Evolutionary and ecological genomics of polyploidy in plants: temporal dynamics across scales of biological organization from molecules to ecosystems Roscoff (Bretagne), France, September 15-19, 2025Deadline for application: May 5, 2025

Polyploidy Conference: www.insb.cnrs.fr/fr/evolution...
Registration deadline is fast approaching! (May 19th)

Looking forward to the Jacques Monod Conference on polyploidy this September in Roscoff, France! Registration is open until May 19! #polyploidy

cjm.sb-roscoff.fr/en/conferenc...

See Derek Taylor’s and my eLetter in #Science critiquing the #proteomic evidence ostensibly supporting the Penghu 1 mandible as a #Denisovan - at the end of www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Our paper on a chromosome-level genome of the carnivorous #butterwort plant #Pinguicula gigantea and other species is now published on bioRxiv ! Exciting to get this project close to done 😀 See the preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A class of allopolyploidy showing high duplicate retention and continued homoeologous exchanges Abstract. We describe four ancient polyploidy events where the descendant taxa retain many more duplicated gene copies than has been seen in other paleopol

Cool new work! Some lineages experiencing ancient whole-genome duplications seem to hold on to their duplicate genes for a really long time & keep accumulating homoeologous exchange events! Runs counter to early models where gene loss is expected to be rapid post-WGD academic.oup.com/gbe/advance-...

Meet the 'wooly devil,' a new plant species discovered in Big Bend National Park The plant, formally known as Ovicula biradiata, is especially notable for being the simultaneous discovery of a new species and genus. It was found with help from the community science app iNaturalist...

The plant, formally known as Ovicula biradiata, is especially notable for being the simultaneous discovery of a new species and genus. It was found with help from the community science app iNaturalist. By @jamesdoubek.bsky.social

Triploidy is prominent in the duckweed Lemna minor complex www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02....

Another look at selection and the Black Death An exchange of comments probes the story of the EPAS2 gene, balancing selection, and resistance to Yersinia pestis.

Looking at new criticism and response of an argument for selection in ancient DNA data, I reflected on the huge extent that immunity now matters in our understanding of human evolution.

johnhawks.net/weblog/anoth...

Chris Stringer is tracing human ancestors back a million years Chris Stringer is tracing human ancestors back a million years, but pinpointing when exactly Homo sapiens emerged is even more complex

Tracing human ancestors back a million years www.newscientist.com/video/246925...

Sea sandwort (Honckenya peploides) genome update - first Nanopore flow cell looking pretty good. Dormant shoots were collected from under beach sand in Denmark. A salt tolerant species that was the first plant to appear on the volcanic island Surtsey (Iceland), which erupted out of the sea in 1963.

FYI, we run PSMCs against self-Masurca assemblies of Illumina reads, as well as against our reference genome. Clermontia spp. are rather poorly divergent which makes the reference genome approach OK, so long as coverage OK. Mapping Cyanea, Delissea and Brighamia to Clermontia not advisable ;)

Will be happy to talk shop w you about other findings we have .. trees, PCAs, F3 analyses, NeighborNet (all of these just complementary w each other and ADMIXTURE) .. but also PSMCs

Here’s the other - needs some manual adjustments tho. This work done by expert PhD student Michaela Richter 😀

Here’s one haplotype .. 14 chrs

Still working on it! We just generated two new assemblies - phased haplotypes - using HifiAsm with the ONT flag plus our HiC reads. Such a big step means we need to re-call our SNPs .. on both haplotypes, independently

A man wearing a hard hat shines a torch at the inner wall of a sandstone tunnel. The tunnel is covered in scratches

Three people face away from the camera, shining torches on the inside of tunnel walls. One of the people points towards something on the wall

Two people crouch inside a sandstone tunnel, one of them points towards the inner wall. They are both wearing hard hats.

A photograph taken from the inside of the mouth of a tunnel. Outside the tunnel, we see green foliage.

Giant ground sloths? Armadillos?

Who - or what - cut these ancient sandstone tunnels in Brazil?

Read the full story: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Rapid evolution of prehistoric dogs from wolves by natural and sexual selection emerges from an agent-based model | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Wolves are among the earliest animals to be domesticated. However, the mechanism by which ancient wolves were domesticated into modern dogs is unknown. Most of the prevailing domestication hypotheses ...

Rapid evolution of prehistoric dogs from wolves by natural and sexual selection emerges from an agent-based model | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Here, a celebration of Apocynaceae (dogbanes, milkweeds, swallow-worts etc.) fruits and flowers tucked into a phylogenetic study. Remarkable diversity.

www.frontiersin.org/journals/eco...

The discovery that Africa is the birthplace of human evolution Marking 100 years since Australopithecus Africanus transformed our understanding.

The discovery that Africa is the birthplace of human evolution: Marking 100 years since Australopithecus africanus transformed our understanding.

www.nature.com/articles/d44...

Photo of an aye-aye

New paper led by @glom.bsky.social!

"Unprecedented female female bias in the aye-aye, a highly unusual lemur from Madagascar"

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journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Top: A picture of the aye-aye named Elphaba. Image credit: David Haring, Duke Lemur Center. Bottom: Pedigree structure of the aye-ayes used in this study. The 18 individuals sequenced in this study are shown: males as squares and females as circles. Two individuals (IDs 100937 and 100935) appear multiple places in the pedigree, each time connected by a dashed line. Elphaba is at the bottom right.

Aye-ayes are clearly unusual, but @glom.bsky.social @3rdreviewer.bsky.social &co show that they also have an unusual pattern of #MutationBias; older females transmit more mutations than males. This is a first for mammals, raising questions about other #lemurs 🧪 @plosbiology.org plos.io/40SR4kj

The Archaeology of Cannibalism: a Review of the Taphonomic Traits Associated with Survival and Ritualistic Cannibalism - Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory Taphonomic studies of osteoarchaeological human assemblages have mainly focused on establishing recognisable markers that allow us to discriminate between humanly induced modifications from natural ca...

The Archaeology of Cannibalism: a Review of the Taphonomic Traits Associated with Survival and Ritualistic Cannibalism link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🎉🆕📰🎉: Phylogenomic analysis of target enrichment and transcriptome data uncovers rapid radiation and extensive hybridization in the slipper orchid genus Cypripedium

The Droseraceae issue arises if one wants a monophyletic Drosera

The NeighborNet doesn’t help much to discern admixture vs other sources of homoplasy; it’s a summary of all splits that may imply any source incongruence. It does reflect the admixture graph in this case. Also in the Stachys/Hawaiian mint case I posted

Oops, I meant is Nepenthes a monophyletic taxon sister to Droso/Triphyo+Ancistro or is it paraphyletic to Droso/Triphyo+Ancistro .. both. Sorry 😬

For example, in this study I’ll be publishing soon, what is the monophyletic taxon to which Nepenthes belongs? Nepenthes itself is monophyletic - but does it form a clade with Drosophyllum/Triphyophyllum+Ancistrocladus, or a clade with “Droseraceae”? Neither. A NeighborNet reveals the same

Panel (a) here shows why the NeighborNet in panel (e) is the way it is - tree-defying allopolyploidies. In fact, any new phylogenomics study (e.g., based on Angiosperm353 loci) that includes allopolyploids .. and that publishes only trees… is, sadly, immediately “wrong”

Please don’t 100% ignore this paper because of its NeighborNet 🥹😅 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Another sadness (perhaps?) .. it’s increasingly clear that most organismal phylogenies can’t be modeled by bifurcating trees .. life seems to be a network .. hence monophyly, and monophyletic classification, illusory