Special Issue: Functional and Adaptive Effects of Genomic Structural Variation See more information on the new Heredity special issue on functional and adaptive effects of genomic structural variation.

The special issue Functional and Adaptive Effects of Genomic Structural Variation is now out in Heredity. Many thanks to all contributors for their submissions, to the editorial team at @heredityjournal.bsky.social and to @ellenleffler.bsky.social, @mydennis.bsky.social & @gokcumenlab.bsky.social!

hooray!! congrats 🙌

Absolutely, this one's going up in the office 💜

Diedre Reitz ( @diedrereitz.bsky.social ), PhD, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at UC Davis, will be giving a seminar on Monday, March 23rd at 4:00pm in Kollros Auditorium. We hope to see you there!

Everyone could use a little purple cat in their life - happy Thursday from my 5yo 🐾

Whoa! Looking forward to checking this one out

Both exist but are not yet public. This is a work in progress and will soon be available 👍

I had a blast working on this paper! This was the first mammalian assembly paper using the new CiFi tech, and we combined multiple lines of evidence to verify a prairie-vole-specific duplication of Avpr1a. All methods will be open source and reproducible, enabling the community to build on them.

*2.3 Gbp (billions not millions!)

The study represents a wonderful collaboration with several labs/institutes: @tollkuhn.bsky.social (CSHL), Dev Manoli (UCSF), Jonas Korlach (@pacbio.bsky.social), Kirsten Howe (@sangerinstitute.bsky.social), and many others.

Our hope is that these genomes will serve as a useful resource for future studies of prairie voles, an emerging rodent model for human neurocognitive conditions. We have created annotated UCSC Genome Browser hubs to facilitate this (e.g., prairie vole: genome.ucsc.edu/s/mabuelanin...)

Sequencing only a single SMRT cell per species (5x CiFi and 30x HiFi), we were able to create T2T-scaffolds (and in some cases contigs) across nearly all chromosomes for the ~2.3 Mbp eukaryotic genomes, both with considerable repeat and SD content. Downsampling shows only 2x CiFi is necessary.

Neither the Avpr1a SD and adjacent prairie-vole annotated centromere were found in any of the four meadow vole haplotypes (ours and VGP) and were missing from the previous reference (MicOch1.0), which has impeded analysis of this candidate gene. Avpr1a CN is uniquely high in prairie vs other voles.

Excited so share our newest study using a single-library HiFi-CiFi approach to generate chromosome-scale diploid assemblies of two vole genomes, identifying putative drivers of divergent pair-bonding behavior, namely a prairie-vole-specific duplication of Avpr1a gene, led by @mabuelanin.bsky.social

BenchDrop-seq: a microfluidics-free platform for benchtop single-cell long-read RNA sequencing www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...

😂

a close up of a monkey 's face with ndnbc written on the bottom right ALT: a close up of a monkey 's face with ndnbc written on the bottom right

parents in davis this morning waiting for summer camp registration to open

GENETICS: @mydennis.bsky.social from University of California Davis discussed the querying complex genomic regions important in human disease and evolution at the 2026 AGBT General Meeting. #AGBTGM26

Long-Read Sequencing Workshop The program will involve sessions on Genome Evolution, Genome Regulation, Transcriptomics, Rare Diseases, Common Diseases, and Viral and Microbial Genomes. Committed speakers include Adam Phillipy (NH...

JAX Long-Read Sequencing Workshop

Keynotes by @aphillippy.bsky.social & @mydennis.bsky.social

Co-organized by @olgaanczukow.bsky.social, @christinebeck.bsky.social & Mark Adams

✈️ Trainee travel awards
📝 Abstracts due March 3
🥼 Optional wet-lab training session
🔗 www.jax.org/education-an...

Thank you, Crystal!

2 First-Gen Scientists on Curiosity, Community and Discovery Megan Dennis, associate professor in Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine, and Siobhan Brady, professor in the Department of Plant Biology and the Genome Center, are more than an just office neighbors ...

Please check out these amazing women! They are fantastic scientists, committed mentors, supportive friends and honestly super stars! 🤩@bradylabs.bsky.social @mydennis.bsky.social @ucdavis.bsky.social
www.ucdavis.edu/news/podcast...

Thank you!

Anyone in the U.S. got an ERK biosensor zebrafish line they'd be willing to share/ship to VA? vascular specific would be preferred, but I'll take global too. @zebrafishrock.bsky.social

Thank you all!

Recently learned that I will be promoted to FULL PROFESSOR(!) this coming summer. So happy and thankful for those that have supported me along the way, including collaborators, mentors, colleagues, friends, family, trainees, and letter writers. #bighugs #youdabest #firstgen

10-day weather forecast in Davis, CA showing warmer and arguably more livable winter conditions than much of the rest of the US, providing yet another reason to apply to a faculty position at UC Davis

While we are still recovering from an atmospheric river, I can’t complain too much about this Davis winter weather 👀

Please repost and share widely - winter break is a perfect time to assemble application materials 😅

Phylogenetic tree showing relationships between zebrafish, mice and cartilaginous fishes. It shows the 3R genome duplication event in teleost lineage. Credit to MacDonald et al. 2018.

Did you know the last common ancestor of #zebrafish and humans was ~450 million years ago? A whole genome duplication event (3R) occurred early in the teleost fish phylogeny. Despite this event, zebrafish and humans have about the same number of chromosomes. #ZebrafishFunFacts 🧪

Absolutely thrilled to share the latest work from my lab focused on the variation and evolution of human centromeres among global populations! We assembled 2,110 human centromeres, identifying 226 new major haplotypes and 1,870 α-satellite HOR variants. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

CiFi: accurate long-read chromosome conformation capture with low-input requirements. #HiFi #LongRead #Sequencing @natcomms.nature.com 🧪🧬 🖥️
www.nature.com/articles/s41...