Anoxic live-cell imaging shows actin-dependent crawling motility and dynamic protrusions in Asgard archaea, providing insights into cellular innovations that may have contributed to eukaryotic evoluti...

The apoplast is a primary location for interactions between plants and invasive pathogens and is the site where many pathogen-secreted effectors are perceived by cell surface immune receptors to activ...

Cite as: van Rooij, I. (2025) AI slop and the destruction of knowledge. This week I was looking for info on what cognitive scientists mean when they speak of ‘domain-general’ cognition. I was curio…

What I told early-career researchers about prediction, rigour, failure, priors — and the tyranny of bar graphs.

The endodermis is a vital barrier tissue in plants, but its origin, evolution, and homologies across land plants remain ambiguous. Here, we implement …

In avocado and certain wild relatives in Lauraceae, a highly synchronized daily rhythm of floral sex timing promotes cross-pollination between two ...

Deubiquitylases are key proteolytic regulators of ubiquitin-dependent cellular processes, catalyzing the removal or remodelling of ubiquitin modifications on substrate proteins, including those target...

Plant-derived pigments offer sustainable alternatives to synthetic colorants, yet their practical deployment in textiles is limited by restricted chemical diversity and low abundance. Liverworts represent a source of diverse chemical compounds, and the model liverworts Marchantia polymorpha are emerging as chassis for bioengineering and synthetic biology. Here, we report the biotechnological application of auronidins, a rare class of flavonoid pigments, as textile dyes. Using M. polymorpha, we engineered enhanced auronidin production through controlled expression of the R2R3-MYB transcription factor MpMYB14. We systematically benchmarked constitutive and inducible gene expression systems, including heat-shock, glucocorticoid receptor, and β-estradiol (XVE) circuits, identifying inducible strategies that decouple biomass accumulation from secondary metabolite production while achieving high pigment yields. Extracted auronidins were used to dye cotton yarn directly, demonstrating the feasibility of auronidins for textile dyeing. Our results establish M. polymorpha as a versatile plant chassis for programmable secondary metabolite production and introduce auronidins as a promising natural pigment platform for sustainable textile biotechnology.

Monoterpenes (C10) are a large group of specialized metabolites important for plant interactions with the environment. Their biosynthesis is well understood in seed plants, where geranyl diphosphate s...

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Agrobacterium-mediated transformation is the dominant method for plant transgenesis, yet it frequently produces multi-copy, structurally complex T-DNA insertions associated with transgene silencing, u...