Our successful effort to create synthetic maize centromeres is now published! We hope to use this method to alter karyotypes in maize and other plants. And one day engineer entire chromosomes. nature.com/articles/s4147…

A nice summary of our work on maize synthetic centromeres by Ian Henderson

I've noticed a tendency to apply the term eugenics to increasingly broad concepts. I think this dilutes the historical atrocities of eugenics. Instead, we should strive for education and nuanced discussions at the intersection of ethics and genetics without misuse of this label.

Are you sequencing genomes? Do you want to compare the chromosomes of two or more species?🧬 I recently released the ODP software package to make scalable comparative genomics easier. Example plots below.📊 1/🧵 paper: nature.com/articles/s4158… github: github.com/conchoecia/odp

Happy 121st Birthday to Barbara McClintock...a beloved member of the CSHL family, one of the most influential geneticists of the 20th century, and winner of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (the first woman to win that prize unshared!) cshl.edu/barbara-mcclin…

Check out our review on activation of the haploid genome in pollen! It's very early in the field and a lot to discover sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

New work from Sohyun Bang using scATAC-seq to decipher WUS function. Sohyun led our first scTAC-seq analysis of a TF mutant, which led to many surprises. WUSCHEL-dependent chromatin regulation in maize inflorescence development at single-cell resolution biorxiv.org/content/10.110…