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Did you ever wonder why vascular plant shoots don’t terminate in sporangia like bryophytes do? I’m excited to be able to offer a 4-year funded PhD University of Bristol Biological Sciences to find out! Project info on findaphd.com & please get in touch if you’d like to know more.

Fitting a discrete (or hidden) character multi-rate continuous trait evolution model using the discrete approximation of Boucher & Démery (2016) in #phytools: blog.phytools.org/2024/11/fittin….

Very excited to be presenting a public lecture for The Linnean Society of London here in Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh Biological Sciences | University of Edinburgh on Thursday, 28 November 6-8 pm I will be talking about the evolution of botanical spirals Free to attend and all welcome! eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-origin-a…

I am very excited to be sharing our new Sebastian Schornack lab pre-print on a Marchantia gene MpGRAS7, with contributions from Philip Carella and Weibing Yang biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

MpGRAS7 is a GRAS-domain transcriptional regulator, from a sub-family which had no characterised function despite being conserved across land plants - possibly because of the loss of this gene in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana

We first started work on this gene because we found it responsive to Phytophthora infection in Marchantia, but early on we found its expression in reproductive organs intriguing… MpGRAS7 is expressed in asexual gemma cups, as well as sexual reproductive organs (gametangiophores)

Furthermore, we found the gene to be responsive to several abiotic cues, including extended Far-Red light irradiation, as well as humidity stress, and abscisic acid application

We generated gras7 mutants, and when investigating the asexual gemma cups, we found that gras7 mutants produced them more frequently. We also found that the dormancy of these cups was broken when compared to wild-type

Conversely, the sexual gametangiophores have a delayed emergence - meaning that gras7 mutants are shifted towards asexual propagation. From our data, we concluded that MpGRAS7 is a negative regulator of asexual initiation, and a positive regulator of sexual initiation.

MpGRAS7 responsiveness to environmental cues therefore allows the liverworts to make strategic decisions about the timing of each reproductive strategy depending on a conducive environment.

To our knowledge, this is the first characterisation of a single gene which regulates the initiation of both of these organs! Future work will have to find what SCLA regulators are doing in other land plant lineages.

We are recruiting! Join the Plant Shape Lab as a postdoc investigating maize leaf development on our European Research Council (ERC) starter grant DynaLines. More information here: elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candidat… 🌽 #PlantSciJobs MaizeGDB Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences

Great talk by Sandy Hetherington on the evolution of botanical spirals Biological Sciences | University of Edinburgh

I had a great time discussing all things plant evolution on the Tree Lady Talks podcast 🌿 You can listen here: buzzsprout.com/1230629/episod… Or watch on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=1uQMH5… #FossilFriday Biological Sciences | University of Edinburgh Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences The Molecular Palaeobotany and Evolution Group

Rafael Rafael Cruz 🪴🔬🧬🇧🇷 #FernAlly and I are excited to share our new paper about fern fiddlehead evolution Current Biology Read the paper at sciencedirect.com/science/articl… Want to find out more watch our video below 👇👇 The Molecular Palaeobotany and Evolution Group Julianne Kiely - Commissions Open Biological Sciences | University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh

We had a fantastic day celebrating all that makes up Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences today. Thank you to all the speakers and everyone who made it such a great event.

On the cover of our #LatestIssue: Stelar morphology illuminated by fluorescent microscopy in the rhizome of Pteridium aquilinum: purple tracheary elements, blue ground tissue, yellow fibers. Image courtesy of Jacob S. Suissa. 📖 See Suissa et al. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/np…

Interested in Botanical spirals but couldn’t attend my lecture The Linnean Society of London Biological Sciences | University of Edinburgh Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences Don’t worry you can now watch it on YouTube! 👇👇👇 The talk includes an overview of our recent paper on fern fiddleheads Current Biology youtu.be/WLHDnjwcPlc?si…

A bizarre ancient organism previously thought to be a giant fungus may actually belong to an undiscovered branch on the tree of life that mysteriously went extinct. newscientist.com/article/247327…

1/2 An exciting #FossilFossil as our new preprint bioRxiv about the enigmatic Prototaxites has been picked up by New Scientist 👇👇👇 You can read the preprint biorxiv.org/content/10.110…