iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Carlos Rodríguez

Dr. Adeene Denton @spacewhalerider.com · 11/05/2026

"Scientists don't want you to know-" Buddy there are so many things I, as a scientist, want you to know and the only thing stopping me from writing more papers and posts about it and then starting a podcast to tell you even MORE things is that I am limited by hours in the day

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

I know! My academic writing is a bit formulaic at times because it's easier to comunicate things like that for a non-native speaker. Now I have to re-check my word usage. I think that LLM fears will lead to reliance on prestige and gut feeling, affecting disporportionately non-US/Europe scientists.

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

I know! I haven't felt like saying TGIF since like mid PhD...for me is the constant worry of falling behind; I want the workweek to end, but feel like I haven't done as much as I needed to during the week

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Lichman Lab @lichmanlab.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Pleased to share our full publication of our manuscript describing completion of nicotine biosynthesis in @natcomms.nature.com following our pre-print from December last year. In this work we solve the 200-year-old puzzle of how tobacco plants make nicotine. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Nicotine biosynthesis is completed by cryptic activating glucosylation - Nature Communications

Despite the significance of nicotine, a neuroactive alkaloid produced by tobacco, its biosynthesis has remained elusive. Here, the authors report the in vitro and in planta reconstruction of a fo...

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Maite Colinas @maitecolinas.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

In our latest preprint we report the unexpected discovery of Epi-STR, an R-stereoselective ortholog of the S-selective canonical Strictosidine synthases (STRs). Found in the rather obscure plant Pogonopus specious. This work was led by my stellar student Clara Morweiser! #natprod #PlantScience

Scheme showing the Pictet-Spengler reaction between tryptamine and a secoiridoid by canonical S-selective STRs compared to the newly discovered Epi-STR. On the right a photo of the pink flowers of Pogonopus speciosus. Photo taken by Eva Rothe.

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Maite Colinas @maitecolinas.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

Our funky R-stereoselective Epi-STR is now available online and open access at its permanent home @angewandtechemie.bsky.social. 🥳 This is Clara's first first-author paper, makes me extra happy! @mpi-ce.bsky.social #PlantScience #natprod doi.org/10.1002/anie...

A collage showing on the left a picture of the bright pink closed flowers and bracts of the plant Pogonopus speciosus. On the right a scheme depicting the reaction of tryptamine and secologanic acid to vincosidic acid that is catalyzed by P. speciosus Epi-STR, an unusual R-stereoselective ortholog of strictosidine synthase.

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

I think that one of the main issues in academia is the university administrators being very anti-academia

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Philipp Bayer @philippbayer.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

I'm glad I'm not in this sector any more. Working seven days, having to fight for every cent, receiving zero support, and then they turn around and spend billions on their mates. Why should I (or anyone) burn myself out for that www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...

abc.net.au

As universities cut courses, spending on consultants and contractors nears $2b

Consultancies have been accused of infiltrating universities and wasting scarce public funds on questionable advice about cutting courses and jobs.

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

If I were asked to collaborate by a person to test a hypothesis, I would be thrilled, honored even, and consider collaboration. But the framing of experimental work as just "unpublished data" to share feels...degrading. And a common theme recently.

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

I'm not a supporter of the "ideas are cheap" crowd, but they are definitely not the limiting factor in biology. We don't lack the capacity to generate data-driven, well-though hypotheses, we lack the resources to test them.

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

I just got an e-mail asking me to "collaborate with data" that offers to put my name in a publication in exchange of experimentally testing some LLM-generated statement. I will not dignify that with an answer; my blood pressure can't deal with writing the appropriate answer.

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Shaily Patel @vox-magica.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

the upshot of all this is that universities shouldn't be chasing industry trends, or trends of any sort, probably. we cede our power to *set* intellectual and cultural trends when we do that. this power demands that we always remain a bit out-of-step. i'd give anything for us to see that.

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Chenxin Li, PhD @chenxinli2.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

I just had that conversation earlier this week. The college dean is deciding if they will (dis)continue the bioinformatics training program for grad students. An argument for discontinuation is that students will use GenAI to help them code, so they don’t need to learn bioinformatics.

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Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology @mpi-ce.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

The process by which the cinchona tree produces quinine has been elucidated. In a new study published in @nature.com, researchers from the @oconnorlab.bsky.social and the @universityofga.bsky.social unveil the biosynthetic pathway behind this 400-year-old secret. www.ice.mpg.de/548102/PR_Ki...

ice.mpg.de

Mystery of quinine biosynthesis solved

For centuries, the process by which the cinchona tree produces its valuable alkaloids, including the life-saving quinine used to treat malaria, was shrouded in mystery. Now, a research team from the M...

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Michael D. Green, PhD @michaeldgreen.phd · 08/03/2026

I’ve seen ppl discuss how over 50% of their grants wouldn’t have been awarded @ current success rates. That’s an important reflection. What about the cost of living and the benefits you received at the start of your career? Expectations are higher, and many schools aren’t even offering startup $

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Nick Sousanis @nsousanis.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

In case anyone needs it for their syllabi, my statement in gen-Ai from the minicomic I made as a syllabus for class last semester. All online and printable here spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-sy...

a snippet of a mini-comic, at top - straight line stretches from point A to B. Immediately below, same dot at A, then becomes a curving, meandering line that winds through the page and ends at a point with rays and a question mark emanating from it. Text reads: "Nothing can do this for you - for that robs you of experience and conflates answers with learning. Rather, it's all the decisions you make along the way, the mistakes, struggles, and surprises! These pathways you create - this is learning.

https://spinweaveandcut.com/fall-2025-syllabi/

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Henryk Straube @hstraube.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

🪴 🫘 🫛 Come work with us in beautiful Copenhagen! This is the erfect position for you, if you like: - natural products - working with plants - solving complex metabolism puzzles - having an applied impact shorturl.at/iIjW3

linkedin.com

Postdoc of Plant Natural Product Biosynthesis or Transport | Fernando Geu-Flores

🌿 Postdoc position in Plant Natural Products 🌿 📍 Geu-Flores lab at the University of Copenhagen (DK) 🥼 Are you passionate about uncovering how plants make and transport complex bioactive alkaloids? ...

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

Honestly, any miniprep day; I was done by noon, had to wait for until the next day for sequencing results, so I had a whole afternoon free; usually wasted reading, but sometimes with a view or a beer

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

I forgot to ad hashtags!! #Biosynthesis #Olive #plantscience #NaturalProducts #SecMet I may have to repost this later this week; anyone know hashtags on natural product biosynthesis or enzyme/gene discovery?

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

But anyway, feel free to ask me anything on this. I noticed several mistakes in this thread that I cannot edit (including an it's that should be an its) but any other discussion on the science is more than welcome!

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

The method has it's limitations; by checking with known enzymes, it might have a higher false negative rate than other methods (which is hard to determine for other methods with no clear threshold) so it's not a silver bullet. But it makes use of public data, so has very low cost to implement.

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

And in the first batch of enzymes we found an activity! And it wasn't a p450 at all, but an oxoglutarate-dependent dioxygenase! Never before I had an activity in the first batch of candidates.

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

I was starting my lab in México with no starter funds, so we couldn't brute force it. So I did the usual: throw more data at the problem. Jasmine and Ash have similar metabolites, so we analized public datasets, and got a reasonable number of candidates that were coexpressed in the 3 species.

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Stubbornness wouldn't let me forget the issue, and we kept testing for the activity; synGenes from different assemblies, isoforms, alleles, ID%, etc. but no activity. Until we thought that maybe it wasn't a CYP72. We decided to have an open-minded approach, but how do you select from 100s of genes?

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

We're closing in on oleuropein biosynthesis in Olive! Oleuropein is the reason we can't eat raw olives, and also the "spicy" taste of olive oil. People assumed (and some wrongly reported) that the pathway was the same as in Catharanthus, but that's not entirely true! 🧵 www.cell.com/plant-commun...

cell.com

Comparative transcriptomic and co-expression analyses enable the discovery of key enzymes responsible for oleuropein biosynthesis in olive (Olea europaea)

Oleuropein, an oleoside-type secoiridoid, is the major determinant of olive oil flavor and quality. This study completes the biosynthetic pathway from 7-deoxy-loganic acid to 7-β-1-D-glucopyranosyl-ol...

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Nikolay Tumanov @ntumanovxray.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

You know, it would really add a bit credibility to your article if you would use correct structural formula of the (well-known) compound that you are studying. #chemsky www.mdpi.com/1999-4923/17...

A structural formula of "Lysine". Wrong one.

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

I'm intrigued...I would look for forbidden m/z values, some masses cannot exist as combinations of atoms are limited. Or check the variation of intensities and symmetry of LC peaks? I'm tempted to volunteer my time to the effort; this is scary...

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Michael Hendricks 🇨🇦 @michaelhendricks.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

I like to tape these graphs next to the asbestos monitoring air pumps that have been running in my building since 2014.

A graph showing the increase of executive and management staff salaries at McGill (260%) since 2014-15 compared to full time faculty (125%). A second graph shows that academic salaries have decreased in real dollars by 4.2% while director/manager salaries have increased by 5.2%.

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New Phytologist @newphyt.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

In #Profile: Laila P. Partida-Martínez 👇 📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #LatestIssue

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

There's something that breaks inside me whenever I read "human - AI collaboration" in a formal, scientific article. I don't collaborate with Excel or R anymore than I collaborare with a pipette or a mass spec. It's a marketing term that overstates capacities that editors should not allow.

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

Lowry! Forgot the name of the assay! I do think that it's due to the misuse in food science spam articles, rather than the protein assay, as I've rarely seen anything that is not Bradford for that.

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

My guess would be the Folin assay, or the paper that first uses it to estimate total phenolics. Food science has a serious SPAM issue of people throwing Folin to a random extract and publishing the results, so it must be >100k citations.

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

I need to start making my exams less dependent on NCBI; good thing it's 10mins to the end of the test, and that I also taught them to use the EBI. But there was some panic.

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

That also works against my notion of potential autotoxicity; few things more reactive than an isothiocyanate...I need to sit and think this more thoroughly.

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

I always believed on the cost to produce, but then I can't explain some Caryophyllales substituting "inexpensive" (CO2) anthocyanins with costly (N2) betalains. I now think it's more about the liability of leaky production of reactive molecules. But that's on ecological time, not evolutionary time.

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Good to know I'm not the only one! Yesterday I started the lecture one hour early because I misread the time zone. Had to tell the students that showed up to meet back in an hour.

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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

The Matthew Effect is alive and well in academia - always makes me wary of programs aimed at identifying rising stars in an already highly talented pool... elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

elifesciences.org

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Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

That's why funders hold the power here. Funders can decide to pay for services or not. They can decide to support authors who publish in for-profit journals, or not. They can decide to pay APCs in for-profit journals, or not. 9/n

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

I think a huge part of this is due to admins being *very* JIF and brand-driven (brand aware?) I also think, and this is very anecdotal, that some uni admins tend to be anti-academic and perceive society journals as old school and Nature brand as more "disruptive" (at least buzzword/marketing-wise).

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Elena Del Pup @elenadelpup.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

🌱plantiSMASH 2.0💥 is now live! I’m very excited to share that the 2.0 version of plantiSMASH is now available online and as a preprint on bioRxiv 📄https://lnkd.in/dN4F56pf 🌱 What’s new in plantiSMASH 2.0? ⬇️

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

SAVE THE DATE! The annual meeting of the PSNA will be on June 15-19 in Wisconsin! Check the website go.wisc.edu/PSNA2026 and follow @psna-official.bsky.social for updates. And if you do research in phytochemistry, consider joining the PSNA; I've found the community to be very welcoming.

go.wisc.edu

PSNA2026@Madison

Save the date!! June 15 Monday - June 19 Friday, 2026

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Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Bisexual of the Blade (Alt-text or DIE) @shengokai.blacksky.app · 15/08/2025

Essentially, narratives about the efficiency and efficacy of AI have flooded our cultural conversation about AI thereby resulting in the uncritical uptake of anything branded as "AI" as inherently more valuable, more effective, than anything without AI, EVEN IF AI IS NOT NECESSARY.

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Carlos Rodríguez @carloslab.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Has anyone else seen an increase in manuscript submissions using triple quads for untargeted metabolomics? Are vendors telling people they can do untargeted with a TQD? Or did I miss something?

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Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) @snsf.ch · 05/08/2025

Call for Ambizione Ambizione grants are aimed at early-career researchers who wish to conduct and lead a project of their own. Interested in learning more about this call? Take part in our online info event on 14 August 2025. Submission deadline: 4 November 2025 ➡️ buff.ly/dDQl9QA

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PlantEvolution 🌱🌾 @plantevolution.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

I’ve been mystified for years why my line of research (which includes genetic engineering of plants) makes (German) people so much more upset than the AI work of my campus neighbors. And why does eco-anxiety have a @wikipedia.org page, but not AI-anxiety?

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