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🌹 Stop and smell the roses From ancient wild roses to today's fragrant, colourful cultivars, every bloom carries a remarkable hidden history. Read more: shorturl.at/GTbd5 #Roses #Gardening #PlantScience #Evolution #Nature

Freshly published! My new paper exploring Aquatic Plants as part of a special issue on Plant Evolution in @currentbiology.bsky.social authors.elsevier.com/a/1nEdl3QW8S... @biology.ox.ac.uk @ox.ac.uk

My PhD paper on my beloved cycads and beetles on the cover of Science!!! Check out how we studied thermal infrared as a pollination signal, from molecular mechanisms to the wonders of behavior... science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Nobody: what is a tree, anyway? Us: authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S... (Review out today, in which we ask whether xylem disconnection arising early in wood anatomy is convergent with disconnection seen across tall plants and whether tree evolution requires disconnection given periodic drought.)

Super excited to see Atlas of Botany in print!!! A pleasure to work with the wonderful team from DK and the @thebotanics.bsky.social I wrote the Ancient Biomes section covering some of my favourite stories about plant evolution from the last 500 million years! @instmolplantsci.bsky.social

New Editorial: "Remembrance of plants past" rdcu.be/fkN8D The timescales on which plants operate are both much shorter and much longer than those on which we function. All we can observe are the traces they leave behind.

New Editorial: "Smells like spring spirit" rdcu.be/ffaAx The return of spring is an excellent occasion to celebrate the secondary metabolites that are the basis for the wonderfully diverse aromas and tastes of plants, which are used for our culinary pleasure. #PlantScience

De novo gene origination from noncoding regions is a major source of genetic innovation. Dong et al. [1] (Nat. Genet. 2025; 57:2562–2569) reveal that bryophytes harbor an exceptionally high abundance of such genes, establishing them as a new and key system for studying the mechanisms and evolutionary consequences of new gene emergence in plants.

Genomic prediction (GP) based on molecular markers has substantially advanced genomic selection; however, prediction accuracy often plateaus despite continued increases in marker density and methodological refinement. This saturation limits the effective use of available genomic information. The emergence of genomic language models (GLMs) offers a new framework for incorporating richer sequence-based information into genomic prediction, potentially capturing biologically meaningful DNA sequence grammar that is poorly represented by traditional marker-based approaches. We conclude that the future of genomic prediction will be shaped not primarily by algorithmic refinement but by the biological expressivity of genomic representations, and that GLMs offer a principled path toward expanding this representational frontier.