marek mutwil 🇺🇦
@LabMutwil
Aim: improve gene function predictions of the plant kingdom to produce more climate change-resilient and nutritious crops.
Super cool to see our petiole cross sections from our fern story make it to the cover of @NaturePlants . Cudos to our collaborator Richard Sibout and his team. nature.com/nplants/volume…

🚨 New resource for stress-resilient crops! We profiled 3 leafy greens (cai xin, lettuce, spinach) under 24 hydroponic stress conditions using 276 RNA-seq libraries. 🧬 Conserved GRNs revealed, new stress database! Published in FIPS shorturl.at/ZepMD
Our Plant Chatbot (plantchatbot.connectome.tools) has been updated with a new interface. To make the results more accurate, we now include a large language model guardrail that highlights relevant results obtained from the knowledge graph. Give it a spin!

I tend not to post any personal pics here, but do admire my new drysuit!

We are hiring! If you have experience in plant genomics + AI, or promoter engineering + synthetic biology, check out our two open postdoc positions (computational + wetlab): vandepoelelab.be/Jobs please RT #ERC
It has been a while… but an updated, faster & more accurate version of OrthoFinder is now out! Scales to thousands of species on conventional compute resources with higher accuracy than ever before and the same data rich fully phylogenetic outputs 👉biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
Check out Jan Hübbers's In Brief article describing our PlantConnectome (Plant Cell, in press) academic.oup.com/plcell/advance…
Very discouraging. Conclusion: keep doing what you have been doing?
Reading in journal club: Shifting research focus comes with the risk of reduced impact nature.com/articles/d4158…
The May 2025 issue is now fully online, with a cover highlighting the cell wall of ferns, from: "Comparative transcriptomics in ferns reveals key innovations and divergent evolution of the secondary cell walls" rdcu.be/enhGp
Good thing I love my job 😅
NEWS: 🇩🇰 Today, the retirement age in Denmark has been raised to 70 for people born after the end of 1970.
Suprising results!!! Plants lacking RBP47, the well known Stress Granule marker are more resistant to high temperature stress 👀☀️ biorxiv.org/content/10.110… First manuscript from our group 👍 and collaborators 💪