Hajk-Georg Drost
Associate Professor of Digital Biology, @royalsociety.org Wolfson Fellow at Faculty of Life Sciences @dundee.ac.uk, Fellow of @camphilsoc.bsky.social. Former Group Leader at @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social and PostDoc at @cam.ac.uk & Trinity College Cambridge.
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostPlant Science Research Weekly -- Rapid shifts in the patterns of gene expression shapes flowering plant diversity (Cell) @hajkdrost.bsky.social (Summary by Kavita Joshi) buff.ly/8jc7R2T #PlantaePSRW
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostOne protein. One pathway. A whole germline fate. New paper from my postdoc @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social out in PNAS: Germline fate determination by a single ARGONAUTE protein in Ectocarpus www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg Drost#PlantSci Res Wkly Jan 30 (2/2) plantae.org/plant-scienc... Mechanoperception and defense signaling; Rapid evolutionary gene expression shifts shaped angiosperms; Intergenerational epigenetic acquired nematode resistance; That big, big fossilized organism that probably isn’t fungal after all
- Explore gene expression evolution across organs in seven flowering plant species via our interactive atlas: 🖥️ DevSeq Plant WebApp 👉 www.devseqplant.org/index.php 📂 All datasets are openly available for reuse and reanalysis: 👉 github.com/schustischus...
- 🧵 Just out in Cell after more than 10 years in the making! 🎓 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... Plants and animals evolve radically different body plans. Do they also operate under fundamentally different molecular evolutionary constraints during organ formation? @cellpress.bsky.social
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostNew paper on genome editing in brown algae by Dr. Claudia Martinho, former member of Susana Coelho's Algal Development and Evolution Department, in collaboration with Masakazu Hoshino, Morgane Raphalen, Viktoriia Bukhanets, Anagha Kerur, @kbogaert.bsky.social, Rémy Luthringer, and Susana Coelho
- Genome editing in brown algae! 🧬🪸🌿 Now out in Cell Reports Methods! Excited to share this highly efficient, transgene-free CRISPR–Cas genome editing protocol for brown algae, requiring no cloning and no specialized equipment. doi.org/10.1016/j.cr... #CRISPR #BrownAlgae @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostTowards a quantitative view of NLR evolution in genome space -- check out where we think the field of #NLR #evolution research is heading in this review led by Luzie Wingen and Aurélien Tellier. ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v... #plantscience
- 🧵 Just out in Cell after more than 10 years in the making! 🎓 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... Plants and animals evolve radically different body plans. Do they also operate under fundamentally different molecular evolutionary constraints during organ formation? @cellpress.bsky.social
- Evo-devo has long focused on genes and pathways. But genes are widely shared, and pathways are deeply conserved. The real question is where evolutionary flexibility and developmental constraint emerge. We tackled this by comparing rates of gene expression evolution across organs.
- We generated organ transcriptomes across flowering plants spanning ~160 million years of evolution. Then we directly compared them to equivalent datasets in mammals. Same organs. Different kingdoms. What we found surprised us. @slcuplants.bsky.social , @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social , @dundee.ac.uk
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View full threadI am particularly grateful to have been part of this massive project initiated by Christoph Schuster and Elliot Meyerowitz, and for a truly rewarding collaboration with Ottoline Leyser, Alexander Gabel, and Ivo Große.
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg Drost
Love this really cool method for gene editing briwn algae- greens or lycophytes next? www.cell.com/cell-reports... - Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostGenome editing in brown algae! 🧬🪸🌿 Now out in Cell Reports Methods! Excited to share this highly efficient, transgene-free CRISPR–Cas genome editing protocol for brown algae, requiring no cloning and no specialized equipment. doi.org/10.1016/j.cr... #CRISPR #BrownAlgae @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social
- 🎓If you are truly curious about the epigenetic mechanisms driving adaptive evolution. Here is your chance to join Thanvi's team as a PhD Student and study plant altitude adaptation through epigenetic genome regulation. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- ✨Call open for a fully-funded PhD position✨ Looking for an enthusiastic student to join my upcoming Ambizione research group (🌱 Epigenome Diversity Lab 🌱, www.epidiversitylab.org) at ETH Zürich, starting August 2026! Apply here ↘️ jobs.ethz.ch/job/view/JOP... Application deadline: January 31st, 2026
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostHow can plants maintain their genomic identity while also responding to the environment? @hajkdrost.bsky.social and I propose an "epigenetic toolkit" – a suite of epigenetic regulators that mediate the physiology-epigenome-genome crosstalk for adaptation. Read more here: www.cell.com/trends/plant...
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostEvolution of evolvability — thought provoking essay from @thanvisrikant.bsky.social and @hajkdrost.bsky.social!
- Defining the epigenetic toolkit as an evolvable trait #plantscience
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostDefining the epigenetic toolkit as an evolvable trait #plantscience
- Can we tune a plant’s epigenetic toolkit to disrupt plant homeostasis in ways that enable phenotypic innovation? 🌱Check out our new Opinion Paper with @thanvisrikant.bsky.social discussing this topic in @cp-trendsplantsci.bsky.social! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Plants already show extraordinary phenotypic plasticity, yet most bioengineering strategies push traits directly, often breaking homeostasis. We ask a different question: 👉 What if we engineer the regulators of plasticity itself?
- We define the epigenetic toolkit as a set of master regulators (DNA methylation, chromatin remodelers, small-RNA machinery, 3D genome organizers) 🧬 These proteins don’t encode traits, we argue that they tune the genomic identity (species identity) of a plant.
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View full threadWe argue for informed, controlled destabilisation of plant homeostasis → not as damage, but as a design principle. Done right, this could unlock: 🌾 climate-resilient crops 🌸 new developmental architectures 🌍 faster adaptation with retained fitness We hope this will stimulate further discussions 🎓
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostThe detectCores() apocalypse is creeping up on us 👻🐛 As more people are getting access to 128+ CPU cores, code spinning up parallel cluster with detectCores() workers fails - not enough #RStats connections available Friends, do *not* default to detectCores(), bc www.jottr.org/2022/12/05/a...
- 🚀 philentropy v0.10.0 is on CRAN! Now with long-awaited parallel distance computation & a full speed-optimized refactor thanks to Andrew Gene Brown. Compute 50+ distances/divergences in R faster than ever. 📦 CRAN: cran.r-project.org/web/packages... 💻 Code: github.com/drostlab/phi...
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostDIAMOND v2.1.15 now supports all taxonomy features for BLAST databases, and support for using BLAST databases has also been added to the Bioconda version github.com/bbuchfink/di...
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostWhat are these? You are looking at embryos of a sea squirt. Each of the 'soap bubbles' is a living cell, about a fourtieth of a millimetre in size. The outlines of the cells are visible thanks to fluorescent markers identified by Hitoyoshi Yasuo @hitoyas.bsky.social see doi.org/10.1101/2024... 🧵
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostTomorrow wednesday 22nd at 11am, lesson #2 of Neil Shubin, Guest Prof @college-de-france.fr ‘Discovering how fish evolved to walk’. Wonderful first lesson @ www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B6y... Fish friends in Paris, please RT🤘 Swim the Seine till St Michel, then get out and walk left. Free access
- It has been a true honour and pleasure to be able to brainstorm about what it means to apply the comparative method to detect common patterns of multicellularity aggregation across the trees of life. This was a marvelous EMBO Workshop, excetionally well organised and held at a breathtaking venue! 😌
- We had also in session 10 Hajk-Georg Drost talking about How ancient genes convergently organise multicellularity across the tree of life. #Multicellverse @hajkdrost.bsky.social
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostLatest from ours: www.cell.com/cell-reports... This is two stories in one: a case study/cautionary tale on developing genetic tools in new organisms, and the first hint at a gene regulatory network for choanoflagellate multicellular development (which turn out to involve a Hippo/YAP/ECM loop!) A 🧵
- Thrilled to share what we learned from re-annotating the mobilome of the brown algae model [Ectocarpus] 🌊🌿🏖️ genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... A wonderful collaboration with @ericadinatale.bsky.social, @cssmartinho.bsky.social, @rorycraig.bsky.social, and Susana Coelho! 🎉
- Our main findings: 1) Ectocarpus mobiome retains mostly recent, evol. young transposons (TEs) 2) These primarily young TEs are regulated by small RNAs in absence of canonical DNA methylation 3) Particular TE enrichment along the sex chromosomes 4) Developmental regulation of TEs through small RNAs
- Due to the curious nature of the [Ectocarpus] genome to select for young and potentially active TEs (majority DNA TEs), we did not manage to focus more on the retrotransposon biology of brown algae. Potentially active retrotransposons could be found with LTRpred: joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21...
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View full threadIt would be exciting to study whether there are clear "causal" links between TE regulation and body plan formation in brown algae, where 'artificial' mobilisation of young TEs can drive innovation (and overcome constraints) in the formation of multicellular phenotypes.
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostIn memory of Jane Goodall, English primatologist and anthropologist and the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees. Take a look at her 1985 article published in #PhilTransB 'Conditions of innovative behaviour in primates': royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostSo happy to see my first first-author paper published! 🎈 A short thread on how Ectocarpus and its TE secrets have kept me busy lately: rdcu.be/eITQH
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg Drost🚀 Jalview 2.11.5 is here! New features include: ✅ Tree visualisation for enhanced protein secondary structure analysis ✅ Consensus colouring for alignments and subgroups ✅ Improved command line options for 3D structure visualisation Plus, key bug fixes and performance improvements.
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostHot damn "The settlement is largest payout in the history of U.S. copyright cases. Anthropic will pay $3,000 per work to 500,000 authors."
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostOut after peer review, collaborative study from Nordborg & Weigel labs with help from many others. Not the largest collection of new Arabidopsis thaliana genomes, but we hopefully put forward some good ideas for how to think about pangenomes and their analysis! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostChaetognaths have lost gene body methylation and shifted #5mC back to Transposable Elements. This reversion to the ancestral state is coupled with a simplification of DNMT3 architecture. We posit that trans-splicing might compensate. It is an honour to have contributed to this 20y struggle ⛰️.
- After nearly twenty years in the making, our attempt at understanding what makes the chaetognath phylum so unique has finally been published! www.nature.com/articles/s41... with #LauraPiovani @dariagavr.bsky.social @alexdemendoza.bsky.social @chemamd.bsky.social and others /1
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg Drost'Hoods are out!!! Big thank you to @plantevolution.bsky.social for the support throughout. Luisa, @kdm9.bsky.social , @aconga.bsky.social , @hajkdrost.bsky.social it was intellectually stimulating ride with you, so congratulations!!!! #diversity #NLR #immune #pan-genome #graphs #networktheory
- Happy to be able to finally share our NLR pangenome paper, out now in CHM. "Pangenomic context reveals the extent of intraspecific plant NLR evolution" www.cell.com/cell-host-mi... #plantscience #plantimmunity #pangenomes #science #nlr
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostOut after peer review now, follow up from our 2019 pna-NLRome paper (which was based on enrichment and long-read sequencing). It is remarkable how much more can be learned with complete genome sequences. Next. pan-NLRome from hundreds of A. thaliana long-read genomes! Big thanks to the entire team!
- Happy to be able to finally share our NLR pangenome paper, out now in CHM. "Pangenomic context reveals the extent of intraspecific plant NLR evolution" www.cell.com/cell-host-mi... #plantscience #plantimmunity #pangenomes #science #nlr
- Reposted by Hajk-Georg DrostHappy to be able to finally share our NLR pangenome paper, out now in CHM. "Pangenomic context reveals the extent of intraspecific plant NLR evolution" www.cell.com/cell-host-mi... #plantscience #plantimmunity #pangenomes #science #nlr
