The Week in Botany June 16, 2025
The summer / winter solstice will next weekend, depending on which hemisphere you live in. Canada’s Globe and Mail has a cheery headline: How the summer solstice may be the cue for plants to brace for fall. Sadly, that story’s behind a paywall, but there’s a free version at Phys Org with a more prosaic title: Summer solstice is an optimal day for plants—but climate change could disrupt this timing.
This week I’m reworking the Bluesky feeds. These are optional algorithms that you can follow on Bluesky. Pulse collects most liked posts of the past day and a bit, so you can see what’s popular right now. Botany 7 pulls together the most popular posts of the past week, or at least it will do once it’s refreshed properly. This is one way of getting another opinion on what’s getting shared on social media.
There 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
How Golf Courses Are Helping to Save the Primrose
Well-managed golf courses are helping save endangered primrose flowers, allowing them grow in number and stay genetically healthy as farms become less friendly to wildflowers.
Karolina Heyduk: A Career Shaped by Desert Plants and Midnight Photosynthesis
Botany One interviews Dr Karolina Heyduk, a plant evolutionary biologist interested in the origins a unique type of photosynthesis.
A Pathway to Salt-Tolerant Crops in a Changing Climate
A new metabolic model identifies the genetic basis of salt stress resilience in plants.
The genetic prison that traps a ghost plant
Why would you make leaves that are all cost and no benefit? A ghost plant puzzle is solved.
…and last’s week’s Week in Botany that had complex gardens, missing extinctions, a call for more experts to address environmental challenges and more...
News & Views
24 hours of flower power…
Nigel Chaffey reviews Flower day: A story of 24 hours and 24 floral lives, written by Sandra Knapp, illustrated by Katie Scott.
Plant biologist from Lancaster reflects on Joshua trees and federal science funding
I’m a bit wary of including this, because it’s not legally available from the EU / UK, as Lancaster Online isn’t too keen on reader privacy. However, if you have a way to access this, like accidentally leaving your VPN on, then it’s well worth a read. It’s a strong defence of curiosity-driven science.
Spinger Nature Discovers MDPI
Is Plants an MDPI journal, a Springer Discover journal or both?
LGBTQ+ inclusion in science and society: Resilience in uncertain times and the importance of community
To celebrate Pride Month 2025, we are excited to share a series of blogs and podcasts highlighting useful articles and resources for LGBTQIA+ ecologists and researchers. In each post, the authors behind these resources explain what they are, how they came to produce them, and why they are important.
You’re probably why it takes so long for your paper to get reviewed and your excuses are bad
A weird thing happened in scientific publishing during COVID. And it hasn’t gone away. Publications went up 30-50%. And responses to requests to review went down 30-50%.
iNaturalist receives grant to improve species suggestions
iNaturalist explains its decision to take a grant to use generative AI in explanations of its identifications. This is proving controversial.
On not being a naturalist – but being one anyway
It’s three in the morning, in a pitcher-plant bog in Newfoundland in September. I’m shivering a little, and I can see my breath. The stars are startlingly bright here, far from the lights of town, and the Milky Way is strewn across the sky like spilled sugar. When I look down, I see the bog vegetation in the pool of light from my headlamp: pitcher plants (a thermometer resting in the water-filled, cup-like leaf of a pitcher plant is why I’m here at three in the morning), sheep laurel, bog rosemary, leatherleaf, sphagnum, crowberry, and more.
Travelling Plants: A Collaborative Project
During 2020, the Archives team at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew developed a collaboration with others to create a model for the archive sector, which uses volunteer-driven, remote methods to transcribe and research collections, making them easily shareable and accessible using TEI-XML encoding. In creating this model, we would also digitise, transcribe, encode, and make accessible in BHL one of Kew’s most important, but inaccessible volumes – the Kew Record Book.
ASPB President’s Update: Advocacy—It’s Never Been More Important to Keep Sharing What it Means to do Plant Science
Advocate: a person who publicly supports or recommends a particular cause or policy.
Colours belowground
Although not always as showy as the plant parts aboveground, the belowground can also feature a variety of colours. Below are some recently coloured examples from the colouring sheets currently available for download and use. These are various southern African Oxalis species, coloured to show more of the variety and contrast present in the various layers of tunics (leaves adapted for protection of the bulb).
Scientific Papers
Plastids in a Pinch: Coordinating Stress and Developmental Responses Through Retrograde Signalling (FREE)
This review highlights the understanding of plastid responses to the environment, as well as the impact generated downstream of retrograde signals, to better understand the role of plastids in abiotic stress resilience of flowering plants.
MYB68 regulates radial endodermal differentiation and suberin patterning (FREE)
Kraska et al identify a genetic regulator of cell-file-specific suberization and passage cell differentiation connected to the xylem. This provides spatiotemporal insights into the mechanism(s) underlying suberization, establishing a framework for the radial organization of the endodermis and highlighting the putative function(s) of passage cells.
Best practices for moving from correlation to causation in ecological research (FREE)
In ecology, causal questions are ubiquitous, yet the literature describing systematic approaches to answering these questions is vast and fragmented across different traditions (e.g., randomization, structural equation modeling, convergent cross mapping). Correia et al connect the causal assumptions, tasks, frameworks, and methods across these traditions, thereby providing a synthesis of the concepts and methodological advances for detecting and quantifying causal relationships in ecological systems.
Parallels between biological invasions and human migration are flawed and undermine both disciplines. Response to Ahmed et al. ($)
A recent article by Ahmed and colleagues (2025) attempt to draw parallels and assess distinctions between biological invasions and human migration. This comparison conflates two globally occurring phenomena in a scientifically flawed way and risks the misappropriation of scientific concepts for ideological and political agendas.
Comparative analyses of four reference genomes reveal exceptional diversity and weak linked selection in the yellow monkeyflower (Mimulus guttatus) complex (FREE)
Yellow monkeyflowers (Mimulus guttatus complex, Phrymaceae) are a powerful system for studying ecological adaptation, reproductive variation, and genome evolution. To initiate pan-genomics in this group, Lovell et al present four chromosome-scale assemblies and annotations of accessions spanning a broad evolutionary spectrum: two from a single M. guttatus population, one from the closely related selfing species M. nasutus, and one from a more divergent species M. tilingii.
A workflow for absolute apoplastic pH assessment during live cell imaging in plant roots (FREE)
Rößling et al present a novel calibration-based workflow for the in vivo quantification of absolute apoplastic pH using the fluorescent pH indicator HPTS. While HPTS has previously been used primarily to track relative pH changes, their novel methodology enables precise absolute pH measurement through a simplified calibration strategy and a tailor-made Fiji Plugin.
Discovery of FoTO1 and Taxol genes enables biosynthesis of baccatin III (FREE)
‘Missing’ genes needed for the biosynthesis of a natural anticancer drug have been discovered by perturbing and analysing individual cells of yew trees. “…allowing a de novo 17-gene biosynthesis and isolation of baccatin III, the industrial precursor to Taxol, in Nicotiana benthamiana leaves, at levels comparable with the natural abundance in Taxus needles.”
The onset of phenological plant response to climate warming (FREE)
Pausas use long-term phenological data for the Japanese mountain cherry tree (Prunus jamasakura; Rosaceae) in Kyoto to identify the starting point of a consistent and sustained phenological change. The full-flowering date of this cherry tree has been recorded since the 9th century, which makes it possible to distinguish phenological changes caused by anthropogenic climate change from natural variability in climate and phenology.
A plant Lysin Motif Receptor-Like Kinase plays an ancestral function in mycorrhiza (FREE)
Terrestrial plants associate with symbiotic fungi to acquire nutrients. In flowering plants this symbiosis is thought to depend on the perception of specific fungal-derived molecules by plant receptors called Lysin Motif-Receptor-Like Kinases (LysM-RLKs). Teyssier et al show that the perception of these molecules in the nonvascular plant Marchantia paleacea also requires two LysM-RLKs, demonstrating the ancestral nature of this symbiotic dialogue.
k-mer-based diversity scales with population size proxies more than nucleotide diversity in a meta-analysis of 98 plant species (FREE)
A key prediction of neutral theory is that the level of genetic diversity in a population should scale with population size. However, as was noted by Richard Lewontin in 1974 and reaffirmed by later studies, the slope of the population size-diversity relationship in nature is much weaker than expected under neutral theory. Roberts & Josephs hypothesize that one contributor to this paradox is that current methods relying on single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) called from aligning short reads to a reference genome underestimate levels of genetic diversity in many species.
In AoBC Publications
Revealing programmed cell death events during flower (petal) senescence (FREE)
On the origin of euphyllophyte roots – hypotheses from an Early Devonian Psilophyton (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.
Postdoctoral Research Associate in Forest Resilience, Climate Change, and Human Health in the Amazon, Oxford
Reporting to the Principal Investigator, Dr. Jesús Aguirre Gutiérrez, the post holder is a member of the research group BioEO: Biodiversity and Earth Observation within the Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. The post holder will have responsibility for developing research on the ecology, climate change and remote sensing of tropical forests in the Amazon and on how these relate to the distribution of vector-berne diseases in across the Amazon forest.
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Oxford
We are seeking to recruit a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Genome Design. This role is part of an ARIA funded project that aims to enhance photosynthesis and climate resilience in potato and wheat. The post holder will be a member of a collaborative research consortium involving academic and industry partners. There will be opportunities for personal development, mentoring with leading academic and industry experts, and an active academic/industry exchange program that aims to accelerate career development for the postholder employed on the project.
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Oxford
The Kelly lab is excited to announce a new post-doctoral position in computational biology. This position is funded as part of an international consortium of scientists who are looking to improve the performance and resilience of feedstock crop plants (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2435360).
Research Fellow in Tropical American Forest Dynamics, Leeds
You will work on a UK Natural Environment Research Council funded project: “AMSINK – The End of the Amazon Carbon Sink?”. You will have responsibility for undertaking statistical analyses of forest dynamics (turnover, productivity, and change metrics) across time and space and producing high-quality written outputs.
Senior Ecologist, Leeds
Futures Ecology is a small friendly consultancy started in 2019 with offices in both Leeds and Bolsover. We are looking for a Senior Ecologist to be based at our Leeds office. Ideally the candidate will specialise in at least one of the following: badgers, bats (including tree climbing), botany or ornithology, as well as being a licence holder / named ecologist for surveys or mitigation works or, with a minimum of four years consultancy experience.
Postdoctoral Research Associate in Plant Molecular Biology, Durham
Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Plant Molecular Biology with a particular emphasis on RNA biology and the epigenetics of transposable elements in Arabidopsis. The research project, funded by BBSRC, will investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying the initiation of epigenetic silencing in plant transposable elements. Towards this goal, the study will employ a broad range of experimental approaches, spanning plant molecular biology and high-throughput sequencing technologies. The successful applicant will be expected to lead independent research aligned with the objectives of the BBSRC-funded project and work closely with the PI, Dr Jungnam Cho, and his group members.
Research Assistant (Fixed Term), Cambridge
A position is open for a short-term research assistant based at the OpenPlant Laboratory in Cambridge in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and directed by Dr Facundo Romani and Prof. Jim Haseloff. The appointee will develop a research project based on exploring the morphological diversity of across liverworts. Previous work with Marchantia has established foundational aspects of vegetative development (https://haseloff.plantsci.cam.ac.uk).
M/F PhD student in geo-natural and anthropized environments on ecosystem services provided by restored meadows, Auzeville Tolosane
This thesis is part of the COMSYSE project (COMpromis et Synergies entre Services Ecosystémiques), which has the particularity of being based on two theses: one in economics, the other in ecology. In the COMSYSE project, we propose to better understand how trade-offs between economic performance and environmental preservation can be formulated to maintain a certain economic efficiency while adopting a form of equity within socio-ecosystems for an economy with high human and ecological value.
Technicien en production végétale H/F, Strasbourg
Le/la technicien-ne effectuera toutes les opérations de la production végétale et assurera le suivi des plantes. Il/elle planifiera les cultures selon des protocoles définis en interaction avec les expérimentateurs et le responsable du service. Il/elle participera également aux travaux d'entretien et de maintenance de premier niveau des installations.
Postdoc on microfluidics of plant - bacteria interaction, Leiden
We are hiring a post-doctoral scientist to join our ERC-funded team on chronomicrobiology, a new field that bridges microbiology and chronobiology. The MicroClock program builds on our novel discovery of a circadian clock in Bacillus subtilis. This post-doc position will focus on uncovering interactions between plant and bacterial clocks. The scientist will establish a microfluidic system to follow circadian gene expression in Bacillus subtilis and Arabidopsis thaliana, and this will occur in collaboration with our consortium partners at the John Innes Centre and LMU Munich. The scientist will learn chronobiological principles and experimentation and be a key part of discovering a cross-kingdom circadian system. The scientist will be involved in an interdisciplinary, innovative project in a productive scientific environment with a good work-life balance.
PhD candidate on molecular details of plant-bacteria clock interactions
We are hiring a PhD candidate to join our ERC-funded team on chronomicrobiology, a new field that bridges microbiology and chronobiology. The MicroClock program follows up on our novel discovery of a circadian clock in Bacillus subtilis. This PhD opportunity focuses on uncovering the molecular details of the bacterial circadian clock during interaction with the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. The PhD candidate will employ molecular biology tools to follow circadian gene expression in Bacillus subtilis as it colonizes the plant root. This work will be carried out in collaboration with our consortium partners at the John Innes Centre and LMU Munich. The PhD candidate will learn chronobiological principles and experimentation and be a key part of discovering a cross kingdom circadian system. The PhD candidate will be involved in an interdisciplinary, innovative project in a productive scientific environment with a good work-life balance.
PhD Researcher: Forest Regrowth rates and carbon accumulation in forests and forest reserves in Europe (NextgenCarbon), Wageningen
Are you a motivated and curious individual with a strong interest in forests, forest dynamics and climate sciences? Do you have an MSc. degree in forest ecology, earth system science, climate sciences, mathematics, or geo-information science or a similar relevant field, and are you proficient in programming with R/Python? Then we have the perfect opportunity for you!
PhD position in the field of archaeobotany, Basel
Your focus will be the archaeobotanical analysis of a Neolithic lakeshore settlement in Switzerland. This PhD position forms part of an SNF Weave/Lead Agency Project entitled 'Deciphering Lakeside Settlements' (grant number 10002949). The successful candidate will analyse the archaeobotanical material and conduct an interdisciplinary reconstruction of the ecology and cultural landscape. They will collaborate closely with the other disciplines involved in the project, including palynology, archaeozoology/ichtyoarchaeology, isotopes, and sediment genetics. You will obtain your PhD by publishing several articles in peer-reviewed academic journals.
Stress response modelling in IceLab: PhD position in computational physics to uncover organelle coordination mechanisms under stress, Umeå
The Department of Physics is looking for a PhD student in computational physics with a focus on understanding the coordination mechanisms between the nucleus, mitochondria, and chloroplasts in plant cells. The position is for four years of full-time doctoral studies. The employment starts as soon as possible according to an agreement. The application deadline is August 15th 2025.
Group Leader, Institute of Biotechnology, Helsinki
The Institute of Biotechnology invites applications from outstanding candidates for the position of Group Leader. Research groups at the institute operate across multiple scales of biological resolution in the areas of Structural Biology, Molecular and Cell Biology, Developmental Biology, Genomics, and Evolutionary Biology. We seek an early-career scientist who will complement our existing research strengths while developing a unique, externally funded research profile.
Lead Botanist, Perth
AECOM are looking for someone with a degree in environmental science, ecology, biology or similar. 7-10+ years professional experience in botanical surveys, with a strong focus on ecological consulting, vegetation assessments, or related fieldwork.
Research Technician - Plant Tissue Culture & Gene Editing, Canberra
CSIRO has an exciting opportunity for a Research Technician – Plant Tissue Culture & Gene Editing to join our Plant Trait Innovation Team in Black Mountain site in Canberra and be a part of the Agriculture & Food Research Unit, contributing to the development of gene editing and cell delivery methods across a range of commercial crop species. In this hands-on, lab-based role, you will bring your skills & experience in plant tissue culture techniques, molecular biology, and genetic transformation of plant material, to undertake a variety of plant tissue culture tasks, design and perform experiments & laboratory analyses, and assist the team in delivering cutting-edge scientific research in the areas of plant tissue culture and gene editing.