The allotetraploid lycophyte Selaginella rupincola growing among the boulders at Cochise Stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains southeast of Tucson, Arizona.

Xanthisma spinulosum growing outside a gym in Tucson, Arizona.

Selaginella arizonica X eremophila hybrid zone at Alamo Canyon in Organ Pipe National Monument.

A Dieteria sp. being visited by a skipper in the White Mountains of Arizona.

I'm recruiting PhD students for the Barker Lab @uofa-eeb.bsky.social We study plant evolutionary genomics - polyploidy, hybridization & machine learning for genome evolution. Work with Selaginella, Xanthisma, Brassica & more. Funding available via CAMBIUM Fellowships. Reach out if interested! 🧬🌵🤖

And look at this graphic abstract….. 😱🤯

- "What should I say if someone calls - like, you’ve won the Nobel prize or something?"
- "Just tell them I’m living my best life"

New preprint! In collaboration with @ergabiodiv.bsky.social, we explored the convergent #evolution of the S-locus #supergene controlling distyly in the #primrose family.

Link: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

#heterostyly #genomics #preprint #bioRxiv

The dawn of bryophyte genomics is here - Nature Genetics Bryophytes are a widespread group of land plants that occupy nearly all biomes, yet their genetics and evolutionary history have long remained underexplored. Now, a study that generates extensive genomic data for bryophytes highlights de novo gene formation and horizontal gene transfer as key forces that shape bryophyte diversity and adaptation.

✨Don't miss the N&V✨

📰The dawn of bryophyte genomics is here.

By Giacomo Potente, Yuling Yue & Péter Szövényi.

⬇️

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

Purple pollen visible in a dissected flower of Linum grandiflorum, flowering flax, an insect-pollinated species.

*Postdoc in Evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University*
We are recruiting a postdoc for a large interdisciplinary project to investigate evolutionary drivers and genomic consequences of pollen evolution in response to pollination mode shifts in flowering plants. 1/5

su.varbi.com/what:job/job...

Check out our new preprint! We compare sequence versus synteny approaches for resolving a challenging #phylogenetic problem. In this case, synteny is far more informative! Also includes the first chromosome-level #genome for the enigmatic #fish family Gyrinocheilidae. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Bryophytes hold a larger gene family space than vascular plants - Nature Genetics A super-pangenome analysis incorporating 123 newly sequenced bryophyte genomes reveals that bryophytes exhibit a larger number of unique and lineage-specific gene families than vascular plants.

... And here’s the original paper by Dong et al.: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The dawn of bryophyte genomics is here - Nature Genetics Bryophytes are a widespread group of land plants that occupy nearly all biomes, yet their genetics and evolutionary history have long remained underexplored. Now, a study that generates extensive geno...

Excited to share that my first News & Views is out in @natgenet.nature.com!

Together with Yuling Yue and @peterszovenyi.bsky.social, we highlight a landmark study presenting 100+ bryophyte genome assemblies and what they reveal about plant evolution.

🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Path diagram of pollen fates

Where does pollen go after leaving a flower? Our paper on pollen fates in buzz pollinated flowers is out. Congrats to the three brilliant undergrads that carried out this study from beginning to end!

pollinationecology.org/index.php/jp...

Genomic Patterns of Loss of Distyly and Polyploidization in Primroses Abstract. Transitions from outcrossing to selfing and from diploidy to polyploidy often co-occur in plants, likely because the ability to produce selfed se

🌱 How does polyploidy shape plant reproduction?
Excited to have contributed to a new study in @molbioevol.bsky.social on the loss of distyly in the polyploid Primula grandis!
doi.org/10.1093/molb...

Universität Basel: PhD position in alpine and arctic plant ecology The research group Ecology at the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Basel in Switzerland invites applications for a fully funded four-year PhD position in alpine and arctic pla...

*Job alert*
Come work with us! We have a fully funded 4yr #PhD position in #alpine & #Arctic plant #ecology available in our group @unibas.ch. The project includes fieldwork & connects to other ongoing projects on species range shifts & microclimate.
jobs.unibas.ch/offene-stell...
Please repost!
🌐🧪

Delighted to see this piece celebrating 60 years of the University of Leicester’s Department of Genetics! 🧬
I spent a few months there as an Erasmus student and I have great memories of the brilliant people met there. Here’s to the next 60! 🥂

Graphical overview of the biological foundations of the proposed approach.

Application of SCINKD to identify XY chromosomes in the Christmas island skink

Application of SCINKD to identify previously unannotated sex chromosomes in the Lesser electric ray.

🚨Preprint🚨

Sex chromosome identification & genome curation from a single individual with SCINKD
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Incredible work led by @drpintothe2nd.bsky.social in collaboration w/ @drsimonegable.bsky.social @stuartvnielsen.bsky.social @tonygamble.bsky.social SE Keating & CH Smith

Some months later, work is now published @natcomms.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Germany Plans Global Alternative to PubMed In the wake of a brief PubMed outage, team launches project to ensure uninterrupted access

'They say there's a need to create such a service in case U.S. funding is curtailed or the quantity or quality of its 37 million citations fall victim to politicization, or a DOGE-like chain saw attack of its trained personnel, sources told MedPage Today.'
www.medpagetoday.com/special-repo...

WorkflowHub: a registry for computational workflows - Scientific Data Scientific Data - WorkflowHub: a registry for computational workflows

The WorkflowHub registry has a global reach, with hundreds of research organisations involved, and more than 800 workflows registered. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #bioinformatics #FAIR

Release RAxML-NG v2.0-beta2 · amkozlov/raxml-ng Main new features Adaptive tree search heuristic (Togkousidis 2023) , (Togkousidis 2024) Multiple fast branch support measures Integrated model testing Full Changelog: 1.2.2...2.0-beta2

RAxML-NG v2.0 beta is here

github.com/amkozlov/rax...
Features
1. Difficulty prediction
academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...
2. Adaptive search academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...
3. Early Stop
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
4. Model selection
5. Rapid bootstrapping academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Perfect Flowers: Adventures in Nature’s Nonbinary Botany, with a Side of Emily Dickinson Rewilding the landscape of possibility for the poetry of being.

Adventures in nature's nonbinary botany, with a side of Emily Dickinson – the poetic science of "perfect flowers" (the actual botanical term) www.themarginalian.org/2021/07/02/p...

The average American has three friends

Exclusive: a Nature analysis signals the beginnings of a US science brain drain A trawl of job views and application data suggests jobseekers are looking abroad as the Trump administration’s cuts to science take hold.

Researchers in the US are seeking career opportunities abroad as President Donald Trump’s administration slashes science funding and workforce numbers, finds an analysis of Nature’s jobs-board data. #Academicsky 🧪

doi.org/10.1002/saj2... Most transformative scientific solutions often emerge from curiosity-driven research, not just problem-focused/use-inspired approaches. #Soil science's greatest contributions will come from maintaining intellectual freedom to truly understand 1 of Earth's most complex systems

New OA Letter: "Viral delivery of an RNA-guided genome editor for transgene-free germline editing in Arabidopsis" rdcu.be/eiJVL

...engineered the tobacco rattle virus to express the RNA-guided TnpB enzyme ISYmu1 and guide RNA for transgene-free germline editing.

New preprint! We investigated the evolution of supergenes and mechanisms underlying distyly in Linum species that diverged ca 33 Mya. 1/8
bsky.app/profile/bior...

Congratulations, very interesting findings! 🎉

Insights into convergent evolution of cosexuality in liverworts from the Marchantia quadrata genome Potente et al. show that in the liverwort M. quadrata, the evolution of cosexuality involves the retention of the male (V) sex chromosome and the complete loss of the female (U) sex chromosome. This p...

…And here’s a link to our paper:
www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Our @cp-cellreports.bsky.social paper was featured by the UZH Faculty of Science!

We explore how sex chromosomes evolve during transitions to cosexuality, using the liverwort Marchantia quadrata 🧬

🔗 www.mnf.uzh.ch/de/news/arti...

Our first paper on algal experiments at NIG with @yawaguchi.bsky.social! We found that a single episode of sexual reproduction can produce large variation in population growth rates (and prevent extinction) under dual stressors @jevbio.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/jeb/... bsky.app/profile/bior...

A whole-genome scan for evidence of positive and balancing selection in aye-ayes (Daubentonia madagascariensis) utilizing a well-fit evolutionary baseline model Abstract. The aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis) is one of the 25 most endangered primate species in the world, maintaining amongst the lowest genetic

Aye-ayes - amongst the lowest #genetic diversity of any primate measured to date - characterising genetic composition is key for future conservation efforts academic.oup.com/g3journal/ad... #biodiversity #genomics