So long TAD fad …

More evidence for TAD uncoupling from gene expression. I also like the earlier work of Furlong lab using the balancers to disrupt TADs with no correlation to gene expression changes - www.nature.com/articles/s41.... What do TADs do then?

Vision in flower foraging butterflies: from functional organization of the retina to encoding in the brain Summary: This Review discusses how processing in the retina and lamina in Papilio xuthus is the first element for its tetrachromatic color vision and chromatic motion vision, whereas higher-order neur...

🚨 The tetrachromatic color vision and motion vision of a swallowtail butterfly is explored in this wonderful review by Michiyo Kinoshita & Kentaro Arikawa 🦋🦋🦋

journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

Ancient environmental genome reveals a migratory brown bear individual in Early Holocene Scandinavia | PNAS After the last ice age, species migrated into a newly deglaciated Scandinavia. Brown bear recolonization is thought to have occurred from two direc...

Very excited to share our study of an ancient environmental genome extracted from lake sediment! It originates from a brown bear that lived around 9,600 years ago close to the last ice-sheet remains in northern Sweden, and has an unexpected mitochondrial haplogroup. 1/7 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

feels so good to steal money straight out of Intuit's pockets, love this for all of us

Tram stop in Tempe celebrating local Leps

Right on Phoenix, nice to see the Lep love

A star scientist showed that better genetics lessons could reduce racism. It was the death knell for his career Brian Donovan had persuaded high school teachers and education researchers that prejudice might be ended by changing how genetics is taught.

“We’ve lost out on the ability to continue to improve this work to make it more effective, and to explore how to apply it to other areas…There are a lot of different ways that genetics has been used to justify prejudice and…that human-made social categories interface with biological categories“🧪

What I love about academia: within a few constraints, you can just go and pursue what you love to do, what you find captivating and fascinating, or what needs fixing. What I hate about academia: the endless to do list resulting from this freedom.

MBE | Soft Selective Sweeps Predominate in the Yellow Fever Mosquito Aedes aegypti

Ketchum, Matute & Schrider investigated positive selection in Aedes aegypti populations from Africa and the Americas, revealing that soft sweeps are more common than hard sweeps, implying this species can respond quickly to environmental stressors.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag068

#evobio #molbio

New preprint! We sequenced 175 'Alalā (Hawaiian crow) genomes to understand why >50% of eggs fail to hatch in a species recovered from just 9 individuals. What we found was a both exciting and surprising. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Great to see Gabriele's paper out in MBE. I was really interested that we found large differences in ancestry maintained across opposite sides of a single valley (presumably with high gene flow). Strong divergent natural selection on cool/wet N-facing vs. hot/dry S-facing slopes.

Colour me better: fixing figures for colour blindness Images can be made more accessible by choosing hues, shapes and textures carefully.

If preparing figures please consider "colorblind friendly" approaches (www.nature.com/articles/d41...). I am missing the long-wave opsin, which manifests in strange ways: I can't discern red vs. black. This dichromacy is rare and severe, but ~300 million have more common forms addressed in link.

My main gripe with the alphafold example is how it shows you need decades and decades of high quality data, well structured, open and accessible to train a model -- and yet they always gloss over it and pretend it's just AI and magic. No, we need to continuously invest in real data and FAIR data.

For me, the most maddening thing is when AI boosters, or detractors, all seem to agree that AlphaFold is an unmitigated good and useful tool showing the power of AI.

I disagree. It's hit and miss. And the misses are REALLY expensive. Especially when the conversation suggests it is ALL HIT.

This. A thousand times this.

Large future genetic diversity losses are predicted from conservation indicators even with habitat protection | PNAS Genetic diversity within species underpins evolutionary adaptation and has recently been included as a target for protection in the United Nations’...

We are destroying species' habitats, leading to a mass extinction event.

This habitat destruction also reduces the genetic diversity _within_ species.

Our latest work develops quantitative models to predict how much genetic diversity has been and _will be_ lost.

🧬🧪🧵

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Genotype-fitness mapping of adaptive mutants reveals shifting low-dimensional structure across divergent environments Predicting the effect of a genetic mutation on fitness is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. This study uses fitness effects of a large collection of adaptive yeast mutants in multiple lab env...

Really excited that this major work from my PhD is finally published in @plosbiology.org ! In it, we were trying to tackle a fundamental question in evolution - how do genetic mutations map onto evolutionary fitness? (1/n)
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Why do schizophrenia GWAS signals look so flat across the genome?

In our recent preprint, we explored why psychiatric disorders — and, more broadly, brain-related traits involving the central nervous system — appear to have unusual genetic architectures.

🧵1/n

AI badly needs a dose of skepticism Some scientists are too eager to believe their own claims

"AI scientists are building ever-larger models, and then claiming that each model can solve even more than the previous one.

Then, model in hand, they go around looking around for problems to solve"

stevensalzberg.substack.com/p/ai-is-star...

UCLA's Most Decorated Ecologist Just Got Fired : Here's the sequence In January of 2025, at the ICTP ICTS winter school at NCBS, Priyanga Amarasekare offered to take me and a few other students out for my birthday. She didn't have to do that.

Insightful summary of an extraordinary person being extraordinarily fired: "you don't silence a woman of color who raised concerns about racism by silencing her...The fingerprints are distributed perfectly across the system." www.linkedin.com/pulse/uclas-...

It is normal and even okay for graduate students to need time and assistance to learn how to do their projects

We just published a review 🗞️😁:

‘The ecology of adaptive radiation’ revisited: A 25-year reflection

Dolph Schluter’s book inspired the interest in adaptive radiation, and we wanted to revisit it.

academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...

1/5 🧵

Special Issue: Functional and Adaptive Effects of Genomic Structural Variation See more information on the new Heredity special issue on functional and adaptive effects of genomic structural variation.

The special issue Functional and Adaptive Effects of Genomic Structural Variation is now out in Heredity. Many thanks to all contributors for their submissions, to the editorial team at @heredityjournal.bsky.social and to @ellenleffler.bsky.social, @mydennis.bsky.social & @gokcumenlab.bsky.social!

Our new experimental evolution study across 30+ locations using the plant Arabidopsis thaliana —— we direct "see" adaptation and extinction to different climates at the genetic as it happens!

Read it in Science
dx.doi.org/10.1126/scie...

@ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social
@hhmi-science.bsky.social

It’s always been a mystery to me how the genetic diversity and composition of the Scandinavian brown bear originated 🤔

Today, we publish a new paper that sheds new light on this, and a real-time example of how mito-nuclear discordances can evolve during severe bottlenecks:

doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

📊 Rethinking microbial #biogeography in lakes

No latitudinal diversity gradient in sediment bacteria.
Carbon resources #DOM regulate diversity, life-history strategies, networks.

➡️ Resource partitioning, not Red Queen dynamics

Molecular Ecology @molecology.bsky.social
🔗 doi.org/10.1111/mec....

First @molecology.bsky.social 's special issue in December (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/1365294x...), and now this! Inspiring to see so many talented scientists working at the intersection of evobio, genomics, and applied conservation. Great for your reading lists!

Sweden continues major investments in research and life science, with more KAW foundation funding for trainee positions in the Data-Driven Life Science Program, with total investment of 330 MEUR / 380 MUSD!

🎉🧪

Humans Had Dogs Before They Had Farming, Ancient DNA Confirms

Early dogs appear to be a huge hit around the campfire .. “Overall, the researchers found evidence of genetically similar Paleolithic dogs at five different archaeological sites that were associated with people from three different hunter-gatherer cultures.”
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/s...