super amazing Alex!!!

see Heena's post for a cool summary bsky.app/profile/heen...

6/ 🙏 Huge thanks to the amazing collaborators and co-authors who made this work possible!

🧑‍🔬 Basile Leduque, Leandro Quadrana, Keith Slotkin, Alexandros Bousios (@abousios.bsky.social) & Hans-wilhelm Nuetzmann

5/ 💻 Surprise package! We developed a custom pipeline, deNOVOEnrich, to profile somatic TE insertions from TEd-seq short-read data.
Using split-read mapping, we pinpoint new somatic insertions at base-pair resolution 🧬🔍
Check it out: github.com/hAmbreen02/d...

4/ 🔥 Somatic insertion hotspots of the EVADE transposon are enriched at environmentally responsive genes 🌄 - including Resistance gene and biosynthetic gene clusters.
Is stress guiding TE activity, or are TEs tuning stress responses?
Somatic genome plasticity 🧬

3/ 🧬 Our work shows somatic TE activity in Arabidopsis is non‑random and family‑specific. Different TE families prefer distinct genomic niches - is it driven by underlying epigenetic code, or are they avoiding conflict in a shared genome ecosystem? 🤔

2/ Combining distinct experimental conditions, we traced a roadmap of expected TE movement in somatic cells 🌿, capturing ~200K new TE insertions across multiple families in the process.

2/2 See also @movillome.bsky.social's paper from my lab on using PacBio long-read sequencing to discover somatic TE insertions with high sensitivity and specificity in an unbiased manner -- an excellent complement to powerful short-read based enrichment methods (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...)

For some years now, people were able to explore genome-wide variation and insertion patterns of TEs across many individuals of a single species, now we can treat cells of the same plant as the individual, this is very cool!

Amazing Andre!!!

Amazing story, well done!! Makes you wonder of what all these small unknown ORFs may be doing in other LTR retrotransposon lineages - many in plants carry 'weird' ORFs!