Hunger lost ground here. Left to right among the trophy-holders: Norman Borlaug (semi-dwarf wheat), D.S. Athwal (Punjab wheat breeding), Gurdev Khush (IR8, IR36 rice). Armed with curiosity, toil, soil, and seed. Abundance is bred, tested, and planted.

Really enjoyed informative, well organised, excellent presentations and panel discussions at hashtag#Bioinputs conference in Melbourne. Thank you very much for inviting me to deliver the opening plenary talk and participate in the panel discuss on regulation and adoption.

Drought-induced plant dominance shift amplifies functional niche differentiation in steppe communities nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/…

Engineering root development with high precision nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/…

this manipuri song is everywhere

🌱 Soil Microbiomes & Human Health It was a pleasure to share our research with UWA students and colleagues last week! I explored why we should care about human pathogens in soils, how they are classified, and the potential health risks they pose. doi.org/10.1016/j.chom.2026.…

Death and chemotaxis: Bacterial chemotaxis enables collective escape from phage predation | Science Advances science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/…

Global proteolysis during starvation governs proteome remodeling and a survival–regrowth trade-off in bacteria doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2611560…

Roots to simplicity: when evolution removes a key organ nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/…

In many experiments, observations naturally come in pairs. For example, measurements taken before and after a treatment, repeated measurements on the same individuals, or matched samples in an experiment. In these situations, the two observations belong to the same unit and should therefore not be treated as independent. Statistical methods such as the paired t-test are specifically designed for this type of data and evaluate whether the average difference within pairs is statistically significant. When analyzing paired data, it is also important to visualize the pairing structure clearly. Simple boxplots or bar charts often hide how the observations are related. Packages like tidyplots make this much easier. In the example shown here, tidyplots visualizes two groups with boxplots and individual data points. The paired observations are connected with lines, making it easy to see the within-pair changes between conditions. The plot also displays the p-value from the paired t-test directly in the figure. This example code is taken from here: jbengler.github.io/tidyplots… This type of visualization makes statistical results much easier to interpret and communicate. If you are interested in topics like this, you can join my newsletter where I regularly share practical tips on statistics, data science, AI, and programming in R and Python. See this link for additional information: statisticsglobe.com/newslett… #DataAnalytics #datastructure #DataVisualization #R #RStats

FAPROTAX2-db: A dataset of experimentally validated bacterial and archaeal metabolic functions nature.com/articles/s41597-0…

Latest research paper: Domesticated bacterial origin genes regulate homeostasis of the insect gut microbiome and empower adaptation onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…

RESEARCH ARTICLE Escalating Ecological Droughts Driven by Compound Soil and Atmospheric Dryness 🔗 buff.ly/e3WB66f

Natural 15N15N abundances constrain fixed nitrogen loss | Science science.org/doi/10.1126/scie… #stableisotopes

Excited to share that our team received a three-year NSF grant for AIM4GREENS: Artificial Intelligence and Modeling for Gene Regulatory Engineering of Networks from Single-Cell Plant Atlases! Excited to get started! Read more: news.clemson.edu/clemson-res… #NSF #AI #PlantScience

Great opportunity to work with amazing team members at beautiful campus!

Plant immune receptor engineering. nature.com/articles/s44222-0…

植物は、栄養不足を感じると遺伝子の働きを変えて対応。本研究では、リン酸が不足した際、酵素UCH2がDNA周辺の「H2A.Z」というタンパク質を調整し、リン酸を取り込む遺伝子を活性化する仕組みを解明。植物の栄養バランス維持の新たな仕組みが判明。Nat. Commun nature.com/articles/s41467-0…

Rarefaction is better than robust Aitchison PCA and other compositional data analysis methods at controlling for uneven sequencing effort journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128…