Junli Zhang 🌾张军利

The USDA is hiring plant geneticists at 23 research sites across the country. Pay is up to $192k/year. Search closes June 11th. usajobs.gov/job/868877900

New Article: "A high-quality bread wheat genome unravels the adaptive evolution of wheat end-use quality" rdcu.be/fhDej With Research Briefing: "The assembly of an elite bread wheat genome reveals how wheat end-use quality has evolved" rdcu.be/fhCkU

GrainGenes update: Triticum turgidum Durum Svevo 2.0 manuscript was accepted and all dataset and tools are released @luigicattivelli @WheatInitiative graingenes.org/GG3/content/ap…

UC Davis to work with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and Bayer U.S. Crop Science on wheat variety that can make its own fertilizer from air @ucdavisCAES facebook.com/UCDavis.CAES/p…

New Review: "Cereal protein biofortification at the interface of nutrition, yield and sustainability" rdcu.be/faZ1l Improve nutrition while maintaining yield and lowering environmental impact with genetics and breeding; enhance protein quality in staple cereals.

In the dense jungles of Panama’s Barro Colorado Island, a striking cricket stirs. Arota festae, known colloquially as a “bush cricket,” usually sports a deep green coat. But occasionally, what appears to be a hot pink mutant will emerge. Scientists have long thought this hue was a genetic aberration—an unfortunate variant doomed to be quickly picked off by bats, lizards, and other predators. But a new study finds the vibrant variant is merely a natural developmental stage, one that makes it all the more remarkable that this bug is able to keep from being picked off. Learn more: scim.ag/4bCYRJW @NewsfromScience

A rare colocolo cat has been sighted in Chile.

@zitongyuzt Yes, two walk-in growth chambers, providing quite a large space.

@aswillow Walk-in chamber?

Excited to try our speed vernalization and breeding protocols in these new growth rooms!

📣Our paper is finally out!🤩 We found that local modification of H3K9me3 using CRISPR/dCas9 at hotspots changes crossover activity, bringing us closer to targeted recombination in plants.🌱 Huge thanks to @SzymanskaLejman, Wojtek, Ania, and Karolina!💪 science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Genome editing in rice: toward climate-resilient, nutrient-rich yields dlvr.it/TRRsWw #plantscience

New Article: "Grass inflorescence morphodynamics guides yield improvement in wheat" rdcu.be/e72m7 Morphodynamic modelling reveals how timing and fate shape diverse grass inflorescences. ID of an early-heading paired-spikelet mutant, which exhibits robust yield gains.

Understand NGS sequencing files bioinf.comav.upv.es/courses/sequen…

For 139 years, @txresearch has pioneered knowledge in agriculture, natural resources and life sciences to nourish health, strengthen communities and support economies. #AgriLifeResearch continues to drive discovery and innovation with impact. @tamusystem

10 websites for drawing scientific figures 👇

gander is an R package that brings AI directly into RStudio or Posit. Instead of switching between your IDE and a chat window, gander lets you ask questions or request code changes right inside your script. It automatically shares relevant context such as variable names, data types, and the surrounding code, so the model can provide precise answers without extra copy-pasting. You can trigger it with a simple keyboard shortcut, choose from different AI models (OpenAI, Claude, or local ones), and control how much of your data is sent for context. In short, gander makes working with AI in RStudio smoother, faster, and smarter. Take a look at the visualization below. It shows an example of how to use gander to create a ggplot2 graph. It’s taken from the package website: simonpcouch.github.io/gander/ Join my newsletter for more tutorials and insights on R, Python, data science, and AI. More info: statisticsglobe.com/newsletter #DataAnalytics #Data #datavis

New Article: "Deep learning-based semantic matching of cis-regulatory DNA sequences facilitates the prediction of gene function" rdcu.be/e4yHX PhytoBabel is an AI model designed to capture the semantic similarity of cis-regulatory sequences across distant species.

Job Announcement: Assistant/Associate Professor - Wheat Breeding, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas. Application deadline: March 2. careers.k-state.edu/jobs/assistant…

Job seekers in the U.S. and many other nations face a tough environment. At the same time, fears of AI-caused job loss have — so far — been overblown. However, the demand for AI skills is starting to cause shifts in the job market. I’d like to share what I’m seeing on the ground. First, many tech companies have laid off workers over the past year. While some CEOs cited AI as the reason — that AI is doing the work, so people are no longer needed — the reality is AI just doesn’t work that well yet. Many of the layoffs have been corrections for overhiring during the pandemic or general cost-cutting and reorganization that occasionally happened even before modern AI. Outside of a handful of roles, few layoffs have resulted from jobs being automated by AI. Granted, this may grow in the future. People who are currently in some professions that are highly exposed to AI automation, such as call-center operators, translators, and voice actors, are likely to struggle to find jobs and/or see declining salaries. But widespread job losses have been overhyped. Instead, a common refrain applies: AI won’t replace workers, but workers who use AI will replace workers who don’t. For instance, because AI coding tools make developers much more efficient, developers who know how to use them are increasingly in-demand. (If you want to be one of these people, please take our short courses on Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and Agentic Skills!) So AI is leading to job losses, but in a subtle way. Some businesses are letting go of employees who are not adapting to AI and replacing them with people who are. This trend is already obvious in software development. Further, in many startups’ hiring patterns, I am seeing early signs of this type of personnel replacement in roles that traditionally are considered non-technical. Marketers, recruiters, and analysts who know how to code with AI are more productive than those who don’t, so some businesses are slowly parting ways with employees that aren’t able to adapt. I expect this will accelerate. At the same time, when companies build new teams that are AI native, sometimes the new teams are smaller than the ones they replace. AI makes individuals more effective, and this makes it possible to shrink team sizes. For example, as AI has made building software easier, the bottleneck is shifting to deciding what to build — this is the Product Management (PM) bottleneck. A project that used to be assigned to 8 engineers and 1 PM might now be assigned to 2 engineers and 1 PM, or perhaps even to a single person with a mix of engineering and product skills. The good news for employees is that most businesses have a lot of work to do and not enough people to do it. People with the right AI skills are often given opportunities to step up and do more, and maybe tackle the long backlog of ideas that couldn’t be executed before AI made the work go more quickly. I’m seeing many employees in many businesses step up to build new things that help their business. Opportunities abound! I know these changes are stressful. My heart goes out to every family that has been affected by a layoff, to every job seeker struggling to find the role they want, and to the far larger number of people who are worried about their future job prospects. Fortunately, there’s still time to learn and position yourself well for where the job market is going. When it comes to AI, the vast majority of people, technical or nontechnical, are at the starting line, or they were recently. So this remains a great time to keep learning and keep building, and the opportunities for those who do are numerous! [Original text; deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issu… ]

🌾 Join in on Friday, Feb 27 for a pathogens webinar with Xianming Chen (USDA) on stripe rust epidemiology and host resistance 🦠🌱 📅 7:00 PM CET / 11:00 AM MST Learn more ➡️ wheatinitiative.org/new-events/2fe… @karchuntan @ReemWheat