đ«đ· The Week in Botany July 14, 2025
I hope youâre well, or at least not cooked. It has been warm here, with the third heatwave of the summer. Iâve decided that, for the next one, Iâll start taking siestas. I wasnât getting a lot of work done during the hottest part of the day. Itâs not just me complaining about the heat. The wild hedgehogs living at the bottom of the garden were grunting complaints during the afternoons.
Not everything has been complaining about the heat. I went to a garden centre yesterday and saw some pollinators enjoying a plant. Iâve not seen Euonymus japonicus listed as a plant for pollinators, but the ones I saw were infested with pollinators. Horseflies, blowflies, gnats, wasps and even a hornet or two. Iâm guessing that the plants had a carrion smell to the insects, but if what youâre interested in is pollinators, then this might be the plant for you.
This might be a plant that works more as a gift for someone youâre ambivalent about, than a plant for your own garden.
There will be another email of the papers and the news stories youâre sharing on Mastodon and Bluesky next week. Until next time, take care.
Alun (webmaster@botany.one)
On Botany One
The Surprising Way Plants Really Sense Heat
The sweet molecules plants make during photosynthesis double as sophisticated thermometers, revealing a hidden layer of plant environmental sensing.
Laura Lagomarsino: An Endless Passion For Tropical Plants
Botany One interviews Dr. Laura Lagomarsino, a plant evolutionary biologist that once she fell in love with tropical plants, she never looked back.
What Dead Plants Tell Us About Living Through Climate Change
Scientists analysing 2,000 herbarium specimens discovered jewelflowers survive new climates not by evolving, but by engineering their own familiar microenvironments.
Wikidata for Botanists: Connecting People, Plants, and Data
Wikidata is a global, open database that can help connect botanical data, such as species, collectors, and collections, and anyone in the botanical community can help improve it.
âŠand lastâs weekâs Week in Botany with nectar with colour, plants with none, how small differences foster biodiversity and small gardens that bring us together.
News & Views
The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit and desperation
Not every ânature healsâ book may be entirely accurate.
Weedkiller ingredient widely used in US can damage organs and gut bacteria, research shows
Diquat is banned in the UK, EU, China and other countries. The US has resisted calls to regulate it.
Being Too Helpful At Work Can Hurt Your Career â Hereâs How To Say No
Pitching in to be helpful at work is important, but sometimes it can hold you back. Employers often need workers to help out and complete tasks outside of their job roles, but the problem is that this work isnât shared equally. Women are more likely to take on the behind-the-scenes duties at work, and research shows itâs taking a toll on their careers.
The Best Wood for World War I Airplanes
To manufacture thousands of airplanes for its World War I allies, the United States would fell acres of spruce.
I became a scientist, but I donât know if my career will exist in five years
University research breeds new innovation, powers our local economy and invests in our future. But all of this is now being threatened by a recent and sustained onslaught on science.
âItâs a nightmare.â U.S. funding cuts threaten academic science jobs at all levels
âThere is a lot of pressure to essentially leave the country or not pursue research,â one Ph.D. student says.
Something Strange Is Happening to Tomatoes Growing on the GalĂĄpagos Islands
Scientists say wild tomato plants on the archipelagoâs western islands are experiencing âreverse evolutionâ and reverting back to ancestral traits.
â»ïž Why you should publish your posters
Publishing your poster in a DOI repository like Zenodo extends the lifespan of your poster beyond the conference, reaching audiences who would not have seen your poster otherwise and providing a verifiable, citable record of your scholarly output.
Why Iâm skipping the Congress this year (And why you should still publish your posters)
Publishing your poster creates a verifiable and citable record of your work. It also protects you from bad actors â the evidence will be there for all to see.
âWood and cellulose civilized Manâ
This weekâs post â and the one, or two, that follow â considers some recently-discovered â or rediscovered â uses of tree products.
Scientific Papers
Uncertainty in the timing of diversification of flowering plants rests with equivocal interpretation of their fossil record (FREE)
The timing of the origin of crown-angiosperms exemplifies the impact of competing approaches to establishing evolutionary timescales. Fossils of unequivocal crown-angiosperms are not known from before the Cretaceous, and yet molecular estimates range from the Late Jurassic to the Permian. Clark & Donahue show that the disagreement between molecular and palaeobotanical estimates is an artefact of interpretations of the fossil record.
ERAD machinery controls the conditional turnover of PIN-LIKES in plants (FREE)
Auxin is a crucial phytohormone that regulates plant development and facilitates dynamic responses to environmental changes through subcellular control mechanisms. PIN-LIKES (PILS) are auxin transport facilitators at the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) that mediate nuclear auxin abundance and signalling. While the posttranslational regulation of PILS is important for acclimating growth responses, the molecular mechanisms involved remain largely unknown. This study demonstrates that components of the ER-associated degradation (ERAD) machinery regulate the proteasome-dependent degradation of functional PILS proteins under non-stressed conditions.
Decreasing Stem Growth in Common European Tree Species Despite Earlier Growth Onset ($)
Bose et al analysed daily-resolved dendrometer data from 228 trees across 48 Swiss forest sites over 2012â2022 to examine stem radial growth timing, intra- and inter-annual dynamics, and environmental controls for five tree species. Their results showed that higher winter and spring temperatures induced an earlier accomplishment of annual growthâindicating earlier growth startâbut did not increase the total annual growth in any of the species studied.
Endogenous Arabidopsis messenger RNAs transported to distant tissues ($)
Thieme et al report the comprehensive identification of 2,006 genes producing mobile RNAs in Arabidopsis thaliana. The analysis of variant ecotype transcripts that were present in heterografted plants allowed the identification of mRNAs moving between various organs under normal or nutrient-limiting conditions.
Read free via ReadCube: https://rdcu.be/ev4dJ
Water availability positions auxin response maxima to determine plant regeneration fates ($)
Despite important advances in understanding various types of regeneration, the mechanism by which plants determine regeneration outcomes remains largely unknown. Kareem et al demonstrate in Arabidopsis that a trade-off between two regeneration fates, wound-induced callus and root regeneration, was driven by distinct molecular pathways related to cambium and root development, respectively.
Read free via ReadCube: https://rdcu.be/ev4d7
An effector from the potato late blight pathogen bridges ENTH-domain protein TOL9a to an activated helper NLR to suppress immunity (FREE)
Pathogens counteract central nodes of NLR immune receptor networks to suppress immunity. However, the mechanisms by which pathogens hijack helper NLR pathways are poorly understood. Madhuprakash et al show that an effector from the potato late blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans bridges the host protein NbTOL9a, a putative member of the host ESCRT pathway, to a helper NLR to suppress immunity.
Symptom Development in Plant Viral Diseases: What, How, and Why? ($)
This review explores the possible sources of viral symptoms in plants, their elucidated molecular underpinnings, and the potential implications of symptom development for viral infection and ecology as well as plant health.
ÎČ-sheet stabilization of the island domain underlies ligand-induced LRR-RP activation of plant immune signaling (FREE)
Leucine-rich repeat (LRR) receptor kinases (RKs) and receptor proteins (RPs) are important classes of plant pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) activating pattern-triggered immunity. While both classical and AI-based structural approaches have recently provided crucial insights into ligand-LRR-RK binding mechanisms, our understanding of ligand perception by LRR-RPs remains limited. In contrast to LRR-RKs, many LRR-RPs typically embed one or more loopout regions in their extracellular domains that are crucial for functionality. Snoeck et al employed an AI-based approach to reveal a novel ligand-binding mechanism shared by the Arabidopsis LRR-RPs RLP23 and RLP42 â the PRRs for the short peptide ligands nlp20 and pg13, derived from NECROSIS- AND ETHYLENE-INDUCING PEPTIDE 1-like proteins (NLPs) and fungal endopolygalacturonases (PGs), respectively.
Genomic resources for crop wild relatives are critical for perennial fruit breeding and conservation (FREE)
Many perennial fruit crops are clonally propagated, resulting in uniform fruit quality but increasing vulnerability to pests, diseases, and climate change. In contrast, closely related crop wild relatives (CWRs) continue to evolve in response to these pressures and are a valuable source of adaptive traits. Despite their potential, CWRs are underutilized in perennial fruit breeding.
Parallel evolution of salinity tolerance in Arabidopsis thaliana accessions from Cape Verde Islands (FREE)
Soil salinization poses a notable threat to agriculture. The Cape Verde Islands are located 600 km off the coast of Africa and are characterized by arid environments and high-salinity soils. MartĂnez Rivas et al find that Arabidopsis thaliana plants native to these islands accumulate glucuronyl-mannose that protects them from salt stress.
In AoBC Publications
Drought tolerance of cowpea is associated with rapid ABA biosynthesis via VuWRKY57 in root (FREE)
Modelling leaf metabolism using a charge- and proton-balanced diel FBA model (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.
Horticultural Technician (part-time) â Nobori Lab, Norwich
We are looking for a part-time Horticultural Technician in the Nobori Group at The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL) to support our research team by managing the cultivation of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Initially, this role will focus on supporting the team by maintaining plant growth, carefully handling seeds, monitoring plant health, and ensuring precise experimental conditions.
Research Associate in Programmable Plant Immunity, London
Join the pioneering âProgrammable Plant Immunityâ initiative, where we will build the first open-source, AI-guided discovery and bio-engineering platform capable of designing synthetic immune receptors for crops. Working at the intersection of structural bioinformatics, molecular plantâmicrobe interactions, and synthetic biology, you will generate receptors that detect stealthy pathogen effectors and re-engineer them to broaden disease-resistance spectra.
Research Fellow (Postdoctoral), Birmingham
A Postdoctoral Research Fellow position is available within the Seed Revolution Lab in the School of Biosciences at the University of Birmingham. The Research Fellow will work as part of the Royal Society-funded project âFern seed found? Testing a new hypothesis for the origin of seed gene networksâ.
Independent Fellowship in Plant-Associated Microbial Interactions, Norwich
The John Innes Centre (JIC) recognises the critical importance of this rapidly evolving field and invites applications from visionary scientists for an Independent Research Fellowship focused on microbial communities and their interactions. We welcome candidates with expertise and interests in any aspect of microbial or fungal communities and their interactions with host organisms, particularly where these interactions contribute to plant and soil health.
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Oxford
The Department of Biology at the University of is currently seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate to join an international team of researchers in the UK, US and Germany (Gail Preston (Oxford), Neha Potnis (Auburn), Courtney Leisner (Virginia Tech)) and Thomas Lahaye (TĂŒbingen)) to investigate the effect of fluctuating temperatures on the outcome and evolution of plant-pathogen interactions.
Ingénieur D'études (H/F) - Biologie Moléculaire / Virologie Végétale, Strasbourg
Mission principale : Contribuer à un projet de recherche visant à caractériser les fonctions et le mécanisme d'action d'une nouvelle protéine de liaison à l'ARN double brin (ARNdb) impliquée dans la réponse antivirale des plantes, en vue d'une poursuite en thÚse.
Assistant Engineer in Molecular and Developmental Epigenetics of Plants (M/F), Grenoble
The Assistant Engineer will study the function of a protein involved in chromatin repression, mediated by Polycomb PRC2, of developmental genes in plants. The main objectives are to finely characterise a factor associated with PRC2, including (i) plant genetics approaches and (ii) molecular biochemistry approaches. To do this, the AI will be tasked with developing molecular and genetic approaches as well as tools for epigenomic/epigenetic and interactomic analyses.
Postdoctoral Researcher in Modeling Chlorophyll Fluorescence Kinetics M/F, Paris
In the short term, the first modeling objective will be to explain the curvature of DCMU curves using a membrane-scale model of fluorescence. Implementing these models will require developing and testing a range of membrane-scale models of photosynthetic light harvesting that include a variety of alternative pathways. Kinetic parameters for the models will be fit against a variety of different measurements available experimentally. One key challenge will be translating the physical models proposed into mathematical descriptions within the membrane-scale model.
Programmer in Ecological Modelling, Bonn
You will need Skill and experience in scientific software programming, demonstrated through successful Bachelor and Master degrees in computer science, geoecology, biology, physics, mathematics, or similar disciplines, and
strong experience and knowledge in programming mechanistic, individual-based and/or theoretical ecological as well as eco-evolutionary models.
Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) of Soil Chemistry, ZĂŒrich
The ideal candidate will have an outstanding publication record, commensurate with their academic age, in the domains of environmental chemistry, geochemistry, and/or interdisciplinary research focused on molecular-level (biogeo)chemical dynamics in terrestrial ecosystems. While the position is open to candidates with a broad range of expertise in chemistry and biochemistry of soils, we are particularly interested in those whose research addresses challenges related to environmental sustainability, soil health, pollutant remediation, and/or climate change mitigation.
Senior Lecturer / Lecturer in Genomics, Melbourne
Monash University is seeking a dynamic and dedicated academic to join our School of Biological Sciences as a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Genomics. In this role, you will coordinate and deliver innovative research and teaching programs in the field of Genomics, contributing to the advancement of the Schoolâs academic and professional objectives.
Lecturer / Senior Lecturer in Ecology (2 positions), Melbourne
Monash University is seeking two dynamic and dedicated academics to join our School of Biological Sciences as a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Ecology. In these roles, you will coordinate and deliver innovative research and teaching programs in the field of ecology, contributing to the advancement of the Schoolâs academic and professional objectives.
The Plant Cell is accepting applications for Assistant Features Editors
Are you an early career researcher passionate about plants and science communication? The Plant Cell is accepting applications for new Assistant Features Editors (AFEs) to begin in 2026 and 2027.