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aleungplants.bsky.social
PhD candidate with Rowan Sage at Univ. of Toronto 🇨🇦 Evolutionary biology, ecophysiology, and photosynthesis 🍃🔬🧪 he/him aleungplants.github.io
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Applications open for EEB Postdoc Fellowship here at the Dept. of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at University of Toronto eeb.utoronto.ca/employment-2/

For International Women's Day, let's pay homage to the great plant anatomist Katherine Esau. In her long career, she transformed our understanding of plant structure through her research and her very important books. She is my academic grandmother, advisor of my advisor.

Here is a working Starter Pack for Plant Ecophysiologists! Please let us know if you want to be added to this list in a comment or DM. #botany #plantecophys #PhysFam go.bsky.app/Pbq39H7

🧪 #PlantScience Ted Cruz posted a list of "woke DEI" NSF grants, which included many REU programs. REU = Research Experience for Undergraduates. A 🧵 thread of sadness: www.commerce.senate.gov/2025/2/cruz-...

Successful immunolabelling trial for GDC P-protein. Both 70nm sections pictured were incubated in 1:200 diluted anti-GDC-P primary antibody in PBS, the antibody solution in latter image with more dots also had 0.5% BSA. This is new knowledge to me. Thought a blocking agent would decrease binding....

How do you balance wanting to do a good job with getting things handed over to your supervisor/collaborator in a timely manner? I don't want to disappoint others but also don't want to be a perfectionist (because maybe the thing I thought was important and spend ages on ends up being cut out)

A new issue of Cell is out, featuring the 4 winners of the Rising Black Scientists Awards. Their essays bring hope, inspiration and reinforce the importance of equity in science. Do take a moment to check them out: www.cell.com/cell/current @cp-cell.bsky.social

1.5 years left to finish my PhD but so much to stress about in the world and so much left I want to do 🥲🥲

Two papers out this week on leaf hydraulics in C4 grasses! 🌾 Zhou et al. - C4 photosynthesis and hydraulics in grasses - doi.org/10.1111/nph.... Baird et al. - Resolving the contrasting leaf hydraulic adaptation of C3 and C4 grasses - doi.org/10.1111/nph....

🌵🌴 Big news! Botany 2025 is now heading to sunny Palm Springs, CA (July 25-31, 2025)! While plans shifted from Tucson, we're excited to stay in the Southwest. See you there! More information will be coming in early January at www.botanyconference.org #Botany2025

when you need to do an experiment that requires mechanical stress (ie, touching) of your plants but you dont wanna sit there poking them for an hour 😆

How do tropical rainforest trees respond to warming? 🌡️🌿We experimentally warmed canopy leaves by 4°C for 8 months and found significant declines in photosynthesis and stomatal conductance, with no shift in Topt. Read the new paper, led by Kristine Crous here: shorturl.at/AVTOk

Hi #PlantScience #plantphysiology 🌱, is it a bad idea to use NADH-coupled rubisco assays to measure activation state? I see that Sales et al. 2020 have compared these methods, but curious if anyone else has compared NADH vs. 14-CO2 based assays

🌾🌱🏵🌵🌿☘️🪴 #PlantScience

Share photos of you in your #plantfizz shirts or a BSA shirt. Also don't forget to renew your BSA membership. #Botany2025 in Tuscon will be amazing this year.

all I want for christmas is a 96 well plate reader so i can do more than one enzyme assay at a time

We’re launching #PlantFizzFriday where we will share your ecophys and phys related content. Submit pictures/videos to [email protected] with a brief caption and you will be entered in a raffle to win an exclusive BSA Phys/Ecophys section sticker! #ecophys #botany

For the 2nd time this month, Tsosie Lab is featured nationally. This article beautifully highlights the biodiversity and genomics work of postdoc fellow Dr. Leke Hutchins (Kānaka ‘Ōiwi). So many great Indigenous scholar voices in this article! www.science.org/content/arti...

A special case of #heterophylly is #anisophylly. Anisophylly means “unequal leaves.” We use this word to refer to plants that produce unequal leaves continuously and concurrently (not environmentally induced). 📷: unequal pinnate, opposite leaves in Tribulus cistoides #Zygophyllaceae #botany 🌱🧪🌾

Anxious about my future in research.... so I downloaded the names of people that received an NSERC Postdoc Fellowship between 2020-2024 in the "Evolution and Ecology" and "Plant and Tree Biology" categories and used the "scholar" package in R to look them up and count the number of publications.

A classic example of #heteroblasty is the switch from leaves to phyllodes (flattened, photosynthetic petioles). You can see the abrupt change in Acacia auriculiformis (#Fabaceae): pinnate leaves give way to sickle-shaped phyllodes. 📷: jayeshpatil912 CCBY2 #Botany 🌾🧪🌱

i got it working! turns out troubleshooting is a lot easier when youre not hungry or sleepy 🌱

spent all day making 5 different types of buffers for coupled enzyme activity assays... only 1 worked 🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠

Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #1,721,892!

taking apart a licor 6400 is humbling

PLEASE REPOST just over 2 weeks to sign-up to be a potential speaker in the #TreesTraitsTime symposium at #Botany2025 !!!

time flies, apparently I'm in the 4th year of my phd now 🫣

From #AppsPlantSci's #Polyploidy issue: A unified framework to investigate and interpret hybrid and allopolyploid #biodiversity across biological scales (by @ckrieg.bsky.social) bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... #ecology #botany #PlantJoy #iamabotanist

🚨ATTN🚨 Do you study the evolution of plant traits through time? Use the form below to be a potential speaker for a #Botany2025 symposium -> Trees, Traits & Time #TreesTraitsTime #botany @bsa-ecophys.bsky.social @botsocamerica.bsky.social @annbot.bsky.social @torreybotanical.bsky.social @botany.one

My first PhD chapter is out! I looked at the diversity of traits that affect the reassimilation of photorespiratory CO2 (and maybe ammonia) and the implications for evolving C2 and C4 photosynthetic pathways. 🌱 doi.org/10.1111/pce....

golden hour in the greenhouse 🌱

Is there a CAM species with both obligate C3 and CAM populations, similar to how Alloteropsis semialata has both non-C4 and C4 populations??🌵🤔