Gautam Shirsekar
@coevolution.bsky.social
76 followers 64 following 24 posts
Plant pathologist | Genomics | Coevolution | Wild plant pathosystems | Weigelworld, Max Planck Institute for Biology | Asst. Prof. at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (EPP)| www.coevolutionlab.org
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Pinned
coevolution.bsky.social
~ 5 and 1/2 years ago, my then postdoc advisor @plantevolution.bsky.social gave me complete freedom to assemble a team and interrogate NLR diversity in pangenomic context. We used @pacbio.bsky.social CCS and Iso-Seq, to annotate genomes with pathogen-challenged transcriptome. We then manually.....
coevolution.bsky.social
@annaliisalaine.bsky.social
Does this look familiar to you? From Cherokee National Forest
Reposted by Gautam Shirsekar
plantevolution.bsky.social
Out after peer review, collaborative study from Nordborg & Weigel labs with help from many others. Not the largest collection of new Arabidopsis thaliana genomes, but we hopefully put forward some good ideas for how to think about pangenomes and their analysis!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
coevolution.bsky.social
Many congratulations Wenfei!!!
coevolution.bsky.social
..... these alleles have arrived there following many ways and will continue their evolutionary journey in natural pathosystems. This research was intellectually stimulating and rewarding experience for all of us. Check it out in @cp-cellhostmicrobe.bsky.social latest issue........
coevolution.bsky.social
.....through transposable elements along the way. 'hoods allowed us to look beyond traditional definitions of NLR clusters and their patterns of evolution. Context made us realize that NLRs are remarkable in their diversity even more than previously thought. When we study NLRs in the lab....
coevolution.bsky.social
.....curated the NLRs with help of a computational pipeline. Meanwhile, the development of PGGB @thinks.lol and ODGI @andreaguarracino.bsky.social made us wander into the land of graphs and use network theory to propose concept of "pangenomic NLR neighborhoods". We also navigated.....
coevolution.bsky.social
~ 5 and 1/2 years ago, my then postdoc advisor @plantevolution.bsky.social gave me complete freedom to assemble a team and interrogate NLR diversity in pangenomic context. We used @pacbio.bsky.social CCS and Iso-Seq, to annotate genomes with pathogen-challenged transcriptome. We then manually.....
Reposted by Gautam Shirsekar
plantevolution.bsky.social
Out after peer review now, follow up from our 2019 pna-NLRome paper (which was based on enrichment and long-read sequencing). It is remarkable how much more can be learned with complete genome sequences. Next. pan-NLRome from hundreds of A. thaliana long-read genomes! Big thanks to the entire team!
Reposted by Gautam Shirsekar
plantevolution.bsky.social
1/2 What's best: a field-first or lab-first approach? No easy answers but differences between lab and field should not be seen as failure but motivate further inquiry and allow complementary discovery. Read our thoughts on this here:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Lab to field: Challenges and opportunities for plant biology
Plant-microbe research offers many choices of model and strain and whether a field-first or lab-first approach is best. However, differences between l…
www.sciencedirect.com
Reposted by Gautam Shirsekar
kdm9.bsky.social
Feel free to ask any q's here
Reposted by Gautam Shirsekar
kdm9.bsky.social
We show that pangenome graphs provide a flexible way to define the context within which NLR evolution occurs, and that graph metrics capture diversity in both sequence and structure, and show that such diversity is centered on NLRs themselves
The neighborhood containing RPP4/RPP5 is among the most complex, and the highly elevated local complexity is focused on NLR genes and pseudogenes. Each per-accession track consists of both a trace of local pangenomic complexity (above the abscissae), and a representation of the gene annotation (below the abscissae). Individuals show extreme haplotypic diversity of NLRs, which is reflected in highly elevated local complexity focused on NLR genes and their immediate surrounds, while TE genes or other protein-coding genes show little elevation in complexity above the genome background. For an enlarged version contrasting two nearby neighborhoods, please see Figure S3.
Reposted by Gautam Shirsekar
kdm9.bsky.social
Long story short: we assemble 17 representative Arabidopsis thaliana genomes, exhaustively annotate NLRs with long read evidence & manual curation, and assay many measures of NLR diversity.
(A and B) Our 17 accessions (squares) are broadly representative of both the geographic and population genetic distributions of the broader 1,001 Genomes collection (circles23); inset shows the UMAP embedding of 17 accessions in the co-ancestry space of all 1,135 accessions (adapted from Shirsekar et al.21). Colors in (A) and (B) represent the haplotype sharing groups from Shirsekar et al.21; samples in gray represent the three haplotype sharing groups not represented by our 17 accessions and their corresponding selected accession (see E).
(C) Phenotypic diversity of 17 accessions (rows) with respect to the oomycete pathogen Hyaloperonospora arabidopsidis (Har; columns), with resistant phenotypes denoted as black. 104 Har accessions were collected across Europe, as described in STAR Methods.
(D) Universal, pangenome-wide syntenic anchors define NLR neighborhoods.
(E) Representative example of an NLR neighborhood, highlighting accurate delineation of the borders of NLR-containing variable regions, regardless of structural or presence/absence variation. Black bars indicate pangenomic neighborhoods, syntenic anchors in pink. A fixed-sized window approach centered on a focal NLR (in yellow) would produce a very different outcome. Note accession codes used in this paper of the form atNNNN represent Arabidopsis ecotype IDs, see Alonso-Blanco et al.23 and Table S1.
coevolution.bsky.social
'Hoods are out!!! Big thank you to @plantevolution.bsky.social for the support throughout. Luisa, @kdm9.bsky.social , @aconga.bsky.social , @hajkdrost.bsky.social it was intellectually stimulating ride with you, so congratulations!!!! #diversity #NLR #immune #pan-genome #graphs #networktheory
coevolution.bsky.social
Come join EEB at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

Evolutionary Genomics, Assistant Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Fall 2026
apply.interfolio.com/170735
functional and evolutionary genomics in any system 🌱, 🦠, or 🦌 (including 👫)
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
apply.interfolio.com
coevolution.bsky.social
More #bloomscrolling from the Smokies
coevolution.bsky.social
In the Smokies, on a wild grape hunt
coevolution.bsky.social
5/6 Neighborhoods "expand" & "contract" in accessions and offer a richer picture of NLR evolution in (genomic) space and (evolutionary) time. Why does it matter? Because, NLRs didn't just fell out of a 🌴, they exist in the context of all in which they live and what came before them
coevolution.bsky.social
4/6 We constructed a pangenome graph with #pggb
@erikg.bsky.social to crawl along the regions of the genomes where NLRs or pieces of NLRs are found at least in 1 accession UNTIL we found common (syntenic) anchors bordering those regions in all the accessions --> "NLR neighborhood"