Still accepting applicants for a postdoc! Here's the evoldir link if you're interested:
evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/evoldi...

Please reach out! Share with a friend!

Opposition leader Péter Magyar at a rally.

Orbán's electoral crushing is a far greater achievement than most people outside Hungary realise.

He systemically consolidated power for 16 years, fixed the electoral map, abused govt power for political purposes & censored media.

The hurdles that Hungarians overcame for this moment were immense.

An Abbot's bagworm case made of silk and sticks

Adult female bagworm (left) and males (right).

The Mongue lab and Kawahara lab @dr-akito.bsky.social are hiring postdocs!!

If you're interested in the genomics of extreme sexual dimorphism and/or silk production, come work on bagworms with us!

See below for details:
sicb.org/jobs-and-fel...

I've been collecting since the 90s if you still need help 😅

The Mongue lab will be there!

📉 FY2026 is worse.

NIH has made 10,195 awards so far. NSF has made 613.

Six hundred thirteen.

Congress appropriated the money. The agencies are not spending it.

Grant freezes. NOFO collapse. Staff RIFs. Review cancellations. You can win the budget fight and still lose the funding war.

This is very very big. Like a big deal and massive cuts. These can’t even be seen as budgetary since you don’t get much savings in the context of trillions budget. They want the US out of R&D out of science research.

"Accidentally" is an odd word choice here. Like they wouldn't have used word phenology, but the effort to document seasonal biological phenomena is clearly intentional!

This is a single individual's diploid variants right? Recent pop size decrease = few rare alleles = a dearth of heterozygous variants would be the prediction, easy to check. Do you know the sex/are you using variants across the whole genome? The XY will naively be HOM calls in males in vcf world.

This has baffled me from the start. Grant money dries up and then industry pivots to what...selling Taq polymerase at the grocery store? So many lab supplies don't have any demand outside of academic research settings.

We played with it in our last lab meeting. The workflow to get the editable contact map is different enough that it's gonna be an adjustment, but the user interface and editing options are waaaay better than juicebox. I'm happy to send notes as we build out our pipeline!

GitHub - sanger-tol/PretextView: OpenGL Powered Pretext Contact Map Viewer OpenGL Powered Pretext Contact Map Viewer . Contribute to sanger-tol/PretextView development by creating an account on GitHub.

Until recently we've been using yahs + juicebox, but we're in the process of moving to the Tree of Life pretextview pipeline:
github.com/sanger-tol/P...

Sex chromosome stability and turnover across vertebrates: a developmental gene regulatory network perspective Sex chromosomes have evolved repeatedly across the Tree of Life, yet their evolutionary fates differ strikingly among lineages. In mammals and birds, highly degenerated Y/W chromosomes have remained s...

🚀 New lab preprint on #SexChromosomeTurnover is out on @arxiv.bsky.social

Huge congrats to lab thesis student for submitting his PhD @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social fellowship: big milestone and fingers crossed 🤞 and to all students for the submissions🤞🤞

More to come soon… 🐸🧬

arxiv.org/abs/2602.23624

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers.

The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).

No clue, but I have to know now!

Different sex determination systems in two closely related Eurasian minnow (Phoxinus) species - Heredity Heredity - Different sex determination systems in two closely related Eurasian minnow (Phoxinus) species

#paperalert #fishes Two closely related minnow ( #Phoxinus ) species share the same rivers — and sometimes even hybridise. But new research shows they've evolved completely different ways of determining sex. 🐟🧬 Lead author PhD student @thetemi.bsky.social @leibnizlib.bsky.social

Einstein - AI Homework Agent Einstein logs into Canvas and does your homework automatically. He has his own computer — he can watch lectures, read essays, write papers, and participate in discussions.

The push to make everything on Canvas accessible to screen readers also makes everything machine readable. Enabling this monstrosity. Which is why I put so little on Canvas anymore.

companion.ai/einstein

The Mongue lab at a conference last year.

This is the biggest project in my lab so far and wouldn't have been possible without help from lab members and collaborators @tliesenfelt.bsky.social @erincpow.bsky.social @kkbugtime.bsky.social
And my former postdoc adviser @laurarossevo.bsky.social for introducing me to scales. Thank you!!
7/7

For starters, there's not "one weird trick to ditch your X." There are multiple paths to sex determination turnover.

To read more about it, including what genes were gained or lost and how the genome looks in X chromosome scales, check out our preprint:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

6/n

Synteny across loss of X sex determination for paternal genome evolution. Colored bars next to species are chromosomes with individual colored lines tracking gene conservation between species. Where applicable, the X is the leftmost chromosome and highlighted with a dashed box.

The other loss, for PGE, is very different. Here, the X is basically intact across the transition and for several PGE groups. The biggest rearrangement only happens in true mealybugs, Pseudococcidae. In other words, the X chromosome seemed to be supplanted not lost. What does it all mean? 5/n

Synteny across loss of X sex determination for simultaneous hermaphroditism. Colored bars next to species are chromosomes with individual colored lines tracking gene conservation between species. Where applicable, the X is the leftmost chromosome and highlighted with a dashed box.

Next, we explored genomic changes across transitions. Starting with the hermaphrodites we found that the X fused to one of the 2 massive autosomes and gene order became more shuffled within and between chrs. Weirdly, the decrease in chromosome number precedes the turnover and may help enable it? 4/n

Maximum likelihood phylogeny of scale insects colored by sex determination system. Tips with a * are newly sequenced draft genomes, those with an illustration are new chromosome level assemblies.

First, we reconstructed a big phylogeny of scale insects based on ~1500 genes. We found X sex determination is ancestral (and some scales still use it!) and there have been
2 independent losses of the X, once in the hermaphrodites and again in the paternal genome eliminating clade. 3/n

We've known for 50+yrs that these alternative reproductive systems exist, but not really how they relate to the more mundane X sex chromosome system of other Hemiptera. So my lab sequenced 17 species of scale insects, getting five of those to chromosome level to explore. 2/n

An unknown scale insect from Costa Rica.

I'm back with another weird scale insect repro study. Previously I've talked about the simultaneous hermaphrodite cottony cushion scales and (functional) haplodiploidy paternal genome elimination in mealybugs. But how did these systems evolve? The Mongue lab has some answers! 1/n #genomics

U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies

The US government lost more than 10,000 STEM PhDs last year, according to an analysis by Science of newly released OPM data, with 11 departures for every hire. And many OPM calls "voluntary" separations were probably pushed. www.science.org/content/arti...

ICE agents killed a man and are disappearing the witnesses.

This line graph illustrates the percentage change in agency staff levels from the previous year for nine major U.S. federal scientific and health organizations between the fiscal years 2016 and 2025. The agencies tracked include the CDC, Department of Energy, EPA, FDA, NASA, NIH, NIST, NOAA, and NSF. For the majority of the timeline between 2016 and 2023, the agencies show relatively stable fluctuations, generally staying within a range of +5% to -5% change per year. However, there is a dramatic and uniform plummet starting in the 2024–25 period. Every agency depicted shows a sharp downward trajectory, with staffing losses ranging from approximately -15% to over -25%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows the most significant decline, dropping to roughly -26%, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows the least severe but still substantial drop at approximately -15%.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again.

www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Character displacement!

Molecular lab representation: Congratulations to One Battle After Another for all the Golden Globe wins, making it the highest profile movie in which people anxiously wait for the results of a gel electrophoresis run (...even if they skipped the PCR amplification).