Yesterday, some of our PhD students, who will be completing their PhDs at GEvol in the coming months, took part in a ‘career planning workshop’ led by Dr. Juliane Handschuh. It was very helpful in discovering the various options available to them. Personal coaching sessions will follow. Thank you.

BRAKER4 and GALBA2 took a walk, today. They learnt how to run RED for repeat masking and minisplice for alignment. github.com/Gaius-August... github.com/Gaius-August...

GALBA2 walks into the arena. We rewrote our protein-based genome annotation pipeline in Snakemake.

Give it a genome + proteins from close relatives → get gene predictions. No RNA-Seq, no GeneMark needed.

miniprot → AUGUSTUS, fully containerised, HPC-ready.

github.com/Gaius-Augustus/GALBA2

You want to work on Transcriptional Regulation in Beetles 🐞? Join our GEvol Community and work with many great people ➡️ Two open PhD positions in @bfeldmeyer.bsky.social lab in Frankfurt: g-evol.uni-muenster.de/open-positio...

Congratulations to @stepbystepsolution.bsky.social to the manuscript on genome annotation of 200 insect genomes, a result his work within of @gevol.bsky.social ! doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Steuern wir auf ein drastisches Aussterbe-Ereignis zu? Anlässlich des „Darwin-Tags“ am 12. Februar fordert der Evolutionsbiologe Prof. Dr. Joachim Kurtz im „Umdenken“-Podcast eine schnelle und entschlossene Antwort der Gesellschaft auf den Klimawandel und...

Anlässlich des #DarwinTag am 12. Februar fordert der Evolutionsbiologe Prof. Dr. Joachim Kurtz im „Umdenken“-Podcast eine schnelle und entschlossene Antwort der Gesellschaft auf den #Klimawandel und den Verlust von #Biodiversität.

Cryptocercus genomes expand knowledge of adaptations to xylophagy and termite sociality Abstract. Subsociality and wood-eating or xylophagy are understood as key drivers in the evolution of eusociality in Blattodea (cockroaches and termites),

🚨 New paper in GBE! 🚨
This study analyzes two high-quality Cryptocercus genomes, the sister group to all termites, to investigate the transition to subsociality and wood-feeding (xylophagy) in Blattodea. 🪳

Check it out here:
doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...

Check out our new review in Nature Reviews Genetics on de novo emerged genes and proteins. How they emerge, are lost and persist - and how de novo emerged proteins relate to randomized proteins! @bornberglab.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Heads up: Two of the PhD positions in our Germany-wide priority program "Genomic Basis of Evolutionary Innovations (GEvol)" have application deadlines in a few days, see
g-evol.uni-muenster.de

Gevol Job alert: 2 New PhD positions. You want to do Bioinformatics 💻, please check the job Mario Stankes lab in Greifswald, or maybe work on ant venoms 🐜, please check the job in Simon Tragust lab in Halle. These and more open jobs can be found g-evol.uni-muenster.de/open-positio...

🦋 i5k Annual Meeting: February 4th, 2026! Anyone with an interest in arthropod #genomics is encouraged to join this open meeting. More details here: i5k.github.io/2025_annual_...

#i5k #arthropods #genomics #insects #biodiversity

Unravelling the evolution of wood-feeding in termites with 47 high-resolution genome assemblies - Nature Communications Termites, the largest lineage of non-hymenopteran social insects, are important decomposers of plant organic matter in the tropics. Here, the authors sequence the genomes of 45 termites and two cockro...

📢🪳 New paper alert!
Former group members Alina and Mark contributed to a new study just published in Nature Communications. The team generated 47 new high-quality genomes from termites and cockroaches, filling a major gap in available data.
Check out the paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

GEvol Job Alert: PhD position in Robert Paxtons lab in Halle This research project focuses on the extent to which the origin of eusociality in the socially variable halictid bees is ascribable
to changes in gene regulatory mechanisms. Find this and more open positions @ g-evol.uni-muenster.de

Postdoctoral Research Associates are sought for the GEvol project on evolutionary genomics. Candidates should have programming and data analysis skills. More info: https://g-evol.uni-muenster.de/open-positions/ #postdoc

📢 GEvol Job Alert: PhD position in Joachim Kurtzs lab in Münster in the Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity. This research project focuses on the evolutionary flexibility of epigenetic regulation in insects. Find this and more open positions @ g-evol.uni-muenster.de/open-positio... 🧬

PhD position available for theoretical and statistical modeling in my joint @gevol.bsky.social project with @luisapallares.bsky.social on the evolution of transcriptional variability and its role in adaptation and evolutionary innovation.
See
job-portal.lmu.de/jobposting/6...

***Super cool-project alert***⚠️ Come work with @dirkmetzler.bsky.social and me in trying to understand how transcriptional noise evolves in a phylogenetic context 🧬 Deadline 15th Dec 2025 (Project funded by @dfg.de @gevol.bsky.social)

📢 Job alert: Post-Doc Position in the project "Functional annotation of genomic🧬 innovations in a densely populated clade🪰 with deep learning 💻" Join the GEvol community in a collaborative project between @bornberglab.bsky.social and @katharinahoff.bsky.social lab.
👉 bornberglab.org/post-doc-pos...

Climate and parasite pressure jointly shape traits mediating the coevolution between an ant social parasite and its host Abstract. Host–parasite relationships are often shaped by coevolutionary arms races. While abiotic influences on these dynamics are well documented, a comb

#Climate and parasite pressure jointly shape traits mediating the #coevolution between an #ant social parasite and its #host:

doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

Erwann et al. 2025

💻 The Project: We will integrate multi-omics (bulk/scRNAseq, long-reads, ATAC-seq) to explore how duplicated genes diverge in regulation and function.
🤝 You will be part of the DFG SPP 2349 @gevol.bsky.social consortium & the @imprsgs.bsky.social, with research visits to collaboration partners (👇).

🧬 PhD Position: Evolutionary & Comparative Genomics 🕷️
Join us at @uni-goettingen.de for a 3-year PhD (65% TV-L E13).
We will investigate the genomic & phenotypic impact of gene duplication across 233 arthropod genomes!
More infos 👇 and s.gwdg.de/eDrAAY
#Evolution #Genomics #Bioinformatics

More specific, from the 6,1 Mio€ grant money, 9 ongoing projects are extended for 3 more years and 8 new projects can be started. The project lead will be at the Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity
@uni-muenster.de

again. We look forward to our old and new collaboration partners and 🪰🐝 &🕷️!

🧩 Thrilled to share our new paper in @genomebiolevol.bsky.social !

We present a comprehensive review of de novo gene emergence — providing a classification of current detection methods and a roadmap for addressing major challenges in the field of gene birth from non-genic sequences.

PhD position available in evolutionary genomics/bioinformatics (hoehnalab.github.io/job_adverts/...). Topic: analyzing gene expression evolution across several firefly species and linking expression changes to genomic architecture. The position is jointly supervised with @anaevolcatalan.bsky.social

check out the accompanying paper doi.org/10.1093/gbe/... as well!

🚀We’re excited to share our new paper in Bioinformatics!

We introduce a user-friendly toolkit that implements our novel DeNoFo file-format for standardised annotation of de novo gene detection workflows — enabling reproducible methodology descriptions and easier dataset comparison across studies.

🎉We are happy to announce that our wonderful GEvol SPP will be funded by @dfg.de for another 3 years. Included are 17 great projects all over Germany with amazing people. You want to be part of this fantastic community? Soon you can find new PhD/Post-Doc positions here & on our website. Stay tuned🎉

The DeNoFo format & toolkit for annotating, assessing and comparing the tools and tresholds used in studies of de novo evolved genes is out now in Bioinformatics! Great effort led by @drdomain.bsky.social and Anna Grandchamp!

academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

Genomic Basis of Evolutionary Innovations in Insects: Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution: Vol 344, No 7 The Journal of Experimental Zoology – B (JEZ-B): Molecular and Developmental Evolution covers the structure & evolution of animal & non-animal organisms.

📢 Check out our GEvol inspired Special Issue in JEZ-B:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15525015... 🚨

Saturating the eQTL map in Drosophila: Genome-wide patterns of cis and trans regulation of transcriptional variation in outbred populations Pallares et al. collect over a thousand RNA-seq and DNA samples from Drosophila melanogaster flies to investigate the genetic basis of gene expression variation. They find eQTLs for 98% of the genes a...

We have put together a comprehensive eQTL map for D. melanogaster using thousands of genetically diverse flies 🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰 We hope this helps -as similar resources have done in yeast and humans- to understand how genetic variation 🧬 regulates complex traits variation 🪰 via transcriptional regulation ⬆️⬇️