Andy Read 🌱🦠
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hashtag-read.bsky.social
Andy Read 🌱🦠
@hashtag-read.bsky.social
210 followers 160 following 30 posts
USDA-ARS wheat and oat geneticist interested in dynamic DNA methylation, plant immunity, transposons, small grains.
Love to talk about: movies, food, TAL effectors, Nanopore sequencing
This is my jam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx9wlPr3Lac
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hashtag-read.bsky.social
Led by talented international postdoc, @harsimargill.bsky.social, we sourced seeds for most entries tested in the USDA coordinated spring #wheat nursery over the last HUNDRED years! We genotyped them and quantified diversity and gene presence 🌾🧬

Me, Sarah and Harsimar with the UMN Borlaug statue
September 29, 2025 at 5:50 PM
hashtag-read.bsky.social
New from the team: A century of breeding has preserved genetic variation, accumulated favorable alleles, and shaped the Rht genes portfolio in North American spring wheat
shorturl.at/LYYvr

Part of my favorite figure showing how different breeding programs use various reduced height genes.
A panel from a scientific manuscript made up of four panels each representing a different public spring wheat breeding program. The panels show stacked orange and blue bars with each bar represents a decade and the proportion of blue shows how often a reduced height gene is found in material tested in that decade. The data show that the programs in minnesota, montana, and north dakota all include Rht-B1 in most of their material, while South Dakota does not.
September 29, 2025 at 5:03 PM
hashtag-read.bsky.social
another seed, appropriately, came from plants!
Here's a figure from shorturl.at/0S5l5 showing what we now know is silencing of the gene for purple pigment in petunias. And an important one from Baulcombe digging into mechanisms: shorturl.at/eP2qX
Hooray for basic research in all its forms! 🌸🪱🦠
a figure from a scientific papers composed of three panels. A single petunia flower is photographed in each panel. The left petunia is mostly red or purple but has areas of white at the margin of each petal. The center panel is a completely red or purple flower - this is what we expect wild type flowers to look like. The third panel shows an almost completely white petunia flower
September 29, 2025 at 4:54 PM
hashtag-read.bsky.social
This is a great time to check-in with your international post-docs, students, and staff.

This picture of our wheat plants has nothing to do with the post, but I felt like I needed some cheering up.
Hundreds of wheat plants occupy two benches in a greenhouse with LED lights overhead. A yellow hose is stretched out between the two long rows of plants.
September 22, 2025 at 7:31 PM
hashtag-read.bsky.social
The resistosome story continues...
Another beautiful structure - this time from a (modified) wheat NLR 🌾
August 29, 2025 at 5:00 PM
hashtag-read.bsky.social
Tough day for small grains research in the Twin Cities. Myself and four scientist colleagues have all been let go from the USDA because we haven't completed our 3 year probationary period - effectively gutting the Cereal Disease Lab.
Taking a few days to be sad before I think about what comes next.
This is a closeup image of wheat plants in a disease trail nursery. There are yellow streaks on the otherwise healthy and green leaves caused by bacterial leaf streak
February 14, 2025 at 4:53 PM
hashtag-read.bsky.social
No Kneecap?
January 23, 2025 at 4:00 PM