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James Schnable
@szintri
Plant biologist and computer geek. Corn Professor at the University of Nebraska. Founder at Dryland Genetics. All posts are in only my personal capacity.
Lincoln, NE
schnablelab.org
Joined January 2009
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    James Schnable
    @szintri
    Jan 20
    The first time I had enough alumni at PAG for a proper reunion. Heard several of their talks, great science. Got to catch up; they sound happy. Feels good. L->R @Sunil_KumarKR 2017-'18 (now at UCR), @shanwai1234 15-19 (NDSU), @ravi_mural 19-23 (SDSU), @vla_torres 21-25.
    6.6K
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    James Schnable
    @szintri
    Sep 9, 2022
    GENESPACE a comparative genomics/synteny visualization and hypothesis testing toolkit implemented in R from @_johntlovell's group out today in eLife. elifesciences.org/articles/78526
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    James Schnable
    @szintri
    Nov 14, 2019
    There is no such thing as a "quick easy little paper." I don't know why I've had to keep relearning this lesson since at least 2011.
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    James Schnable
    @szintri
    Jan 3, 2023
    Cotton candy: pink cotton without dye. Engineered cotton producing betalain, the red pigment found in beets. doi.org/10.1111/pbi.13…
    68K
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    James Schnable
    @szintri
    Apr 20, 2022
    It still doesn't feel real but is now official. Feel about as speechless now as I did when @TheMikeBoehm dropped by my office (was not expecting that!) to give me the news.
    00:00
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    James Schnable
    @szintri
    May 29, 2023
    Corn plants producing betalain, the red pigment found in beets.
    Figure 1. Wang, D., Zhong, Y., Feng, B., Qi, X., Yan, T., Liu, J., ... & Chen, S. (2023). The RUBY reporter enables efficient haploid identification in maize and tomato. Plant Biotechnology Journal. doi: 10.1111/pbi.14071
    43K
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    James Schnable
    @szintri
    Aug 11, 2025
    Today I learned you can just spray mRNA on plant leaves and they'll make proteins. New preprint just sprayed a bunch of green florescent protein mRNA on different plant leaves and found signal.
    39K
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    James Schnable
    @szintri
    Oct 7, 2022
    It only takes one mutation in a single gene (lazy1) to make corn plants grow down instead of up. journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…
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    James Schnable
    @szintri
    Mar 28, 2019
    Never would have happened without all people willing to take chances on me over the years. From students to collaborators to the @UNLBigData search committee and my own one-of-a-kind PhD mentor. Thank you. Even with the news in hard copy it doesn’t feel real.
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    James Schnable
    @szintri
    Jun 15, 2023
    Publishing a complete, telomere-to-telomere assembly of the vast and tangled maize genome, filling in every remaining gap. nature.com/articles/s4158…
    Chen, J., Wang, Z., Tan, K. et al. A complete telomere-to-telomere assembly of the maize genome. Nat Genet (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-023-01419-6
    32K
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    James Schnable
    @szintri
    Jan 2, 2024
    Sat down at my text 20 minutes ago and already have my first paper rejection of 2024. Reviewer 2: "Bioinformatic analyses are just like colorful bubbles which look beautiful but may not be real"
    186K
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    James Schnable
    @szintri
    Jun 3, 2021
    My collaborator Kankshita Swaminathan recently introduced me to "Paper BLAST". Paste in a protein sequence and find papers published on the functions of homologs. Amazing quality of life improvement when writing up RNA-seq or GWAS results: papers.genomics.lbl.gov/cgi-bin/litSea…
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    James Schnable
    @szintri
    Dec 1, 2023
    The origin of maize is more complicated than we previously realized. A story years in the making from the Ross-Ibarra lab, just published in Science. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
    25K
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    James Schnable
    @szintri
    Feb 15, 2024
    My PhD advisor trained 76 PhD students and postdocs in his first 35 years as a professor. Seventy. Six.
    19K