to diversity transition grants slow research and lengthen job searches.
How do forests keep their cool? A 1.89 million Swiss Francs question.
Professor Charlotte Grossiord, forest ecologist and head of the Plant Ecology Laboratory, a joint research team between WSL and EPFL, has just received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council. Her team will study how European forests stay cool amidst heatwaves, focusing on “atmospheric drought”, a phenomenon caused by hot dry air.
Food will be more affordable — if we double funds for agriculture research now
A global drop in public and private investment in agricultural science in the past four decades is partly to blame for high food prices, an analysis reveals.
Weird wet weather has Joshua trees flowering early — or late? Help the Yoder Lab map this “bonus bloom” to understand why
Joshua trees are ending 2025 by throwing us a curveball — they’re flowering! Many contributors to iNaturalist have recorded observations of the trees flowering in the last month or so. The normal flowering season for Joshua trees starts in late February into April. So these flowers are either very late for 2025, or quite early for 2026. What’s going on?
Non-seed plant research in the spotlight
The Genetics Society Non-Seed Plant meeting brought together researchers embracing the diversity of plants and using emerging and established model systems covering hornworts, mosses, liverworts, lycophytes and ferns.
Size of Life
What’s bigger, the world’s largest flower, or the world’s largest crab?
♻️ 7 random unsolicited tips for students and early career researchers
You might not want to hear them, but here they are anyway.
A botanical conundrum solved (sort of…)
A few weeks ago I shared a baffling bit of botany with you, in the post entitled, A botanical conundrum: HELP please!. The puzzle posed in that post was to find the source for a statement about the amount of photosynthetic effort that plants put into producing the mucilage secreted by their roots.
This Week in Botany
5 Years Ago: Tree root identification saves ancient caves and the forest above them
10 Years Ago: Grounds for climate change optimism?
15 Years Ago: Astrobotany on the web
Scientific Papers
Homology and heterochrony in the evolution of conifer seed cones (FREE)
For more than a century, plant morphology experts have been scratching their heads about the relationship between conifer seed cones and their evolutionary background. Matsunaga looks at some of the puzzles in their Tansley review.
The discovery of twilight length sensing in plants and its implications for models of plant photoperiodism (FREE)
Decades of research in plant circadian biology have deciphered the role of the clock in controlling photoperiodic flowering through what is known as the ‘external coincidence model’. However, past work has largely neglected to include another aspect of natural photoperiod change in experimentation – twilight length.
Tiny forests, huge claims: The evidence gap behind the Miyawaki method for forest restoration (FREE)
Reported outcomes offered weak to null evidence for most claimed benefits, including rapid growth, accelerated succession, self-sustainability, cost efficiency, enhanced biodiversity, higher carbon sequestration and increased tree density.
Arabidopsis Microtubule-BRI1 Associated Proteins negatively regulate hypocotyl elongation by controlling brassinosteroid-dependent cortical microtubule reorientation (FREE)
Brassinosteroids (BRs) are steroid-type phytohormones that are essential for plant growth, development, and adaptation to environmental stresses. BRs are known to control microtubule (MT) orientation, which is pivotal for directional growth, but the underlying molecular mechanisms are still largely unknown. Delesalle et al. identified and characterized a new family of BRI1-interacting proteins named MICROTUBULE-BRI1 ASSOCIATED PROTEINS (MBAPs). We confirmed using several complementary approaches that MBAPs are genuine BRI1 partners in plant cells.
How interactions between temperature and resources scale from populations to communities in microbes (FREE)
Kremer et al propose a simple, physiologically motivated model capturing the interactive effects of temperature and resources (specifically, inorganic nutrients and light) on the growth of microbial ectotherms over multiple ecological scales.
Sodium constraints on megaherbivore communities in Africa ($)
Sodium (Na) is an essential nutrient for animals, but not for most plants. Consequently, herbivores may confront a mismatch between forage availability and metabolic requirement. Recent work suggests that larger-bodied mammals may be particularly susceptible to Na deficits, yet it is unknown whether Na availability constrains the density or distribution of large herbivores at broad scales. Abraham et al show that plant-Na availability varies >1,000-fold across sub-Saharan Africa and helps explain continent-scale patterns of large-herbivore abundance.
Carbon availability acts via cytokinins to promote gemma cup formation in Marchantia polymorpha (FREE)
Humphreys et al nvestigated how carbon promotes gemma cup formation using Marchantia polymorpha as a model species. Through a series of pharmacological and genetic experiments, they found that carbon availability promotes gemma cup formation by inducing the cytokinin pathway, thereby increasing the expression of MpGCAM1 and MpSTG, which encode two transcription factors involved in forming the basal floor of gemma cups.
The Earliest Vegetal Motifs in Prehistoric Art: Painted Halafian Pottery of Mesopotamia and Prehistoric Mathematical Thinking (FREE)
The earliest systematic depictions of vegetal motifs in prehistoric art appear on painted pottery vessels of the Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia, c. 6200–5500 BC. The motifs are varied, representing flowers, shrubs, branches and trees.
Mutualist-pathogen co-colonization modulates phosphoinositide signatures at host intracellular interfaces (FREE)
The host membrane that surrounds intracellular microbes forms a critical interface, influencing whether interactions result in mutualism or pathogenesis. While phosphoinositide identities differ between pathogen and mutualist interface membranes, it is unclear whether these are modulated during co-colonization. To address this, Guyon et al generated Nicotiana benthamiana plants expressing biosensors for phosphatidylinositol 4-phosphate (PI4P) and phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate (PI(4,5)P2) and imaged root colonization by the pathogenic oomycete Phytophthora palmivora and the mutualistic fungus Funneliformis mosseae.
Hot droughts in the Amazon provide a window to a future hypertropical climate ($)
Tropical forests represent the warmest and wettest of Earth’s biomes, but with continued anthropogenic warming, they will be pushed to climate states with no current analogue. Droughts in the tropics are already becoming more intense as they occur at successively higher temperatures. Chambers et al synthesize multiple datasets to assess the effects of hot droughts on a central Amazon forest.
Amyloplasts are necessary for full gravitropism in thallus of Marchantia polymorpha (FREE)
investigated the gravitropic response of the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha, a model for early land plant evolution. In darkness, the thallus tips extended upward, forming several straight, narrow structures whose growth direction was consistently opposite to gravity and disrupted by clinostat treatment.
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.
David Sainsbury Career Development Fellow x 2, Cambridge
Applications are invited for two David Sainsbury Career Development Fellowships in the Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge University. The Fellowships provide an opportunity for imaginative junior investigators to develop their own research programme and become creative leaders in the field of quantitative plant developmental biology.
Research Assistant/Associate, Glasgow
Use mathematical modelling to understand the molecular mechanisms of plant cold sensing, thus providing a foundation for breeding more climate-change-resistant crops. This project will be for 36 months, under the supervision of Dr Rea Antoniou-Kourounioti and Prof Matt Jones.
CEPLAS Graduate School, Germany
The CEPLAS Graduate School offers a structured four-to-five-year doctoral program covering the fields of molecular plant sciences, plant genetics, plant-microbe interactions, synthetic biology as well as quantitative and computational biology. The program is jointly organised by the Universities of Düsseldorf and Cologne, the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research and the Forschungszentrum Jülich and it leads students with a Bachelor’s degree through a unique qualification phase to the PhD.
Tenure Track Professorship (W1 with Tenure Track to W3) in “Molecular Biology" (f/m/d), Heidelberg
The candidate should demonstrate a strong record of scientific excellence, reflected in outstanding publications and international recognition. Applicants are expected to submit a compelling research proposal with the potential to establish a successful independent career and secure competitive external funding. The successful candidate will be a member of the Faculty of Biosciences.
W3 Professorship for Functional and 3D Modeling of Plants, Bonn
We seek an individual who has achieved international recognition in simulation modeling of whole plants at crop level. A central element is the plant’s 3D geometry, and models should predict plant growth, development, and yield as well as key physiological relationships across the whole plant. These relationships may include energy metabolism, plant water dynamics, growth dynamics as well as nutrient uptake, transport, and allocation from sub-organ to plant scale. The models should include responses and possible adaptation mechanisms of plants and crops to abiotic stresses such as drought and temperature stress or nutrient deficiencies.
W2-Professur für Pflanzenphysiologie (m/w/d), Kaiserslautern
Sie vertreten das Fachgebiet der Pflanzenphysiologie in Forschung und Lehre. Sie akquirieren aktiv eigene Drittmittel und beteiligen sich an der Einwerbung neuer koordinierter Programme. Neben einer starken Grundlagenforschung entwickeln Sie einen Schwerpunkt in der angewandten Forschung. Sie vertreten das Fach Pflanzenphysiologie in seiner ganzen Breite in den deutschsprachigen Bachelorstudiengängen und entwickeln eigene Lehrveranstaltungen in einer der Vertiefungsrichtungen Mikrobielle und Pflanzliche Biotechnologie, Molekulare Zellbiologie oder Ökologie des englischsprachigen Masterstudiengangs Biology. Sie werden aktiv in universitären Gremien mitarbeiten.
Full Professor (W3) in Stress Resilience of Plants, Aachen
We are inviting applications the position of full professor in the area of stress resilience of plants, to be filled by October 1, 2026. The professorship will be embedded in the area of plant molecular physiology, focusing on plant resilience. Biological core research areas in Aachen are the Integrated Bioeconomy, Stress Resilience and Computational Life Science. We thus search for a candidate who works at the intersection of cellular or molecular plant physiology and a biological question related to bioeconomy. A focus on plant resilience will be explored (e.g., acclimation or adaptation to biotic or abiotic stresses). Research approaches may combine eco-physiological, molecular biological/genetic, and biochemical methods. We place particular emphasis on interdisciplinary collaborations within the faculty, with other faculties within the university and with Forschungszentrum Jülich and the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME.
PhD position, Ecology and biodiversity in wet forested environments, Umeå
Do you want to contribute to the future sustainable use of forests? Apply to join WIFORCE Research School! Biodiversity and the role of forests in climate change are now key social issues that require more knowledge. In order to both sustainably use and safeguard forest biodiversity, a coherent basic science research program is needed that addresses large and complex issues and develops new analytical tools. That’s why the WIFORCE Research School, part of the Wallenberg Initiatives in Forest Research (www.slu.se/en/wiforce), was created.
Lecturer/Senior Lecturer - Plant-Microbe Interactions - School of Biological Sciences, Auckland
We invite applications from scientists interested in Plant-Microbe interactions to join our team in the Te Kura Mātauranga Koiora | School of Biological Sciences for one position at Lecturer/Senior Lecturer level. The successful applicant will be expected to establish a competitive and innovative research programme to attract external research funding. This position will involve contributing to our undergraduate and postgraduate teaching programmes, supervising postgraduate students, and developing inter-institutional research projects. Teaching may be required at international partner institutions, including in China, for a period of approximately one month at a time.
Assistant Professor in Non-Seed Plant Diversity (Bryophytes, Ferns, Lycophytes), Vancouver
The Department of Botany seeks candidates for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the area of Non-Seed Plant Diversity with an expected start date of July 1, 2026. This is a full-time position with an expected starting salary range of $120,000 to $135,000 per annum. Applicants conducting innovative research in the area of bryophyte, fern, or lycophyte diversity are encouraged to apply, including those who employ systematics, phylogenetics, evolution, paleobotany, ecology, cell biology, developmental biology, physiology, molecular biology, genomics, or related techniques, and whose research ideally includes the collection and use of field samples and/or museum collections to address fundamental questions on the biodiversity and comparative biology of non-seed plants.
