iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Carolyn Johnson @carolynyjohnson.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Many scientists feel grim right now. Here's a different story - about discovery, friendship, grimness, yes, but how science finds a way! @couchmicroscopy.bsky.social @andrewilloughb.bsky.social In an $80 Motel Room, a Discovery to Shed Light on the Origins of Life www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/s...

nytimes.com

In an $80 Motel Room, a Discovery to Shed Light on the Origins of Life

A scrappy science project led to a significant discovery: two new species of a rare organism that could elucidate a fundamental transition in the history of life on our planet.

1194

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Fun fact that didn't make it in: When I saw John's first iteration of his colored pencil tool, he used the orange and the brown ones. I was shaken to my core that he only went the earth tones (Green? Photosynthesis? This isnt hard.) I am happy to see in this article John's pallete has expanded

392

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Really lucky to have been part of this work and end up in the NYT about it!

040

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

eric lai @lucksmith.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

inspiring journey to read amidst bleak times for US science @couchmicroscopy.bsky.social! (still grappling with news yesterday there is no love for my 9% then 3% R01 renewal at end of fiscal year). however, i smirked at this line. (pooters aka mouth pipettors are still used by some fly fanciers). 🪰

1173

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

So lucky to have been involved, and my first ever field work!

010

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology @biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

All detectable ancient whole-genome duplications involve hybridization www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…

03219

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

New Phytologist @newphyt.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

✨ Paper spotlight ✨ (🧵 1/5) Nuclear auxin signaling and temperature: perception and response across scales nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Fig. 1 Auxin signaling as an interpreter of temperature across scales.

143

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

bioRxiv Plant Bio @biorxiv-plants.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

CLAVATA3 peptide signaling from stem cells integrates vascular organization and stem cell maintenance in Arabidopsis shoots www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…

066

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Julia has lots of great things to say about coming together in a crisis, and I am also happy to brag our friendship! I had never done field work before and I learned a lot from Julia and John about eukaryote diversity and mouth pipetting.

Me and Julia standing next to each other

030

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

"These ideas coalesce to support DNA transfer as a fundamental ecological phenomenon that remains largely unmeasured"

051

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

@plantcelltech.bsky.social has a raffle for the mini laminar flow hood but you have to post about it to enter👀

030

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Getting to be involved in this project was the first time I had heard of the Calyceraceae. Really great plants, and really neat story about the evolution of the Asteraceae!

A picture of a cluster of Acicarpha flowers, in a capitulum-like head but elongated peduncles. The flowers are small and white, while the peduncles are bright green coming from a paler green base. High contrast with black background.

A picture of a series of Acicarpha inflorescences developing, in . Pale green balls emerge over bracts, and then grow in a tiered structure with a central flower at the top. Halfway through the series of 12 inflorescences as they start to turn white instead of green before opening the tiered structure goes away and they are mostly flat except for the prominent central flower the final, open, flowers have regained their tiered placements from elongation of the petioles. High contrast with black background.

050

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Barbara J. King @bjking.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

"The project that was terminated was on this hummingbird, the white-necked jacobin....I suspect that it has something to do with studying a species that doesn’t fit the binary." Researcher @jjinsing.bsky.social interviewed by @carlzimmer.com #birds #nature #science #fundscience #nonbinary 🧪

nytimes.com

He Studied Why Some Female Birds Look Like Males

014551

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Development @dev-journal.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

More extraordinary model systems for regeneration In their #LifelongDevSI Perspective, José Garcıa-Arraras, Chunyi Li, Tania Rozario, Mansi Srivastava & @andrewilloughb.bsky.social introduce five research organisms with remarkable regenerative potential doi.org/10.1242/dev....

A screenshot of the article PDF showing the title, authors and author photos. Read the article for more information.

064

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

Streptocarpus plants rapidly make shoots from the leaf epidermis without exogenous hormones. The coolest plants in the world, many species have one cotyledon that never stops growing, and no SAM until they flower. Do you have Streptocarpus at home already? African violets are also Streptocarpus!

A piece of a regenerating Streptocarpus leaf covered in new bright green leaves emerging from its surface. The new leaves are a little cupped and have many little hairs

A selfie of Andrew in a plant growth room with plant shelves holding a large single leaf covered in dozens and dozens of purple flowers.

Two purple flowers overtop several bright green leaves.

0100

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Suresh Damodaran @sureshd.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

Love the concept of new research organism in development and regeneration. Enjoyed reading it!!

121

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

闵娅(Min Ya; Minya) PhD @minyaaa.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

Looking forward to it! Now #MorphographX is an important part of my work. I'm grateful for @kierzkowskilab.bsky.social and @mingyuanzhu.bsky.social teaching me how to use it during grad school, and for @richardsmithlab.bsky.social and @soestrauss.bsky.social always patiently answering questions!

0122

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

PlantEvolution 🌱🌾 @plantevolution.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

Congrats, Joe Ecker @salkinstitute.bsky.social, to receiving the McClintock Prize! Joe has been a visionary leader of the field of genetics and genomics – not only for plants – for decades www.salk.edu/news-release...

012738

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Gitta Coaker @gittacoaker.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

UNC Chapel Hill is hiring an Assistant Professor in Plant Molecular Biology. Per Jeff Dangl MPMI candidates are also highly desired in the search. unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

unc.peopleadmin.com

Assistant Professor

The Department of Biology at UNC Chapel Hill (https://bio.unc.edu/) is searching to hire a tenure track Assistant Professor to study critical questions in Plant Molecular Biology.We seek candidates wh...

02131

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Mark Peifer (He, him) @peiferlabunc.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

Love to see one of my favorite colleagues, Pat Gensel, profiled on the UNC website: " Indiana Jones — but for plants" www.unc.edu/posts/2025/0...

unc.edu

Paleobotanist searches for ancient plants | UNC-Chapel Hill

Emeritus professor Patricia Gensel studies 400-million-year-old plants across the globe.

0457

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

Some more fun Streptocarpus floral symmetry issues. First photo is typical S. michelmorei, 2nd and 3rd have patterning issues, and the 4th is wonderfully/horrifically fasciated.

A purple flower with 5 petals, the 3 bottom petals have a darker purple throat that transitions to yellow as dark purple spots get smaller. 2 stamens attached to these bottom petals are fused at their tips. There are two barely visible infertile stamenodes attached to the top two petals.

Four petal flower, all with dark purple/yellow markings and 4 stamens attached at their tips in two pairs

8 petal flower, no petals have the dark purple spots or yellow marks, and there are 6 stamenodes. The top 2 and bottom 2 petals closely resemble each other. The 4 remaining petals look shoved together in groups of two, inserted in the lateral position. They have a dark purple center but nothing like the intensely pigmented throat of the typical flower.

A severely fasciated flower that nevertheless has normal dorsoventral patterning. 8/9 dark bottom petals, ~5 light petals. Stamens protrude from the bottom petals. There are 4 visible separate stigmas, although the most central one appears to be two fused together, which would make 5.

060

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Lucia Strader @luciastrader.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

The lab is moving to the Salk Institute! We are thrilled to join an inspiring community where we will continue to explore plant growth and development. Deep gratitude for the years of support and collaboration at Duke/NCSU/UNC. www.salk.edu/news-release...

salk.edu

Plant biologist Lucia Strader joins Salk faculty to study plant growth signaling - Salk Institute for Biological Studies

LA JOLLA—The Salk Institute will welcome plant biologist Lucia Strader as a new professor and holder of the Howard H. and Maryam R. Newman Chair in Plant Biology in October 2025. Strader is an interna...

412519

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Mark Peifer (He, him) @peiferlabunc.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

The community of Drosophila researchers is amazing, mutually supportive and collaborative. Right now a key resource for our community, @flybase.bsky.social , is threatened by the cancellation of its NIH grant and is seeking community help in raising short term funds 1/n 🧪 please share

Dear Fly Community,

In May 2025, the NIH terminated all grant funding to Harvard University, including the NHGRI grant that supported FlyBase. This grant also funded FlyBase teams at Indiana University (IU) and the University of Cambridge (UK), and as a result, their subawards were also canceled.

The Cambridge team has secured support for one to two years through generous donations from the European fly community, emergency funding from the Wellcome Trust, and support from the University of Cambridge. At IU, funding has been secured for one year thanks to reserve funds from Thom Kaufman and a supplement from ORIP/NIH to the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (BDSC).

Unfortunately, the situation at Harvard is far more critical. Harvard University had supported FlyBase staff since May but recently denied a request for extended bridge funding. As a result, all eight employees (four full-time and four part-time) were abruptly laid off, with termination dates ranging from August to mid-October depending on their positions. In addition, our curator at the University of New Mexico will leave her position at the end of August. This decision came as a shock, and we are urgently pursuing all possible funding options.

To put the need into perspective: although FlyBase is free to use, it is not free to make. It takes large teams of people and millions of dollars a year to create FlyBase to support fly research (the last NHGRI grant supported us with more than 2 million USD per annum).

To help sustain FlyBase operations, we have been reaching out to you to ask for your support. We have set up a donation site in Cambridge, UK, to which European labs have and can continue to contribute, and a new donation site at IU to which labs in the US and the rest of the world can contribute. We urge researchers to work with their grant administrators to contribute to FlyBase via these sites if at all possible, as more of the money will go to FlyBase. However, we appreciate that some fu…

https://wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase:Contribute_to_FlyBase

Our immediate goals are:

1. To maintain core curation activities and keep the FlyBase website online

2. To complete integration with the Alliance of Genome Resources (The Alliance).

Integration with the Alliance is essential for FlyBase’s long-term sustainability. For nearly a decade, NHGRI/NIH has supported the unification of Model Organism Databases (MODs) into the Alliance, which we aim to achieve by 2028. Therefore, securing bridge funding to sustain FlyBase over the next three years is crucial for successful integration and the long-term access to FlyBase data.

At present, our remaining funds will allow us to keep the FlyBase website online for approximately one more year. Beyond that, its future is uncertain unless new funding is secured. We will, of course, continue pursuing additional grant opportunities as they arise.

Given the uncertainty of future NIH or alternative funding sources, we are relying on the Fly community for support. Your contributions will directly help us retain the staff needed to complete this transition and to secure ongoing fly data curation into the Alliance beyond 2028.

We at FlyBase are incredibly grateful for the outpouring of support from the community during this challenging time. Your encouragement has strengthened our resolve and underscores how vital this resource remains to Drosophila research worldwide.

Sincerely,
The FlyBase Team

1149126

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

A very pretty peloric Streptocarpus flower opened up today

A normal Streptocarpus flower, 5 pale lavender petals. The bottom 3 with deep purple highly contrasting streaks running into the center

A peloric Streptocarpus flower, 5 lavender petals all with 3 deep purple and contrasting streaks running into the circle.

282

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

John Burns @burnsajohn.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

New #symbiosky paper from Cory Bishop and collaborators (including me 😊) on the remarkable specificity of the symbiosis between spotted salamanders and the alga in their eggs. Cory organized colleagues to get egg fluid from NC USA to NS Canada. He found extremely low... tinyurl.com/2jmwce2s

frontiersin.org

Frontiers | High partner specificity in an algal-salamander mutualism at continental scale

The mutualism between the green alga Oophila amblystomatis (“Oophila”) and egg masses of the spotted salamander Ambystoma maculatum involves acquisition of a...

1308

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 07/08/2025

A fantastic and thorough paper, and the imaging is breathtaking

131

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Penelope Lindsay @penlindsay.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

delighted to share work from my postdoc @cshlnews.bsky.social - here, we use TurboID in maize meristems to be able to resolve CLV receptor interactions, unlocking its potential to resolve in vivo receptor interactions important for meristem signaling.

1238

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

This is a heart breaker, attending this meeting last year for my PGRP postdoc fellowship was a great opportunity

020

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Julia Van Etten @couchmicroscopy.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

I’m thrilled to announce that next summer I’ll be joining the University of Maryland Department of Biology as an assistant professor! The Van Etten lab will study how horizontal processes (DNA and gene transfer + organelle acquisition) drive and are driven by ecology and evolution. vanettenlab.org

2117424

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

Newest software stuff from team @viralemergence.org and maybe the most widely-useful thing we've developed? Huge congrats to Alexander and Steph, this is such an amazing bioinformatics tool. (Just wait until you see what they're doing with it!)

1115

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Paula Elomaa @paulaelomaa.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

Happy to see this out and for the opportunity to contribute!! The puzzle of Asteraceae inflorescence development jumps one step forward (a big step 😅) 🌻

1134

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

The CapituLab @thecapitulab.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

We are absolutely thrilled to share this work on CLV signaling in the sunflower family! This project was only possible through the efforts and contributions of our incredible collaborators! It also represents the CapituLab’s first preprint! (more to come soon though…) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

Floral innovation through modifications in stem cell peptide signaling.

Understanding how evolution shapes genetic networks to create new developmental forms is a central question in biology. Flowering shoot (inflorescence) architecture varies significantly across plant f...

2166

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

A new really exciting preprint from @thecapitulab.bsky.social, my PhD lab, and many others One of the many interesting findings - The sequence evolution of CLV3 and changes to CLV signaling is required for capitulum development. CLEs make sunflowers! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

Floral innovation through modifications in stem cell peptide signaling.

186

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

Elizabeth made so many high order CRISPR mutants for this great paper! Florigen bypasses defects in CLE signaling!

030

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Elena Shpak @elenashpak.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

New review: WUSCHEL: The essential regulator of the Arabidopsis shoot Apical Meristem. doi.org/10.1016/j.pb... Message me if you need a free access link.

092

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

Based on some quick math, this alone could fund the NSF Plant Genome Research Program for ~4 years; the NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology, which was totally axed in the NSF budget request, for ~9 years; and ~ half the total NSF GRFP budget

3252141

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

Private funding of research cannot and will not compensate for the lost public research funding

063

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Oh big deal, it's not like soybean is *checks notes* the 2nd biggest crop in the US and is *turns page* currently under threat by a major pest

66214

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

"the number of staff, students, and researchers involved in NSF-supported science would drop from more than 330,000 to about 90,000—a whopping 73 percent cut."

000

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

I just got back from one of these workshops, and it was probably the best meeting I have ever attended

010

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Lucia Strader @luciastrader.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Biomolecular condensates are critical for organizing cellular contents, but most studies focus on phase separation driven by salt, pH, or temperature. But what if intracellular movement also matters? Here, we explore motility-induced condensation in the cell. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

science.org

Active transport enables protein condensation in cells

The force generated by active transport modulates protein condensation.

37326

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Nature Plants @natplants.nature.com · 13/05/2025

Our editors write: - "Symbiosis signalling: Mycorrhizal CLE mimicry" rdcu.be/elQ6S

2112

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

John Burns @burnsajohn.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

I made some lovely new friends over the weekend with @couchmicroscopy.bsky.social, @andrewilloughb.bsky.social, and these fantastic (and tiny--15 micron cells) #rhizarian #protistsonsky Paulinella sp. The eukaryote with totally unique and recently acquired photosythesis.

An image of a Paulinella cell preparing to divide. It is a small oval encased in silica scales with two curved green rods--its chromatophores. One will go into the new daughter cell--putting out a scale like the one at the top of this cell in this image is one of the early steps in division.

0352

Andrew Willoughby @andrewilloughb.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

You can even see my Streptocarpus shirt (which I demanded shown to the world)

050

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Julia Van Etten @couchmicroscopy.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

In the field with @burnsajohn.bsky.social and @andrewilloughb.bsky.social. We found our first photosynthetic Paulinella cell of the day! Only took 4 hours to find 🥴. Now isolating this and the other few we’ve found since! Very very hard, tedious work but we are in good spirits.

0365

Reposted by Andrew Willoughby

Congressman Bill Foster @repbillfoster.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

NEWS: I just led 112 of my colleagues in demanding answers from the Trump Administration on their funding freeze of the National Science Foundation. Cutting off NSF funding threatens vital research, stalls innovation, and risks ceding global scientific leadership to China.

24590143