New Pre-Print Alert!
Evolving initial conditions: an alternative developmental route to morphological diversity
with Shannon Taylor and @jamesehammond.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🚨 Why can’t mammals regenerate limbs like frog tadpoles or salamanders?
In our new paper in @science.org , we show that species-specific oxygen sensing acts as a gatekeeper for initiating limb regeneration 🐭🐸
🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #EvoDevo
Zebrafish finds Nemo. New paper with our great collaborators on gap junctional communication in widely divergent species.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Lizard head on the journal cover
Our work as Editor's choice in @evolletters.bsky.social !✨️
Developmental biases & micro- to macroevution in the lizard skull 🦎
academic.oup.com/evlett/advan...
Impacts of genome architecture on the repeatability of polygenic adaptation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...
Two models for the nature of pleiotropy in adaptation. Left: Schematic of the environmental structure in this study. Environments can be mapped onto a multidimensional environment space characterized by chemical and physical compositions. The large green circle represents an environment where adaptive mutants evolved, and the large pink circle is a distant environment. Around each base, a set of identical environmental perturbations (arrows) is applied, generating clusters of similar environments around distinct base environments. Top right: Schematic of fitnotype map for adaptive mutants near their home base environment. By measuring fitness in each of the green environments, one can infer how many fitnotypes matter for this set of mutants in their home environment. Here, only four of the possible 8 fitnotypes matter. Bottom right: When the mutants are moved to the distant base environment, and their fitness is measured in all pink environments (base and perturbations), there are two possibilities. Either more fitnotypes become important and the space appears higher-dimensional (left, pleiotropic expansion), or the set of fitnotypes that matters remains low-dimensional, but shifts (right, pleiotropic shift).
Predicting the effect of a #mutation on #fitness is hard. @oliviamghosh.bsky.social @petrovadmitri.bsky.social &co use fitness effects of adaptive yeast mutants to show that underlying genotype-phenotype-fitness maps are low-dimensional but context-dependent @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4dLy2Ez
🚨 We're hiring!
Postdoctoral positions in modeling of development and evolution at @stockholm-uni.bsky.social & @scilifelab.se
Focus: dynamical systems, time-series, phylogenetics, dimensionality reduction
📍 Stockholm
🕒 2+1 years
🔍 Details: su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...
Please share!
Our study on shape diversity in cnidarians is now published. The final version includes extensive new data that substantially extend the original bioRxiv preprint. Congrats to everyone who contributed to this work! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
@embl.org
An Empirical Bayes approach for the study of phenotypic evolution from high-dimensional data www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...
Multipanel figure illustrating the key components of the paper: 1) biophysical reservoir computing where a network of biophysically detailed excitatory and inhibitory neurons are randomly connected, receive a brief input, and produce a sustained spiking pattern in response, 2) an illustration of the task the biophysical reservoir computer is trained on: a simplified working memory task where the network must produce distinct fixed point attractors in response to different inputs.
Happy to share a new preprint from my PhD thesis! “A novel framework for expanding RNNs with biophysical detail to solve cognitive tasks” 🧠💻
📝 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
@jonescompneurolab.bsky.social
This is why we love #CalciumSignaling
Look how mechanical damage triggers long range Ca2+ waves in this plant !!
By @annalisabellandi.bsky.social, who is now around here ;)
Full www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @science.org #microscopy #cell #mechanobiology 🧪🔬
PhD student Ouyang Xuan is going to present our work using representation learning to map developmental flow in morphological landscape: Mon Mar 16 3:30pm 'Morphogenesis' @apsdsoft.bsky.social @aps-dbio.bsky.social
Check it out! #APSGlobalSummit2026
Evolutionary dynamics under phenotypic uncertainty www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...
This bridge can help improve estimation of parameters relevant to evolution and clarify how different sources of variation (genetic, environmental, etc.) shape phenotypic covariance.
A step toward a more integrated perspective on variation in evolution, combining #EvoDevo and #QuantitativeGenetics!
We connect two ways of thinking about phenotypic variation:
1️⃣ A dynamical systems view of development, where phenotypes emerge through generative processes;
2️⃣ Quantitative genetics, which describes variation statistically and is used to predict evolutionary change (and methods like GWAS).
How does development shape the variation evolution can act on?
In our new paper in @pnas.org , we bridge developmental dynamics and quantitative genetics, linking dynamical models of phenotype formation with the statistical parameters used to study evolutionary change
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
SciLifeLab Fellow and Stockholm University researcher Mafalda Ferreira and PhD student Maja Svedberg photograph museum specimens of ptarmigans, to understand how they change colors. Visible: the two researchers are photographed from behind, when Mafalda Ferreira is setting up the camera that is standing on a tripod in a white photo tent.
(1/2) To study #SeasonalAdaptation, @mafaldaferreira.bsky.social (SciLifeLab / @stockholm-uni.bsky.social) do #fieldwork in remote parts of the world, measure color of specimens in museum collections and work in the wet lab and do computational work. ↓ 🖥️🧬🧪🌍
youtu.be/llCvotNH5to
Lateral view of a preserved croaking gecko (Aristelliger) embryo
I’m so excited to announce our new paper in @journal-evo.bsky.social showing how embryology can help us determine ancestral character states in temporal niche
academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...
Collab w/ A Bauer, A Wegerski, @tonygamble.bsky.social, & A Rasys
#GeckoEvoDevo #Aristelliger
1/x
New Perspective form Rory Maizels & me: "Gene regulatory networks: from correlative models to causal explanations"
Gene regulatory networks are supposed to give us mechanistic explanations of development, so why are we drowning in 'hairballs' of statistical correlations?
rdcu.be/e7zx7
Curious about the origin of development during the transition to multicellularity?
A very belated preprint alert: bit.ly/4rr2mHU
Reproduction emerges from ecological interactions at the onset of multicellularity.
A short 🧵 with lots of videos...
🚨 We're hiring!
Postdoctoral positions in modeling of development and evolution at @stockholm-uni.bsky.social & @scilifelab.se
Focus: dynamical systems, time-series, phylogenetics, dimensionality reduction
📍 Stockholm
🕒 2+1 years
🔍 Details: su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...
Please share!
Men studying a dragon
ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIP IN HISTORY OF SCIENCE
My home department at Uppsala University is advertising an endowed professorship in the history of science. This is the best position in the field in Sweden, and probably in all of Scandinavia. Apply before 30 April 2026. www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...
How does development affect the evolutionary process?
Join our symposium at www.evodevoconference26.com
in Glasgow this June. We have a strong lineup of invited speakers, chaired by me and @milocco.bsky.social
Submit your abstract before Thursday! ⏰
This looks like it might be particularly interesting to folks in #hpbio e.g. interested in niche concepts or some of Lewontin's arguments. "Birds That Don't Exist: Niche Pre-Emption as a Constraint on Morphological Evolution in the Passeroidea" by Chia et al. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Can we simulate realistic evolutionary trajectories and “replay the tape of life”? In this work, we propose a flexible, generalizable deep learning framework for modeling how the entire protein sequence evolves over time while capturing complex interactions across sites. 1/n
doi.org/10.64898/202...
Collect #NeuralCrest Cells for #SingleCell #RNAseq from any vertebrate.
Our new paper, present an antibody-guided #FACS method to collect NCCs. No trans-genesis or in ovo manipulation required.
Demonstrated in wall #lizard #embryos using #microscopy, #RTqPCR and #scRNAseq.
doi.org/10.1111/ede....
Tom Van Dooren and I are organising a symposium on "Advances in theoretical evo-devo" at the next Euro Evo Devo meeting in Glasgow. Invited speakers: @n-martin.bsky.social, Nayely Vélez-Cruz, Thomas Hansen & Günter Wagner. Consider submitting an abstract, now open! www.evodevoconference26.com
From Pankaj’s Mehta group www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... “Our findings highlight the need for rigorous benchmarking and suggest that the biology of cell identity can be captured by simple linear representations of single cell gene expression data.” 🔥🔥🔥
Morphological innovation without gene co-option: the Drosophila sex comb evolved via changes in developmental tempo and energy metabolism www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02...
Existence of Causation without Correlation in Transcriptional Networks www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02...
