The best bit about being a British person in America is having to periodically explain to people the concept of Mr Blobby.

If you know a graduating undergraduate looking for the chance to spend 1-2 years in a lab before graduate school, we're hiring! Our lab explores morphogenesis, defining how the cell adhesion & cytoskeletal machinery work together to allow cells to change shape & move tarheels.live/peiferlab/ 1/n RT

This paper is super cool. Squeaky-clean genetic evidence that Wnt cis-regulatory alleles tune horn length in caterpillars.

Yeah! I'm thinking it's a feature not a bug - it has to be 'relational', as others are saying, but also inherently needs to involve comparison over extended time, whereas 'new' can be applied to something that happens in an instant.

I like this definition. It seems like it can only be applied retrospectively, vs this use of 'new' which can be applied, say, within a population. It also feels quite related to (syn)apomorphy.

Just to test the definition, would the evolution of aerobic citrate metabolism in the Long Term Evolution Experiment count?

The Genetic Basis of Color Polymorphism in the Orb‐Web Spider Gasteracantha cancriformis This study investigates the genetic basis of coloration in the polymorphic spider Gasteracantha cancriformis using RNA-seq data from different female color morphs. We assembled a reference transcript...

We just published a first exploration using whole body RNAseq of the mechanisms shaping color variation in Gasteracantha. More work to come — stay tuned!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Awesome!! It's really cool to see bab and BarH pop up yet again for colour-related things - parallelism all the way down.

One neat feature to note for fellow QTL-mapping nerds: rather than a 'classical' reduced representation method, they did low-coverage WGS at avg 1x, which seems to have been pretty effective and low cost. Does this herald the end of the RAD era?

Cis-regulatory evolution of Wnt family genes contributes to a morphological difference between silkworm species Closely related species often exhibit distinct morphologies. This study uncovers the genetic basis of caudal horn size differences between the domesticated silk moth and its wild relative, revealing c...

Some quite elegant work from Kenta Tomihara and my PhD-twin @pinharanda.bsky.social: They mapped genetic variation in a caterpillar structure between wild and domestic Bombyx to a cluster of three Wnt genes, then narrowed down on the functional gene with a CRISPR mKO-based hemizygosity test.

Figure showing the evolutionary diversification of Lepidopteran larval appendages.

Really excellent paper on the genetics of caterpillar butt ornaments
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

I only have two science quibbles with Project Hail Mary and they are both to do with centrifuges but in dramatically different contexts...am I the only one?

Love it - this really scratches my itch for studies that contextualise and unify the modern synthesis with developmental biology. Textbook stuff!

Research on fruit flies and other ‘model’ organisms may be declining Analysis of published papers on eight widely studied species suggests work on them is fading, but not everyone is worried

The Model Organism is dead, long live the Model Organism www.science.org/content/arti...

A map of anatolia, indicating the spatial distribution of yellow and white bees.

Figure 1 from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13596-2

I've just had a jaw-to-the-floor moment with this new paper from the Hines lab. They describe a yellow-white switch in bees, which maps to the same TF as the yellow-white switch in Colias butterflies, previously described by the @chriswheat.bsky.social lab. journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...

This is really beautiful work, congrats @ottilie.bsky.social et al. This, esp fig 2d, also feels reminiscent of Dobzhansky Muller incompatibility.

New Preprint! When one enhancer allele changes another's regulatory output, is that bad? We found it could be a feature — interallelic cis-regulatory dominance buffers outputs AND enables evolutionary innovation. Two for one!

Led by @ottilie.bsky.social from @embl.org

doi: doi.org/10.64898/202...

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

Another cool genetic hotspot

BarH ----| pterin granule formation must be a conserved module dating to before butterfly/bumblebee split

Pterin polymorphism predictably map to this master switch in setae and scales.

McVitties for me - you could smell the caramel from the school yard on Tuesday mornings.

To me, this is a pretty gob-smacking case of parallel evolution between two pretty drastically divergent lineages - though in both cases we're looking at pterin accumulation in sense organ homologs (setae for bees, scales for butterflies). Beautiful work!

A map of anatolia, indicating the spatial distribution of yellow and white bees.

Figure 1 from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13596-2

I've just had a jaw-to-the-floor moment with this new paper from the Hines lab. They describe a yellow-white switch in bees, which maps to the same TF as the yellow-white switch in Colias butterflies, previously described by the @chriswheat.bsky.social lab. journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...

Science Says So: How Do Caterpillars Get Their Wings? YouTube video by Marine Biological Laboratory

Nipam Patel exploring the common myth that caterpillars 'turn to goo" inside the chrysalis, with some beautiful visuals!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCka...

update - it is snowing heavily and the 'feels like' temp is -3.

DC weather right now is ridiculous. Right now it is 29 Celsius. Tomorrow it will hit freezing and it might snow.

I've just registered for EuroEvoDevo 2026 in Glasgow, and they've extended the abstract submission deadline! www.evodevoconference26.com

Now this is how #DeExtinction is done. These are "Lazarus species" in my taxonomy of the dead.

Predominantly genetic determination and stable transmission of DNA methylation in an avian hybrid zone www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02...

🦋✂️🧬 🧪 New preprint! Led by @donyaniyaz.bsky.social CRISPR‑Cas9 knockouts of ABCG transporters across butterflies & moths reveal how pigment pathways shape color during development. #CRISPR #Lepidoptera #pigmentation
Feedback welcome 👩‍🔬
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It's only February but I think I might be able to call this my top paper of 2026 already.