Excited to share our 36 years study of the wild wheat population of Ammiad! @biorxivpreprint https://t.co/Qlw4JWNqwY. It involved fun field work, benchwork and fascinating analysis at the lab of Avi Levy @WeizmannScience, in collaboration with @magnusnordborg @gmivienna 🧵👇(1/n)

Our work on the functional role of DNMT3A/3B during early development is finally out! Grateful for the opportunity to work with Amos Tanay, gratitude for the collaboration with @aviezer_l, and thanks to the Tanay group members @WeizmannScience @NatureSMB https://t.co/JvM3uO6kJJ

Two AGO proteins with transposon-derived sRNA cargo mark the germline in Arabidopsis https://t.co/PRwREMnKKi very nice & intriguing work on AGO5 & AGO9 from Ruben Gutzat & colleagues @gmivienna strong expression in germline & SAM + carrying plenty of GYPSY siRNAs..

Thanks to the rest of the co-authors from Avi Levy lab @PesWeizmann @WeizmannScience and the institute of cereal crop improvement @TelAvivUni. I am grateful to be a @SaeriWeizmann PhD fellow and Short-Term @EMBOFellows which allowed me to travel to the @viennabiocenter ! (14/14)

This 36 years-long-project would not have been possible without the vision of Yehoshua Anikster (TAU) and Moshe Feldman (WIS) who initiated a project that would serve as an in-situ conservation study for decades. We need more of these! (13/n)

We learn from this study that in-situ conservation of wild plants biodiversity at sites like Ammiad, can be achieved in a relatively small area (~10 hectares) to preserve high diversity and valuable genetic resources for crop plants (12/n)

We were really puzzled to see that much ecological stability over time, suggesting that natural selection acts on such a local scale. We did not expect that. Can adaptation work in such a small area? What do you think? Any input is welcome! (11/n)

It appears that neutral processes alone could not account for the observed spatial and temporal behavior. Yet, under extreme parameters, simulations could produce results similar to the observed, thus we cannot definitely reject a purely neutral explanation. (10/n)

@ellisztamas ran simulations involving different parameters of seed dispersal, outcrossing rate (selfing species), seed bank and plant density. His results show that under the most realistic parameters, the observed stability does not overlap with the simulations (9/n)

But what causes this spatial and temporal stability? Is it just because the wild wheat does not disperse much? Or is there some selection/local adaptation? (8/n)

This pattern was repeating year after year, a remarkable stability over time. This is how it looks like over the 36 years and across all transects. (7/n)

@ellisztamas and @FabriMafe showed that genotypes tend to be confined to a single microhabitat using permutations and population differentiation. (6/n)

We genotyped the 832 samples and saw that the population is diverse and divided in clusters of genotypes. Looking at the first year of collection, it appeared as if this clustering corresponds to the ecological microhabitats (arrows): (5/n)

tl;dr — despite 36 years of climate change, the distribution of genotypes is remarkably constant over time. It is difficult to know why, but simulations suggest that a purely neutral model of limited migration is unlikely to explain these observations. Details: (4/n)

Ammiad is located in the Northern Galilee, Israel, at the centre of distribution of wild wheat. It was sampled every ~5 years since 1984 from 100 marked points, at 4 linear transects spanning diverse microhabitats, resulting in over 800 samples, which we have now sequenced (3/n)

We made a short video summary! 🥳 Working on wild populations is the best 🌾 (2/n) https://t.co/v55fAlfm7n

Genome sequences of the five Sitopsis species of Aegilops and the origin of polyploid wheat B-subgenome #reseach #MolecularPlant https://t.co/7bY3PHDs6q

Delighted to share our paper, now out in @NatureSMB led by the wonderful David Wiener, in which we describe a singular context, yeast meiosis, in which mRNA deadenylation and degradation are decoupled. https://t.co/mA0HVwz2jn -->

Excited to share the final version of our paper. Low light‐regulated intramolecular disulfide fine‐tunes the role of PTOX in Arabidopsis https://t.co/wdVzxuTGzh We are still trying to understand the immutans variegation mutant, one of the oldest Arabidopsis mutants.

Check out our latest work on chromatin evolution: we reconstruct the origin and evolution of eukaryotic histone marks and modifiers, including their archaeal roots. https://t.co/iHVmTfBes2 👇Summary below by @xgraubove.