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

Abstract. Biochemical constraints on the admissible amino acids at specific sites in proteins lead to heterogeneity of the amino acid substitution process

Rhynchospora tenuis undergoes obligate, genome-wide achiasmy in both male and female meiosis.

Despite the ubiquity of wild boar populations across Eurasia, their origins, routes of dispersal, and phenotypic evolution remain uncertain. Here, using 745 genomes representing populations across Eur...

We present here a revision of the APG classification that considers the extensive recent analyses of hundreds of nuclear and plastid genes for many angiosperm species. Although previous versions of t...

Author summary Blast, caused by the fungal pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae, is one of the world’s most devastating rice diseases. During infection, M. oryzae secretes a diverse set of molecules, known as ...

Deciphering the mechanisms of protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and protein structural changes within the native cellular environment is crucial for advancing drug discovery. In vivo chemical…

PhyloDig is a command line pipeline for automated homology mining across collections of protein and coding sequence databases. It combines HMMER searches, optional Pfam domain filtering, and sequen...

Heritable microbes profoundly influence insect biology, yet the traits they confer often evolve rapidly and differ among closely related symbiont s...

Plant receptor-like kinases (RLKs) are involved in diverse processes, ranging from growth and reproduction to interactions with microbes. Variation in the extracellular domains delineates several RLKs...

Plants perceive external and internal signals via receptors to modulate their growth, development, and defenses. Leucine-rich-repeat receptor-like-kinase (RLKs) and receptor-like-proteins (RLPs) are t...

Croll lab at University of Neuchatel. The lab of Daniel Croll wants to understand how pathogens evolve to cause disease. For this, we mainly focus on major crop pathogens to unravel mechanisms of rapi...

Angiosperm seed formation requires the coordinated development of the products of double fertilization—the embryo and the endosperm. The endosperm mediates efficient nutrient transfer from surrounding...

Angiosperm seed formation requires the coordinated development of the products of double fertilization—the embryo and the endosperm. The endosperm mediates efficient nutrient transfer from surrounding...

Elevated temperature has been shown to compromise salicylic acid (SA)-mediated immunity in plants. The Arabidopsis thaliana accession C24 retains constitutively elevated SA and resistance to the hemib...

The model plant Arabidopsis thaliana has been a workhorse of plant biology since the 1950s, when the Columbia-0 (Col-0) accession was widely adopted by the research community as a reference genotype. ...

The grass family (Poaceae) has immense economic and ecological importance and exhibits distinctive metabolic traits, including dual starch and lignin biosynthetic pathways. We sequenced the genomes of...

Abstract. The prominence of positive selection, in which beneficial mutations are favored by natural selection and rapidly increase in frequency, is a subj

Many questions in population genetics are concerned with reconstructing evolutionary history through time, such as inferring how population structure has changed throughout the past. Yet, many existing approaches have only an implicit temporal component, using quantities such as allele frequency or haplotype length as rough proxies for age. Recent advances in the inference of Ancestral Recombination Graphs (ARGs) have made it possible to estimate the entire sequence of local genealogies along the genome. These genealogies explicitly encode how samples are related to each other at different time points in the past, enabling the inference of how population structure has changed over time. To this end, recent work has used ARGs to define time-stratified versions of widely-used population genetics summary statistics in an attempt to capture the population structure present within a particular time window. Here, we show that naive approaches result in statistics that cannot be interpreted solely in terms of the population structure present within the time window they are targeting. To address this problem, we introduce a framework of coalescent-based time-stratified statistics, which use coalescence probabilities to partition classical summary statistics into interval-specific contributions. Using coalescent simulations, we demonstrate that these statistics accurately isolate population structure at different temporal depths and avoid spurious signals. Our results highlight the necessity of integrating coalescent theory into ARG-based temporal analyses and provide a principled and practical foundation for studying the dynamics of population structure through time. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. National Human Genome Research Institute, https://ror.org/00baak391, R01HG014005

The relative importance of genetic drift versus selection to evolutionary change has long been debated. This debate has mainly focused over long-time-scales (e.g. hundreds of thousands of generations)...

To promote disease resistance, plant nucleotide-binding, leucine-rich repeat (NLR) immune receptors often require paired co-receptors. In many cases, paired NLRs comprise one NLR to perceive effectors...

Lichens are symbiotic associations between filamentous fungi and photosynthetic micro-organisms, such as green algae and/or cyanobacteria, that result in a single anatomically complex structure that…

Abstract. Fungi harbor diverse arrays of genes encoding NOD-like receptors (NLRs), key intracellular immune proteins found in plants, animals, and bacteria

Chhillar et al. reveal that plant immunity is organized across leaf tissues through specialized cell-type programs. While a shared core immune program is broadly activated, individual cell types deplo...

2027 IS-MPMI Congress · 18–22 July 2027 · Jeju, South Korea Submission deadline: 25 September 2026 Call for concurrent session proposals We are thrilled to announce that concurrent session submissions...

Kinase fusion proteins (KFPs) have emerged as an important group of immune receptors encoded by plant resistance genes. Here, we report a new type of gene pair that controls resistance of wheat to the...