I also saw a queen yesterday! What are the chances

I don't like your government any more than you (same goes for my government). But I have to acknowledge that they may have accomplished something if the Iranian nuclear program is really done for.

PLEASE REPOST AND SHARE!

My intro biology course has an "Interview a Biologist" project where students connect with a wide range of biologists using cell/molecular tools.

If you are willing to speak with a student for ~30 minutes on Zoom, please fill out this form:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Last few days to apply for the Transcriptomics! Workshop, our 10th Haifa Winter Workshop in Bioinformatics, that will take place on 2-6/3/25. See attached for details.

Eyal, Martin, Daniel, and Maya

Registration: forms.gle/rGoe2usmDNCu...

🟠New #genome resources expand possibilities for #insect models
🟢Assembly quality varies in contiguity & completeness
🔵Technological advances support new models with high-quality #data
🟣Emerging models advance knowledge of insect #biology & #evolution www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Looking good!

Patterns of Positive Selection in Seven Ant Genomes Abstract. The evolution of ants is marked by remarkable adaptations that allowed the development of very complex social systems. To identify how ant-specif

Great study! Super interesting read. In the first genomic survey of positive selection in ants @julienroux.bsky.social and I showed that nuclear genes related to the mitochondria are especially enriched for positive selection compared to flies and bees:
academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

A renewed reminder to anyone applying for a PhD or postdoc position in a lab--indicate your interest in the email/cover letter by talking a bit about that lab's work and why it would be a good fit. I answer any query that includes this information but do not answer those that do not.

Depends on which field. Some are worse than others. It's all up to the community norms and enforcement by reviewers and editors.

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Thanks Brendan! Right! Everybody please check it in your favorite (hymenopteran) social insect!

Really? I was sure it is. Looks exactly like you!

This incredible result is the product of great work led by the super postdoc Aparna Lajmi with lots of contributions from the rest of the lab.

This means it's an ancient chromosome, at least 90 million years old. The discovery of the antiquity of the social chromosome opens the way for future studies in many other species.

We studied the genomic basis of polymorphism in social structure. We identified a "social chromosome" associated with colony structure in the desert ant Cataglyphis niger. This chromosome is homologous to the first social chromosome discovered in the fire ant Solenopsis invicta.

Here it is! Our best paper ever, by far. Have you ever wondered how complex traits have evolved repeatedly across the tree of life? May be we have some answers...
t.co/n0HoWi36T7

🤫 don't tell! it's a surprise!

:-) It's just my regular bus ride home. I wanted to hold a hard copy in my hand and flip through the pages and the beautiful figures. That's what we did in the olden days...

On the bus home holding a hard copy of the manuscript that is going to be the peak of my career. Everything else fades in comparison. Look out for the preprint any day now!

We’ve got a new phylogeny of the ants out as a preprint! It’s been an exciting collaboration with some awesome 🐜 people for the past few years, led by Marek Borowiec and @corriemoreau.bsky.social:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Dolichoderus - Alex Wild is a diverse genus of heavily-armored dolichoderine ants found worldwide. Colonies can be large and are often associated with honeydew-producing insects.

A gallery of Dolichoderus ants from around the world. These insects are incredibly diverse in form, quite heavily armored for their subfamily, and often ecologically dominant, with large colonies holding extensive territories.

Waspy people - welcome to BSKY!

The list of wasp people to follow is growing! Let me know if you want to be added! Recommend feeds to add too!

#WaspLove

go.bsky.app/3u5XkrS

Our controlled experiments show that the combination of enzyme choice and size selection (using a Bluepippin instrument) allows for optimizing yield and efficiency. Without accounting for this in advance, a suboptimal design can easily result in waste of 30% of sequencing effort.

Upload your genome and ddgRADer will suggest enzyme choices for the double-digest Restriction-site Associated DNA sequencing protocol (ddRAD-seq) to achieve a desired coverage of the genome, both in terms of number of loci and sequencing depth. The plot shows the predicted fragment size distribution

Optimizing ddRAD sequencing for population genomic studies with ddgRADer Double-digest Restriction-site Associated DNA sequencing (ddRADseq) is widely used to generate genomic data for non-model organisms in evolutionary and ecological studies. Along with affordable paire...

Finally a widely useful methodological contribution from our lab to the community. ddgRADer is a webtool (t.co/CpE5aGEbFD) for optimizing experimental design of population genomic studies. Check out the insights behind it in our Mol Ecol Res paper onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

That's incredible. I didn't think it was possible to do an RNAseq differential expression analysis without getting any false positives!

Great answer

Given the afflux of new science peeps here, and the lack of a similar increase of users at Mastodon, I'll post both here and there for the time being. Although I'm not convinced this place can escape the issues which affect any corporate owned social media pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/u...

Cover image of the book Organismic Animal Biology, showing illustrations os a range of animals linked by a phylogenetic tree on the background of their habitats.

ICYMI: My book "Organismic Animal Biology - An Evolutionary Approach" came out earlier this year.

If you are teaching an introductory zoology/organismic biology course, this is the textbook you've been waiting for.

global.oup.com/academic/cov...

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