Devang Mehta🌱🧬
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mehta-lab.com
Devang Mehta🌱🧬
@mehta-lab.com
2.3K followers 1.2K following 370 posts
Leading the Experimental Plant Systems Biology Lab at KU Leuven 🇧🇪. Previously at UAlberta 🇨🇦, ETH_Zurich🇨🇭, Imperial College London 🇬🇧, VIT University 🇮🇳.

Fmr Early Career Advisor @eLife, @biorxiv affiliate

he/him
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Devang Mehta🌱🧬 @mehta-lab.com · Nov 14
By way of (re)introduction, here's a repost of a short 🧵 about our latest study published in Science Advances:

We discovered that plants sense the duration of TWILIGHT🌅, giving us a new insight how plants measure the length of a day!

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adl3199
Just a moment...
www.science.org
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
drkatemarvel.bsky.social
I really wish we'd stop calling them climate "skeptics" or "vaccine skeptics", if you jump off a cliff we don't call you a "gravity skeptic"
November 25, 2025 at 8:18 PM
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
reckless.bsky.social
I’ve been running around asking tech execs and academics if language was the same as intelligence for over a year now - and, well, it isn’t. @benjaminjriley.bsky.social explains how the bubble is built on ignoring cutting-edge research into the science of thought www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...
November 25, 2025 at 1:54 PM
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
allenholub.bsky.social
I'll admit that I occasionally watch Forged in Fire (a reality show where people make edged weapons under time pressure—don't judge 😄). One of the things I find particularly interesting is how the contestants continually make the same mistakes that brought down contestants in previous shows.
1/9
November 24, 2025 at 7:59 PM
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
plantevolution.bsky.social
We (Nordborg & Weigel labs) need input on the next generation of genome browsers & data download modes for the #Arabidopsis #1001GenomesPlus project. We have now a curated collection of over 500 long read genomes.

Please help us by filling out this questionnaire: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Next generation of 1001 Genomes Plus browser and data download
Please indicate all features you would like to see in a browser that displays features of completely sequenced Arabidopsis thaliana genomes
docs.google.com
November 24, 2025 at 2:49 PM
mehta-lab.com
The sheer cruelty of it.
jonfeatonby.bsky.social Jon Featonby @jonfeatonby.bsky.social · 2d
At least 160,000 people have been granted refugee status over the past five years. It now seems they are intended to be caught by the Government’s plans to make refugees wait up to 20 years for settlement - even for those just months away from ILR

www.thetimes.com/article/6f83...
November 24, 2025 at 2:45 PM
mehta-lab.com
Nice 🧵. IMO we still need Arabidopsis. I’ve seen many crop biotech projects struggle because they ignore the fundamental knowledge gained through Ath work. At the same time, some fields definitely need to start replicating Arabidopsis experiments in other plants to get to more generalisable models.
nickdesnoyer.bsky.social Nick Desnoyer @nickdesnoyer.bsky.social · 2d
With the 50-year rise of Arabidopsis as the most studied plant, is it time for its downfall?

Let’s investigate it’s history and outlook 🧵
November 24, 2025 at 2:14 PM
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
alileverett.bsky.social
Can anyone help:

I want to take photos of arabidopsis rosettes everyday as they grow to get growth curves for a lot of ecotypes. Does anyone know of software that can be used to read the label from inside the photo and rename the file with the plant ID and then amend the date to the file name too?
November 21, 2025 at 1:50 PM
mehta-lab.com
“scientific orthodoxy”, or in this case, facts.
nytimes.com The New York Times @nytimes.com · 4d
Breaking News: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he personally instructed the CDC to abandon its position that vaccines do not cause autism. The move underscores his determination to challenge scientific orthodoxy — in this case, that vaccines save lives — and bend the health department to his will.
RFK Jr. Says He Instructed CDC to Change Vaccines and Autism Language on Website
In an interview, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cited gaps in vaccine safety research. His critics say he is ignoring a larger point: Vaccines save lives.
nyti.ms
November 23, 2025 at 12:46 PM
mehta-lab.com
Lees mijn eerste opiniestuk met collega’s van @kuleuvenuniversity.bsky.social in @standaard.be! “Door het Engels te omarmen als lingua
franca in onderzoek wissen we onze wortels niet uit. We zetten de deur open voor samenwerking, investeringen en talent.“
www.standaard.be/opinies/vlaa...
November 23, 2025 at 9:12 AM
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
It only took us several decades and dozens Nature/Nature Genetics papers but we finally got to the conclusion that plant and animal breeders (and Lewontin) arrived at from the start: twin studies suck!
sashagusevposts.bsky.social Sasha Gusev @sashagusevposts.bsky.social · 4d
I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵
The missing heritability question is now (mostly) answered
Not with a bang but with a whimper
theinfinitesimal.substack.com
November 21, 2025 at 11:40 PM
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
devawo.bsky.social
This is bananas & has been accomplished entirely via propaganda turbocharged by negative polarization.
pewresearch.org Pew Research Center @pewresearch.org · 6d
A majority of U.S. adults (59%) say they don’t want to get an updated COVID-19 vaccine. This is roughly identical to the share who said in October 2024 that they probably wouldn’t get the updated vaccine.
A series of blue and green stacked horizontal bars on a chart showing that about 6 in 10 Americans say they don’t want to get an updated COVID-19 vaccine and opinions differ by age and political affiliation
November 19, 2025 at 9:58 PM
mehta-lab.com
Guilty of A 👀
richardsever.bsky.social Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 12d
What's more irritating in talks?

A) Speakers saying "I'm going to switch gears" when they mean "I'm going to change direction and talk about something else"?

B) A metaphorical collaboration slide that shows 3 or more gear cogs in a configuration that could not possible work.
November 14, 2025 at 8:07 PM
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
elife.bsky.social
Evidence from 14 research funding programmes confirms that early winners tend to keep winning (Matthew effect). But the idea that an early setback makes you stronger later doesn’t replicate widely.
buff.ly/UEtcRd4
eLife Assessment This important study reports the results of efforts to replicate two phenomena of significant interest to early-career scientists and scientific policymakers: the Matthew effect and the early-career setback effect. Several previous studies of these effects have focused on early-career researchers with grant proposals that fell just below or just above a funding threshold. Those just above the threshold were more likely to be successful when they applied for funding later in the career (an example of the well-known Matthew effect), while those just below were more likely to go on to have stronger publication records (the early-career setback effect). In this study the Matthew effect was found to be robust across funders, and to generalize from those close to the funding threshold to the whole population. The early-career setback effect was not robust across funders and did not generalize to the whole population. The evidence reported is convincing.
November 12, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
kwsgroup.bsky.social
📣The joint letter from EU farmers & breeders urges EU to stick to science on #NGT1 negotiations:
✅ Regulate like conventional plants
✅ Safety & transparency already ensured in EU
✅ Avoid global disadvantage
✅ Voluntary labels suffice.
www.linkedin.com/posts/copa-c...
Joint Letter - COPA COGECA & Euroseeds urge the European Parliament to stick to science: NGT 1 plants should be regulated like conventional ones, with no extra sustainability checks or labels… |...
Joint Letter - COPA COGECA & Euroseeds urge the European Parliament to stick to science: NGT 1 plants should be regulated like conventional ones, with no extra sustainability checks or labels becaus...
www.linkedin.com
November 13, 2025 at 12:59 PM
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
malwaretech.com
There's this woman doing an absolutely wild social experiment on TikTok. She calls random US churches with the sound of a baby crying in the background, explain the baby hasn't eaten in over 12 hours, and asks for 1 bottle of baby formula. She has a public spreadsheet of how each one responded. 1/3
November 13, 2025 at 6:48 AM
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
nature.com
Getting Rosalind Franklin’s story right is crucial, because she has become a role model for women going into science

www.nature.com/articles/d41...
What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure
Franklin was no victim in how the DNA double helix was solved. An overlooked letter and an unpublished news article, both written in 1953, reveal that she was an equal player.
www.nature.com
November 10, 2025 at 9:44 AM
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
colincarlson.bsky.social
In September, we had an event where we brought in nine international participants. Out of nine total, one was detained in a back room without explanation. I don’t think people here realize what a dice roll it is, but people outside the U.S. certainly do
donmoyn.bsky.social Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 16d
I have had other colleagues from Europe tell me they simply will not attend conferences in the US for the foreseeable future because they no longer feel welcome. They have seen the stories of travelers detained and don't want to hand their social media over to the current administration for approval
November 9, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
evolutionistrue.bsky.social
A deeply misleading book review in Nature implies that the modern view of evolution is woefully incomplete, making the same tired arguments refuted over a decade ago. Moreover, the author of the book review is a collaborator with several of the book's authors.

whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/11/09/n...
November 9, 2025 at 4:03 PM
mehta-lab.com
Maybe the best way to handle Watson’s legacy is to figure out how to change the culture of science so that we still value the drive & insight that leads to groundbreaking discoveries without the crazy ego-boosting that leads so many scientists to turn into overconfident a-holes.
November 9, 2025 at 10:08 AM
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
pgourevitch.bsky.social
Maj Gen Tomer-Yerushalmi—who resigned as Israel’s top military lawyer after saying she released a video that shows severe abuse of a Palestinian detainee by Israeli soldiers “to counter false propaganda” against the army’s investigation of the crime—has now been arrested.
www.bbc.com/news/article...
Israeli military's ex-top lawyer arrested as scandal over video leak deepens
Maj Gen Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned on Friday, admitting leaking a video allegedly showing abuse of a Palestinian detainee.
www.bbc.com
November 3, 2025 at 1:02 PM
mehta-lab.com
If you don’t like what this represents, join me in boycotting for-profit publishers of scientific research. There are still high quality, highly selective non-profit run journals around. They need our business to survive and thrive.
October 29, 2025 at 6:46 AM
mehta-lab.com
I guess it’s testament to the vanity of scientists that the “Nature Scientific Reports” trick worked so well on us.
richardsever.bsky.social Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 28d
Scientific Reports meanwhile on course to publish 40K papers = >$100M pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov?term=%22Scie...
October 29, 2025 at 6:41 AM
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
plantevolution.bsky.social
1/2 Want to become up to date with pangenomes and genome graphs and their history? Check out this fantastic review by @zbao.bsky.social!

Complexity welcome: Pangenome graphs for comprehensive population genomics
#pangenomes #plantscience #genomegraphs
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
October 27, 2025 at 5:53 PM
Reposted by Devang Mehta🌱🧬
olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social
"A key aspect of the way we lived with each other before these self-styled epochal developments [post-2020] involved exactly the “social shame and cultural pressure” that Klein and other influential voices now come to condemn"

tapping the 'bring back shame' sign
www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...
October 14, 2025 at 10:37 PM