New Postdoc position (2yrs) available in our #EvoMPMI lab @JohnInnesCentre. Come and work with on harnessing the diversity of immune mechanisms to protect plants. jobs.jic.ac.uk/Details.asp?va…

Excited to host the UK NonSeed Plant Meeting in Norwich this year on Friday December the 12th. It’s a great community and these meetings are always fun and informative. Whether you’re a seasoned expert or a newbie looking to diversify your research, please consider joining us!

RNA from herbarium specimens is more stable than you think. Cool new study from @atyszka.org @evojfwalker.bsky.social and team. @khongsamchia.bsky.social and I were happy to contribute by functionally validating an NLR immune receptor last expressed in 1956 : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Please welcome our PhD student Ellie @ebkennedy.bsky.social to BlueSky! As described in her bio, she’s enamoured with moss. Hopefully you can see why 🤓😇

Lastly, we show that liverwort-isolated P. viridiflava also infect the flowering plant N. benthamiana, where it similarly relies on avrE/hopM1. Our work highlights P. viridiflava as an effective pathogen that manipulates evolutionarily divergent plant hosts

Since T3SS/effectors were most important, we knocked out the conserved avrE/hopM1 effector pair and found that these too are essential for liverwort infection

We generated KOs in the T3SS component hrcC (no effector deliver) or PEL (pectate lyase) and determined that effector delivery rather than PEL-dependent cell wall degradation is important for liverwort infection

Next, we generated draft genomes and found that infectious isolates were P. viridiflava belonging to phylogroup 7 of the P. syringae species complex

We found wild liverworts with disease symptoms in their aerial structures and used them to isolate endophytic Pseudomonas. We discovered several Ps.isolates that reliably infected Marchantia in the lab

New Preprint! We identified Pseudomonas in wild liverworts and explored what makes them virulent. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Nice! Now I’m always going to see sour patch kids 😹

Check out our latest preprint where we dissect how Pseudomonas syringae is able to infect distantly related plants like liverworts, ferns, and angiosperms. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New lab tradition: Holiday pizza party! 🍕 🎉 🌱