Thanks Álvaro ☺️ It took us a while :)

Amazing work! Cool observation and way to answer it. Congrats to you and the whole team!

8/8 Altogether,our work adds another layer to how we think about coding sequences: exons encode proteins, but the DNA itself can also carry information that helps determine where and how genes are expressed in plant cells. Huge thanks to all the co-authors and collaborators for the fantastic work!

7/8 And why stop at Arabidopsis? 🌱🍅 In collaboration with some colleagues at Paris-Saclay, we extended our analyses to tomato, finding that many of these genomic features are shared across species.

6/8 And there was another surprise. EEs may not act only on the genes in which they are embedded. Our analyses suggest that they may also contribute to the regulation of neighboring and distal genes, potentially through chromatin interactions. 👀

5/8 But BRI1 is only part of the story. EEs are common across the Arabidopsis genome, so we took a closer look at their genomic features: where they are located, which transcription factors are associated with them, and what characterizes the genes that contain them.

4/8 BRI1 contains an exonic enhancer. And this EE is important for establishing the spatial expression pattern of BRI1. So, in BRI1, the coding sequence carries information not only about the protein itself, but also about where the gene should be expressed. 🤯

3/8 Thanks to a predoctoral contract from @ageinves.bsky.social Raúl Denia-Mondéjar joined our lab @ibmcp.bsky.social and started trying to solve the mystery. After ruling out several possibilities, we finally found what was behind this regulation… 👇

2/8 This story started some years ago. When I left UNIL, one thing was clear: BRI1 was regulated by its own coding sequence (CDS). But we had absolutely no clue why.