Spreading Plant Science through Twitter

Post by Angel Vergara Cruces

For my ASPB Conviron Scholars independent project, I wanted to use Twitter to spread plant sciences. I was hoping the way Twitter works could allow me to reach a wider audience. I especially wanted to introduce plant sciences to undergraduate students in the life sciences, who may in principle not be particularly interested in this area.

I published a thread summarising the results from the strawberry genome paper (https://www.nature.com/article…), taking the opportunity to talk about how genomes are sequenced, the difficulties in the case of polyploids and emphasizing the importance of polyploidy in plant evolution. You can see it here: https://twitter.com/ngelVerCru…

Also, because I wished to contribute content about science in my native tongue, I did another version in Spanish: https://twitter.com/ngelVerCru…

Overall, it was a very nice experience. I received very positive feedback from the community, although Twitter Analytics tools do not allow me to be sure of the demographics of my audience. Moreover, I was given the opportunity of publishing a post on the PacBio blog on the same idea. So far, this has been an interesting learning experience and the draft is currently being reviewed by the team at PacBio.

To sum up, I am very happy to have done this project, it has been very rewarding and it has inspired me to use Twitter for science outreach, which I would like to continue in the future