🌱Pierdomenico Perata

Head of the PlantLab at Scuola Sant'Anna in Pisa, Italy.

[🌱Pierdomenico Perata @ThePlantLab]

🆕 The NEW PlantLab🌱website is online! 🖥️https://t.co/13frHGbFIP

[FISV @FISV998]

#FISVDays2026 comincia il 24/11 con "Green Revolution: il DNA delle piante e le sfide planetarie".
Con: Pierdomenico Perata (Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna) e Vittoria Brambilla (Università di di Milano).

Programma👉 https://t.co/FgOdOeJ5MP

📝 Iscrizione: https://t.co/funndKhMfQ

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

Curiosity often sparks scientific breakthroughs. For 2026 medicine laureate Peter Hegemann, it began with a question: how could a tiny green alga called Chlamydomonas react so rapidly to light?

The Chlamydomonas algae is famous for its ability to swim towards light. When the alga is stirred into a petri dish, the liquid turns a faint green colour. If one side of the dish is illuminated, the green colour moves towards the light source, as the microscopic algae swim towards it. The algae sense the light with an eyespot, a dot on the cell’s surface that contains a light-capturing molecule, retinal.

Hegemann discovered electrical signals in the light-sensitive eyespot that occurred just half a millisecond after illumination, far faster than the response of the human eye. He could only think of one explanation for this ultrafast response: the process must be much simpler than in a human eye. He proposed that a single protein could both detect light and act as an ion channel, an idea initially met with scepticism.

After years of experiments with his colleague Georg Nagel, Hegemann's hypothesis proved to be correct. Together, they discovered proteins that functioned exactly as he had predicted: ion channels that opened in response to light. This breakthrough laid the foundation for optogenetics, a revolutionary technique that allows scientists to control individual nerve cells with light. What began as a question about a microscopic alga ultimately helped transform the field of neuroscience.

Read more about the newly awarded 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: https://t.co/UkNVNYb0xU

[Alex Costa @lab_costa]

It's finally out! Another piece of the puzzle of wound-induced long-distance signaling in Arabidopsis 🧩

Thanks to @JyothiVadassery for this great collaboration!

https://t.co/wZE5i3vqex

[Syngenta @Syngenta]

Say hi to a new class of biologicals. 🧬

Today, Syngenta announced EXORT™ technology, a scientific breakthrough ushering in a new generation of biological solutions.

Based on natural microRNAs, EXORT™ technology is a new frontier in agriculture, designed to help farmers increase yield with lower impact.

It works with the same signals that plants use to regulate biological processes, helping crops optimize how they use their own resources.

Find out more: https://t.co/xthpcLPx5r

#AgTech #Biologicals

[New Phytologist @NewPhyt]

Spray- vs. Host-induced gene silencing: what 89 studies reveal about fighting fungal disease

https://t.co/QUMeIVfqF3

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

MicroRNA plays a crucial role in gene regulation. This new class of tiny RNA molecules was discovered by Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024.

Learn more about their work: https://t.co/KOCIO9OxLN

#NobelPrize

[🌱Pierdomenico Perata @ThePlantLab]

Oxygen sensing in plants: from dynamic hypoxia signalling to the expanding roles of the Cysteine N-degron pathway https://t.co/f5QnvL2iOP

[🌱Pierdomenico Perata @ThePlantLab]

Chemical priming of hypoxia responses via PLANT CYSTEINE OXIDASE inhibition improves flooding tolerance https://t.co/2AQAPyEXgQ

[FISV @FISV998]

🏆 PREMIO FISV GIOVANI RICERCATORI: scopri i vincitori su https://t.co/AusyVoglW8
👉 i premi verranno conferiti il 22/09 al XVIII Congresso FISV
👉 i vincitori , previa iscrizione al congresso, saranno tenuti a presentare il proprio lavoro
Iscrizioni: https://t.co/guZA4gxlt1

[🌱Pierdomenico Perata @ThePlantLab]

Chemical priming of hypoxia responses via PLANT CYSTEINE OXIDASE inhibition improves flooding tolerance https://t.co/zentu3YYkd

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

"...deidentified data on 110,303 manuscript submissions over 5 years at Science and Science Advances."

Key results:
- Editors rejected 28.1% of submissions outright.
- They sent the other submissions to an advisory board for feedback, and then rejected 75% of those.
- If a paper makes it to peer review, then it will be accepted about one-third of the time.
- Submissions from "more prestigious" schools are far more likely to make it past the editor. The benefit of being from a prestigious school goes down once the paper makes it to peer review.
- Submissions from China are penalized (less likely to be accepted). Papers with lots of authors also have higher success rates. Note that all of these things are correlations, though; it is possible that papers from China are literally just worse on average, or that papers with large teams really are better, etc.
- And they made the data available!

[Science Advances @ScienceAdvances]

A study of 110,303 manuscript submissions to two elite research journals has identified factors during the editorial and peer review stages that impact whether a paper is accepted for publication. https://t.co/xUGdwiWUrt

[SCImago @scimago]

1⃣Distributed excellence: Countries such as the UK, Italy, and Spain show strong performance across most institutions, not just at the top.
In UK 90% of universities are positioned within the top half of global rankings, demonstrating broad-based excellence throughout the system.

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

“Being wrong is part of being a scientist. We’re wrong all the time. One of the jokes that I use all the time, but it’s not a joke, it’s really true, is when we got to the point of trying to identify this gene, we had 20 possible genes it could be. I prioritised those genes. The gene that was responsible was the last gene, which means I could not have been more wrong in my prioritisation. It’s absolutely the most wrong thing I could have done. We got it eventually, so it was still there, but it was because there was nothing left. It’s not because I was smart or had any foresight.”

In our official interview with medicine laureate Fred Ramsdell, he told us about the importance of handling failures and being persistent.

Watch the full interview: https://t.co/F0U2k5CXSI

[FISV @FISV998]

"Se scomparissero le piante non avremmo problemi di ossigeno ma moriremmo di fame nell’arco di 13 anni."
Pierdomenico Perata (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa).
#Fisvtalk2026 #DivulgazioneScientifica #Ricercaitaliana

[🌱Pierdomenico Perata @ThePlantLab]

Resetting of a tandem microRNA156 enables vegetative perennial growth in rice | Science https://t.co/2ru8ETXaG3

[Molecular Plant & Plant Communications @MPlantPCom]

The hypoxic niche enclosing the shoot apical meristem is shaped by a combination of morphological features and metabolic activity #research #MolecularPlant https://t.co/NEiTB3p5Jp

[🌱Pierdomenico Perata @ThePlantLab]

Switching on and off the hypoxic response in plants https://t.co/taOFBdhik2

[Alex Costa @lab_costa]

Plants "talk" internally — and now we can watch it happen.

MAPPI lets us track shoot-to-root Ca²⁺ signals in real time 🌱⚡

@ScienceAdvances!

https://t.co/4DHOXTKSeC