I am hiring a popgen postdoc!
Looking for a creative scientist to join us at USC to investigate recessive variation and complex traits in model or non-model species. The project is funded by a multi-year NIH grant, contract can be renewed.
Job add & details 👇🏽
usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-ange...
We’re hiring a Junior Specialist in the Calderon Lab. Great fit for someone thinking about grad school who wants hands-on experience in functional genomics (MPRA, single-cell), contribute to ongoing projects, and grow into more independent work over time. Apply by 4/24: aprecruit.ucsf.edu/JPF06010
SMBE Mid-Career Excellence Award - Matt Pennell
This year's SMBE Mid-Career Excellence Award goes to Matt Pennell, professor @cornelluniversity.bsky.social
Visit our website to learn more about the SMBE Faculty Awards
🔗 smbe.org/faculty-awards
#society
The old man and the CPU?
An absolutely beautiful line of work both scientifically and in terms of human impact.
Spread the word! UChicago BSD is currently searching for an instructional professor (open rank) to help develop and support graduate training in quantitative biology at UChicago. This is an Instructional Professor position (open rank). apply.interfolio.com/183517.
Thrilled to see this out. What started out as a chat several years back with @drfejzo.bsky.social about leveraging publicly available data on hyperemesis gravidarum GWAS turned into a wonderful collaboration with April Shu, @mvaudel.bsky.social, @xwww.bsky.social and many others!
rdcu.be/fdl9k
This profile of star science education researcher Brian Donovan, who worked to reform systematic teaching of "genetic essentialism" (which undergirds racism), is terrific.
Even better, his work itself: empirical studies of curriculum interventions that work. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
New from our group, led by Nick Collier:
Cool new work from my @gladstoneinst.bsky.social and @ucsanfrancisco.bsky.social on haplosufficient genes
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41929339/
Very proud to share our new work on General, orders-of-magnitude faster whole-genome analysis with genotype representation graphs (GRG). We topped ourselves in this one 🚀 and made GRG a practical foundation for biobank-scale population and statistical genetics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
General, orders-of-magnitude faster whole-genome analysis with genotype representation graphs www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...
Our team appeared in The Daily Californian news!
Discussing our experimental evolution in Science Magazine www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... and a recent paper on the threat of genetic diversity loss in PNAS doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Check it out:
www.dailycal.org/news/campus/...
Delighted to share our latest research from the 23andMe Research Team, just published in @nature.com !
We looked at data from >27,000 participants to uncover how human genetics influences weight loss efficacy and side effects of GLP-1 medications like semaglutide. A short thread 🧵👇
Brian and I were grad students together. He's a mensch, and the goons who torpedoed his funding and his livelihood are contemptible.
I hope this isn’t the end of Brian’s career but if there’s something people can do, it’s use his material in your classes (thankfully carried on by @robbeewedow.bsky.social and company)
I’m so glad someone covered this story. Brian is an amazing scholar and person who I’ve been blessed to be able to get to know, even a little. What happened to him is awful
Mother and young Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) at the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary, Way Kambas National Park, Lampung, Indonesia. Dicerorhinus was one of the 29 plant and animal species whose population-scale genomic data was used to calibrate the model. Stock photo.
Biodiversity includes genetic diversity within species. A framework for predicting changes in genetic diversity under realistic habitat change scenarios suggests that species have already lost up to 13% of nucleotide genetic diversity. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/s0R150YCr5K
Distilling the most confident mutation effect scores across different versions of the same protein language model results in a superior sequence-only variant effect predictor.
@vntranos.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Never seen a more compelling endorsement for submitting your work to GENETICS @genetics-gsa.bsky.social
Gonna be some rad science -- @mollyschumer.bsky.social keynote and a bunch of good talks and posters. And I'll personally pay the registration of anyone who wants to come (it's free).
Our paper is out! We compared introgression maps, both across populations and at the individual level. Some consistencies were observed across maps: A core set of genomic regions, lower background selection in introgressed regions, and some phenotypes were enriched across multiple maps. (1/3)
Meiosis faces a fundamental problem:
It must repair hundreds of DNA double-strand breaks while executing a transcriptional programme essential for gamete development.
But many of these breaks occur in genes.
So how are these two processes reconciled?
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Yes! That’s basically the gist. There’s some effect of the geometry of the habitat, and the spatial structure of how habitat is lost, but what you said is the right intuition.
It was a real pleasure to work on this with a fantastic team, with my co-leads Kristy Mualim and Clemens Weiß, extremely helpful contributions from Oliver Selmoni and Meixi Lin, and, of course, @mexpositoalonso.bsky.social.
There's a lot more in the paper (along with some fun (at least for me!) population genetics math in the appendix), so please do check it out:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Forecasts showing how genetic diversity will change in the short and medium terms. In the short term 0% to 14% of genetic diversity will be lost, but in the mid-term up to 20% will be lost.
We then forecasted how much genetic diversity will be lost across species given current estimates of habitat loss.
In the short term, we predict very little will be lost, but in the long term, species might lose up to 20% of their genetic diversity on average. This is WITHOUT FURTHER HABITAT LOSS!
Plots showing that within population fragments genetic diversity plummets following habitat fragmentation.
What is happening is that locally the species is actually becoming significantly _less_ genetically diverse, but the fragmentation disconnects parts of the species, which slowly diverge from each other.
The species-wide diversity masks the plummeting local diversity. Again, this is BAD.
Plots showing that genetic diversity increases following habitat fragmentation.
In these fragmentation scenarios, we actually see genetic diversity _increase_ in the long term.
This is super weird! How can destroying habitat result in increased genetic diversity?
Schematics showing species losing habitat in random fragments resulting in a "patchy" landscape.
Everything up to now has assumed that habitat is lost along one edge of the species range (as a rough model for the effects of climate change).
If instead we model the kinds of habitat fragmentation that result from land use changes, things get weird.