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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Also happy to discuss my ongoing work on KAI2 agonists as a non-GMO approach to the same quandary,and interested in collaborations to refine a wide host range, field appplicable agonist as an agrichemical approach to improve phosphate uptake efficiency.

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I'll be at ICS2026 in Paris next week - find my poster #32 to learn about repurposing the suicidal germinant SPL7 for yield protection and mycorrhizal competence in rice.

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

I'll be presenting Wed 17th 11:30 at IMMM2025 in Munich in our labs work on the role of the D14L-SMAX1 module in the arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis, and why we think it operates in two distinct roles (regulating the common symbiosis pathway and independent of it in the cortex). #immm2025

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

I've also got a poster (#9) if you want to discuss further details.

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

Tokyo waterworks museum, pretty small but it's worth a look around

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

Not sure if there's some relationship to raccoondogs or if it's just an artistic predeliction for the scrotum as a weapon

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

Spirit of chlorea defeated with bottled water and improved hydraulic infrastructure

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

Alien infiltrator (Rhizophagus irregularis in rice lateral root, 3d reconstruction)

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

Actually poster 101 😅 Hope to see you all tomorrow

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

Probably the direct binding of PHRL7 overrules the more general KL signalling of nutrition, but it wouls be interesting to see if in the legumes KL signalling is more dominantly regulated by nitrogen status.

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

Wondering how this fits with SMAX1 - at least in Glycine it appears to inhibit nodulation, and is degraded downstream of PHR (in Arabidopsis & rice). ( @oswaldovaldesl.bsky.social )

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Alex Guyon @alexguyon.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

1/🚨 New preprint alert! Can mutualists and pathogens co-colonise the same living plant cell and what does that do to the plant membranes that surround these microbes?

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 20/06/2025

I'll be at @ipgsa2025.bsky.social in 10 days time - come find me at poster 102 to discuss what we've learned in rice about the role of KL & its negative regulator SMAX1 in root development, mycorrhizal symbiosis and germination, as well as our efforts to take chemical control of this pathway.

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

Some more #mycorrhiza #microscopy Rhizophagus irregularis inside a rice lateral root (plant & fungal CWs stained with calcofluor white, 400x mag)

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

Thanks, glad my rambling made some sense. Not sure I'm enough into phylogenomics to write that review, but @alexdallaire.bsky.social might have a more informed take.

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

There are plenty of extant fungi that range from pathogenic to mutualistic depending on the environment too, trying to categories things beyond 'capable of intimate metabolic association' may be looking at it wrong.

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

Some people think there is a geologically regular switch between pathogenesis and symbiosis in the EcMF linages, but thats disputed and not well evidenced.

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

For the review's scenario, I guess you could have a fungi terrestrialised to grab lithic minerals, and reaches back to water to pull carbon from aquatic macroalgae? Seems possible but IDK how likely.

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

Aquatic to terrestrial transition of lichens makes a lot of sense, but we're looking at different linages for plant/mycorrhiza. Geosyphon & Mortierella are both reported to have endosymbiotic algae, which would be another route, but again doesn't match plant phylogeny emerging from a macroalgae.

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

Increased access to minerals may also be sufficient, though you'd think if this was the case you'd be able to find mycorrhizal-like associations in extant macroalgae

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

with partially terrestrial filamentous fungi foremost for providing hydraulic conductivity, but TBH glomeromycotina genomes are so reduced we could just be missing some service an aquatic ancestor could have provided (like some extant vitamin exchange cycles between algae & fungi in their CW).

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

rather than a commensal & it would seem quite likely symbiosis precedes terrestrialisation. Though you do have the question of what the aquatic fungus provided. I could also conceive of the first plants being an interaction between algae in intermittently dried fresh water,

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

I'd missed that line (early land plants tamed some of their attackers, leading to mutually beneficial AM relationship) in the review, IMO better to see evolution to symbiosis is really a two-way street. I don't think we have evidence that the first mucoromycota symbiont was a pathogen

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

I think we can also hypothsize two waves of autotroph-fungal terrestralisation, first of ascomycete - algal (lichen) and then of mucoromycota - plants (Honegger 2012, though again the fossil evidence isn't old enough to differentiate)

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

On the plant side, chareles seem to have most of the core symbiotic geneset but I don't know of any known fungal symbiont of them, or even to what extent its been investigated - though land plant fossils predate fossil chareles so what their LCA was is also purely inferred from phylogenomics

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

It makes sense to me that Mucoromycotan symbiosis would arise from an fungus that associated with an alga either pathogenically or sapotrophically on waste or dead cells, but at this point I don't know how you'd tell that apart.

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

Axiomatically, symbiotic fungi must be derived from non-symbiotic fungi at some point, and symbiosis has evolved many times. Loss of PCWDE is a common convergent event, and Glomermycotina's obligate biotrophy is clearly derived from a saprotrophic Mucoromycota LCA.

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

...those plants are clearly pretty derived. Similarly, phylomics suggest that the LCA of extant land plants formed intracellular mycorrhizal associations with Mucoromycota, had a chitin sensor that was both symbiotic & immunogenic (but are also mutlicellular & cutin synthesizing)

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

I think its generally accepted (save that it would likely have been fungi not oomycetes since we now know they're separate clades). Hard evidence is difficult given the time involved. Fossils evidence for mycorrhizal associations co-occur with the oldest whole plant fossils, but ...

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Sharing some of my own #mycorrhiza #microscopy from @paszkowskilab.bsky.social Rhizophagus irregularis inside a rice lateral root (plant & fungal CWs stained with calcofluor white, 400x mag)

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

I know theres old publications on internal membrane tubules within bacteroids, but I'd assume there are probably peri-bacteroid lumen tubules too (like those observed in the peri-arbuscular lumen)

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

Extracellular vesicles are fascinating (if another layer in the 'every time we learn anything, we find biology is actually more complicated than the last model' thing).

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Cedric Feschotte @cedricfeschotte.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

💥🥳 At long last, our latest paper is out! Gag proteins of endogenous retroviruses are required for zebrafish development www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Led heroically by Sylvia Chang & @jonowells.bsky.social A study which has changed the way I think of #transposons! No less! 🧵 1/n

pnas.org

Gag proteins encoded by endogenous retroviruses are required for zebrafish development | PNAS

Transposable elements (TEs) make up the bulk of eukaryotic genomes and examples abound of TE-derived sequences repurposed for organismal function. ...

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Cedric Feschotte @cedricfeschotte.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

In sum, at least three different vertebrate TEs encode Gag proteins required for embryonic development! How did we get there? We propose a TE ADDICTION model: TE products (eg Gag) are redundant with & progressively displace essential host proteins establishing dependence on TE for development.

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

yeah I read that as being the stock pots bulking the Fm; lettuce would be past harvest date by 3 months so doesn't fit the results section. The actual experimental growth conditions just don't seem to be mentioned

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

I can't find how old the plants were anywhere in the article, but they must be very young (FW ~0.2g; no DW given) so its hard to extrapolate to harvest weight

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

Anyway this is what google serves you as a top result for "plant uptake of fatty acids", and includes in it own LLM summaries.

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

Came across a strange website that appears to be some sort of LLM generated scam product for weed growers. Interesting to see that while the LLM has hallucinated all the citations it does get the right volume for the publication year. www.growwithgrease.com/blogs/news/f...

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Nick Desnoyer @nickdesnoyer.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

Figure 1. Custom Micro-Roses, engineered in Arabidopsis thaliana 🌹 Top: Visible light, Bottom: Fluorescence (a) White: no pigment (b) Magenta: betalains (c) Pink champagne: betalains + betaxanthins (d) Champagne: betaxanthins

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Sophien Kamoun @kamounlab.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

Jurassic Research Park ⁦‪@NorwichResearch‬⁩ 🦖

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Jen McGaley @jenmcgaley.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

Mid-week #mycorrhiza 🍄 Roots are busy places... here's a rice root packed with mycorrhizal fungal arbuscules 🔬

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

nodulation is controlled by jasmonic acid (JA) signalling when the metabolite being produced senses the red/far-red (R/FR) ratio - is a misunderstand of Suzuki 2011's title The use of common-meanings of words rather than their scientific meaning was aggravating. "Cytokinins catalyse symbiosis"

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

Like what? If they didn't want to draw any conclusion from that other than GA is involved in nodulation then it could have been a table entry.

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

should be comprehensively studied to understand its exact influence along the symbiotic pathway during legume-rhizobium interactions."

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

which lacks GA and is capable of producing fewer nodules than its unmutated wild-type counterpart corroborates its role during legume-rhizobium interactions. From the existing body of knowledge, it can be concluded that, in the future, the interaction of GA and other plant hormones

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

During the interaction between legumes and Rhizobia, the infection stage of nodulation is inhibited; however, gibberellins favour nodule organogenesis. Gibberellins hinder nodule senescence and stimulate nodule meristem division in P. sativum. Furthermore, the observation that P. sativum,

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

Even allowing for ESL, the lack of proofing was poor. see the GA section as an example of both issues; I've removed the citations but left otherwise as is: "All vascular plants produce gibberellins, are the important metabolites of functional nodules Moreover, it negatively influences infection.

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Thomas Irving @endosymb.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

I've never seen someone write a metanalysis methods section for a review before. Odd. But I was unimpressed by the content; fully descriptive rather than concluding anything other than 'more research' and lacks any genetic detail on the host side.

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