A photo of a young Lilian Vaughan Morgan, sitting with a book on her lab staring into the distance.

A photo of an older Lilian Vaughan Morgan, sitting at a lab bench with a microscope and dozens of glass milk bottles bunged with cotton. Lilian is in the middle of applying ether to anaesthetize a bottle of flies.

This #InternationalWomensDay I want to tell the story of Lilian Vaughan Morgan. I learned of Lilian this past year - what a badass.

Lilian was a leading scientist when women weren't welcome in the lab, nor even the department. But she contributed immensely to the genetics of sex determination

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What happens if the germline goes on without (most of the) piRNAs for 45 generations?

Come find out at my talk at the evolution session on Saturday at #dros26 @genetics-gsa.bsky.social

🪰🔬🔎⁉️🤔

Is a ‘selfish gene’ making a Utah family have twice as many boys as girls? Genealogy study claims first conclusive case of sex ‘distortion’ in humans — but not all researchers are convinced.

Nature News on the tantalising possibility of the first documented sex-ratio distorter in humans.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

So excited to share this manuscript led by the inimitable Cara Brand, who discovered that Topoisomerase II evolution causes hybrid female lethality in Drosophila.

Congrats to Cara, @nickbr0wn.bsky.social, Anirban, and
@buszczaklab.bsky.social!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Such an incredible story. It’s not often that very complicated questions have such elegant solutions. Congratulations to you and Dominik!

The demystification of piRNA clusters

if you wonder how cells generate piRNAs specifically against transposons & you are looking for a weekend read

check out @86dominik.bsky.social's opus magna (or Dominik's great thread)

a shared project with the one and only Rippei Hayashi, lab alumnus & friend

How does the piRNA pathway solve the self vs. non-self problem? 🧬

Since piRNAs come from single-stranded RNA, how does the cell choose the right ones? For years, "piRNA clusters" were seen as THE privileged source. But are they really special and earmarked for biogenesis? (1/19)

A Naïve RNA Sampling Core Enables Adaptive piRNA Specificity Against Transposable Elements www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02...

Our (@jeffsekelsky.bsky.social, Corbin Jones & me) #Meiosis, Recombination & Evolution of Sex class @uncchapelhill.bsky.social had a great chat w/ Kent Golic @uofubiology.bsky.social about his lab's #GENETICS paper on #Drosophila ring chromosomes:
doi.org/10.1093/gene...

Signatures of sex ratio distortion in humans www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02...

In #GENETICS, @hildeschneemann.bsky.social and John Welch introduce a simple fitness landscape model to predict hybrid fitness with arbitrary ploidy and an arbitrary number of hybridizing lineages using data from #maize and rye. buff.ly/E24fZsM

Congratulations!!!

I'm thrilled to announce that I’m opening my own research team in the Department of Genome Biology at I2BC @i2bcparissaclay.bsky.social ! #ATIP-Avenir
Very excited to start this new adventure! www.i2bc.paris-saclay.fr/equipe-intra...

Medicine’s J. Arvid Ågren examines how organisms persist with internal conflicts | CWRU Newsroom | Case Western Reserve University J. Arvid Ågren, PhD, assistant professor at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, and Manus M. Patten, teaching professor at Georgetown Univer...

The Paradox of the Organism in the university news

case.edu/news/medicin...

The Evolutionary Genomics of Meiotic Drive Abstract. Meiotic drivers are selfish genetic elements that gain transmission advantages by distorting equal, Mendelian segregation. For decades, biologist

Meiotic drive has long been considered as a genetic curiosity. Genomic "footprints" suggest otherwise.

Check out our new review doi.org/10.1093/molb..., a cross-taxa synthesis arguing that recurrent drive is a pervasive and underappreciated force in genome evolution.

Drive, suppression and escape from suppression of a selfish chromosome Abstract. Meiotic drivers are selfish genetic elements that are predicted to spark rapid intra-genomic arms races with their suppressors. However, the long

Check out our new paper, out in the current issue of Proc B!

In this work, we investigate the long-term persistence of the Drosophila pseudoobscura SR chromosome without suppression. We reconstruct its evolutionary history, showing that it has a history of suppression and escape from suppression.

Drive, suppression and escape from suppression of a selfish chromosome
#Drosophila

Check out our new paper in early access at Nature Communications!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Drive, suppression, and escape from suppression of a selfish chromosome www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08....