The Week in Botany January 5, 2026
I hope you had a good break. I had a lesson in botany over Christmas from the office manager, Stanley Fluffypants. I thought I’d brought him some catnip toys as a present, and thought it was catnip because the outside of the box said ‘catnip’. He loudly sang the song of his people to tell me that it wasn’t catnip but silver vine, while he was upstairs and the toys still downstairs. Silver vine is in some ways, similar to catnip, the chemistry is similar, as I’ve blogged. But it’s not the same, so a cat that doesn’t have a strong reaction to catnip might be extremely interested in silver vine, to the extent it’s time to don the gauntlets to retrieve the toy before someone gets hurt.
I also had a reminder that I really need to get a blog post finished, when I saw Stephen Heard publish a series of posts on the Latin names for Gardeners. It’s an excellent series of posts, that probably came out a bit too early in the break to be picked up by my automated systems as recent popular posts.
The bulk of today’s post was written on Friday, to try giving me much of the weekend off. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d want to say much about Saturday’s news anyway. People don’t read this email for my opinions on politics. However, the stories are the things people share most on Mastodon and Bluesky, and politics has unfortunately been inescapable in 2025. I will be putting my finger a bit more on the scales this year, so there will be more stories about people doing cool things with plants, and fewer about a narcissist trying to get more people to pay attention to him. Until next time, take care.
Alun (webmaster@botany.one)
News & Views
Declared extinct in 2025: A look back at some of the species we lost
Some species officially bid us farewell this year. They may have long been gone, but following more recent assessments, they’re now formally categorized as extinct on the IUCN Red List, considered the global authority on species’ conservation status.
Indonesia calls in military to help clear forests at rapid pace
Deforestation under way on 3mn hectares for state-backed food project.
From invasive species tracking to water security – what’s lost with federal funding cuts at US Climate Adaptation Science Centers
When the Trump administration began freezing federal funding for climate and ecosystem research, one of the programs hit hard was ours: the U.S. Geological Survey’s Climate Adaptation Science Centers.
The Trump Administration’s Most Paralyzing Blow to Science
Cuts to research may have spoiled the country’s appetite for bold exploration.
Deep in Kakadu, nature has long warned about rising sea levels
Crocodile warning signs break the surface of a flooded Oenpelli Road, as Jonathan Nadji speeds through the paperbark forest of the Magela Creek system.
It’s publication day! “Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences”
Ok, we’re seriously excited – not for tonight’s fireworks, but because after several years of work, our new book is officially published today! That’s right – Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences: An Evidence-based Approach is now for real! It can be in your hands right away (and of course, we think it should be).
Missing for 200 Years, the Galapagos Rail Reappears Following Floreana Island Restoration
Centuries after they were made famous by Charles Darwin, and a century after they had become plagued by invasive rats and cats, the Galapagos Islands are well on their way to recovery.
Welcome to BSBI's New Year Plant Hunt!
Now in its fourteenth year, the Plant Hunt is contributing to our understanding of how wild and naturalised plants across Britain and Ireland are responding to a changing climate. You may be surprised by how many wild flowers can you spot in bloom at New Year in your local area?
Environmentalist hugs tree for 72 hours for Kenya’s native forests
A Kenyan environmentalist hugged a palm tree for 72 straight hours in Nyeri county to draw attention to the rapid loss of the country’s native forests, many of which face extinction.
Defunding fungi: US’s living library of ‘vital ecosystem engineers’ is in danger of closing
These fungi boost plant growth and restore depleted ecosystems, but federal funding for a library housing them has been cut – and it may be forced to close.
Project sees long-term success restoring forests in the high Andes
The Polylepis forests of Peru are some of the highest high-altitude forests in the world, playing an essential role in the water cycle.
This Week in Botany
5 Years Ago: Flowering time likely an important driver of speciation in South African Restionaceae
10 Years Ago: Can agriculture cultivate a new variety of CERN?
15 Years Ago: Thousands of trees felled in UK to stop Sudden Oak Death
Scientific Papers
Research Culture: The SAFE Labs Handbook as a tool for improving lab culture (FREE)
Donà et al introduce the SAFE Labs Handbook: a collection of 30 “commitments” that can be implemented by individual group leaders to improve research culture in the life sciences.
Lateral inhibition governs ancestral cellular patterning in fossil and extant liverworts (FREE)
Mercadal et al use comparative and mathematical analyses to uncover an evolutionarily conserved patterning mechanism underlying liverwort oil body cell specification. They demonstrate that patterns of oil body cell homologs in fossils of the oldest known liverwort (Metzgeriothallus sharonae) exhibit the spatial organization characteristic of lateral inhibition. A mechanism with local activation and lateral inhibition not only reproduces the patterns observed in fossils, but also oil body cell patterns in the extant liverworts Treubia lacunosa, Apotreubia nana, and Marchantia polymorpha.
Balanced polymorphism in a floral transcription factor underlies an ancient rhythm of daily sex alternation in avocado (FREE)
In avocado and certain wild relatives in Lauraceae, pollination occurs via a synchronized rhythm of floral sex timing between two hermaphroditic flowering types. A-type plants present female-phase flowers in the morning and male-phase flowers in the afternoon, while B-types show the complementary pattern, a form of heterodichogamy. Groh et al map this dimorphism in avocado to a genomic region overlapping a single strong candidate gene, SDMYB, where a dominant haplotype confers A-type flowering.
Structural basis for heat tolerance in plant NLR immune receptors (FREE)
Nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) immune receptors sense pathogen molecules and oligomerize, initiating defense signaling. Some NLRs function poorly at elevated temperatures for unknown reasons. Grech-Baran et al show that temperature-sensitive NLRs retain ligand binding at elevated temperatures but are impaired in oligomerization
Evolution of protein domains and protein domain combinations provides insights into the origin and diversification of land plants (FREE)
Protein domains are fundamental units determining protein functions. This study identified all protein domains and domain combinations from 446 genomes across all major plant lineages. Xue et al discovered more domains and domain combinations in land plants than in algae. Many novel “core” protein domains were acquired in the early evolution of streptophytes, substantially enriching the genomic toolkit that enabled plants to shift from unicellular to multicellular organization and to adapt to terrestrial life.
Seventy-Five Years of Systematic Biology: Looking Back, Moving Forward (FREE)
What does “systematic biology” mean today, where has it been in the past, and where is it going? Landis & Donoghue explore these questions by considering five elements—collaboration, integration, discourse, infrastructure, and society—that they think have allowed systematic biology to adapt to change and sustain growth without losing its unique identity.
The Goldilocks effect drives plant diversification on middle-aged Hawaiian islands (FREE)
Islands are ideal mesocosms for studying dispersal, speciation, and extinction, but our understanding of insular radiations has long been limited by the difficulty of estimating the timing and tempo of island evolution in the absence of fossils and methods that explicitly account for the role of paleogeography in diversification. Lichter-Marck et al introduce a new generalizable model, TimeFIG, which jointly infers paleogeographically-informed biogeographic rates, ancestral species ranges, and divergence times without using fossils.
Plants in the expansion era: recent advances in expansion microscopy in plant systems (FREE)
Cox, Jr et al review the development of expansion microscopy methods for the plant kingdom. These advances range from isolated organelles, single cells, and unicellular organisms to whole organs, embryos, and reproductive tissues.
Defence-mediated phloem restriction of a plant virus facilitates insect transmission (FREE)
Mei et al show that phloem restriction of tobacco curly shoot virus (TbCSV) depends on the allele of the C4 gene it carries.
Three-dimensional-printed tools to democratize global plant research (FREE)
Numerous activities in the plant sciences require time-consuming, repetitive actions that are ideal for automation, but existing tools to accomplish these types of tasks are often priced beyond the reach of many research labs, especially in low-resource environments. McNair et al developed a suite of easy-to-use, three-dimensional (3D)-printable tools for seed handling, tissue collection, and bead dispensing.
Engineering compact Physalis peruviana (goldenberry) to promote its potential as a global crop (FREE)
Goldenberry (Physalis peruviana) produces sweet, nutritionally rich berries, yet like many minor crops, is cultivated in limited geographical regions and has not been a focus of breeding programs for trait enhancement. Leveraging knowledge of plant architecture-related traits from related species, Santo Domingo et al used CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing to generate a compact ideotype to advance future breeding efforts and agricultural production.
In AoBC Publications
A generic model for individual leaf size in maize, sorghum and pearl millet (FREE)
Acaulescent palms are resilient to disturbances: experimental and global evidence ($)
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.
Doctoral Researcher (m/w/d), Freiburg
The position is embedded in the project “BeGenDiv – A multispecies genetic diversity survey for the Biodiversity Exploratories” and will focus on characterizing the genetic diversity of tree and shrub species in the forest plots of the Biodiversity Exploratories (https://www.biodiversity-exploratories.de/en/). The PhD project will investigate the genetic diversity of around 30 tree and shrub species in landscapes characterized by diverse combinations of forest management intensity and environmental heterogeneity. The PhD project will focus on a comparative analysis among species, while multi-species indices will be developed by a postdoctoral researcher in the same project.
