A career in pursuit of the origin of species: celebrating Roger Butlin’s contributions to the advancement and growth of our scientific community:
@ruifaria.bsky.social @jonbridle.bsky.social @markravinet.bsky.social @rhondasnook.bsky.social @anjamwestram.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...
📣 2026 winner of the JMS Prize:
⭐ Wendy Valencia-Montoya
🐝🌼 "...a tiny insect pollinator must find its rare host plant. How do they find each other? What signals and sensory systems allow them to communicate? And once they meet, how do insects survive feeding on plants packed with neurotoxins..."
Our review on adaptive introgression in the context of climate adaptation is now published in Mol Ecol:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
In a nutshell: often invoked theoretically, rarely unambiguously demonstrated empirically!
Many thanks to everyone who shared feedback on earlier versions
That time of year again! If you'd like an example of job apps in academia or industry, here's a good resource. If you got a job in industry or academia in the last few years, please consider adding yours! github.com/RILAB/statem...
I'm hiring a postdoc (start date flexible) and a PhD student (for Fall 2027) to work in any area of computational phylogenetics! More info here:
mhibbins.github.io
I will be attending both PEQG and Evolution in June, so please reach out if you want to chat at these meetings!
New from our group, led by Nick Collier:
🌻 Next STRiVE seminar: Loren Rieseberg (UBC) explores SVs, adaptation & speciation—from wild sunflowers to 1000+ species!
🗓️ Apr 29 | 9am PDT / 6pm CEST
✉️ Zoom link via mailing list: groupes.renater.fr/sympa/subscr...
ℹ️ Info: structuralvariantsstn.github.io/about/
🚨MUSEUM JOB KLAXON🚨
Join us to work with one of the country's best natural history collections at @zoologymuseum.bsky.social!
We're recruiting for a new **Assistant Conservator** to help us with a major moves project. IS IT YOU?
www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/assista...
#MuseumJob #MuseumJobs
Wildlife trade drives animal-to-human pathogen transmission over 40 years
New in @science.org ‼️ In the most comprehensive study to date, we show that wildlife trade is driving animal-to-human zoonotic spillover at a planetary scale, with +1 spillover per host every 10 years. Live animal markets and illegal trade pose even greater risks. 🔓 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Read our perspective piece on a brilliant new piece of work out in @pnas.org studying public goods in an insect. Congratulations to the team! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... @caritalindstedt.bsky.social @stuwest.bsky.social
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...
A model for background selection in non-equilibrium populations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02....
Headshot of Wendy Valencia-Montoya. Text: Wendy Valencia-Montoya, 2026 Society for the Study of Evolution Dobzhansky Prize.
Congratulations to this year’s Dobzhansky Prize recipient, Dr. Wendy Valencia-Montoya! She will give the Dobzhansky Prize talk at #Evol2026 in Cleveland, OH in June. Learn more about her work: www.evolutionsociety.org/news/display...
@wendyssae.bsky.social
My PhD paper on my beloved cycads and beetles on the cover of Science!!!
Check out how we studied thermal infrared as a pollination signal, from molecular mechanisms to the wonders of behavior...
science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Flyer of the course on "Introduction to Biodiversity Genomics". All information are also here: https://biodiversitygenomicslatam.weebly.com/
In July, we will teach the 3rd biodiversity genomics course in Latin America, this time in Bogotá, following the COLEVOL meeting. We invite applications from students, postdocs and PIs from Latin America interested in learning how to analyse genomic data. biodiversitygenomicslatam.weebly.com
A young woman wearing a museum t-shirt sits at a table and helps children stood around her with a craft activity at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Applications are now OPEN for our Museum Experience Internship.
Sitting your A-levels/ equivalent and looking for a paid summer job? This unique role gives you the opportunity to experience a range of museum jobs @maacambridge.bsky.social.
➡️ www.museums.cam.ac.uk/new-internships
🗓️ 8am, 11 May 2026
82% of Britain’s electricity is currently zero carbon.
This is an incredible achievement of which we should be rightly proud and motivated to go further, faster.
Instead, we’ve got fossil fuelled politicians telling us we should be focusing on 93% depleted North Sea oil & gas.
The global geography of plant invasion risk under future climate and land-use changes | Nature Ecology & Evolution share.google/qBIokfLa4Dm8...
We have two paid internships available in our group starting this summer, suitable for master's / pre-PhD students:
- Protein structure search
- Promoter variation
For full details and how to apply see: www.bacpop.org/jobs/
Happy to share the final version of @oliviamghosh.bsky.social's paper on inferring low dimensional phenotype-fitness maps from high-throughput fitness measurements across environments. Fun collaboration with @oliviamghosh.bsky.social, @grantkinsler.bsky.social, & @petrovadmitri.bsky.social
🧬 Funded GTA PhD in my lab at UCL @ucllifesciences.bsky.social !
Looking for a motivated student to work on how mismatches between mitochondrial & nuclear genomes shape health, ageing & evolution.
Experimental (Drosophila) | Computational genomics
The project is flexible & shaped around you.
Hi all. I am very excited that after 6 years I finally got my phylogenetic comparative methods book and online exercises online. Feel free to use and share. The book is here: nhcooper123.github.io/pcm-primer/. Note that it is not finished, we had to abandon it before the sunk costs fallacy broke us
PREPRINT ALERT!
Determinants of chromosomal rearrangements in holocentric Leptidea butterflies
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Massive #chromosome reshuffling in Leptidea #butterflies reveals how satellite DNA, rDNA, and duplications—not #transposons, shape the architecture of #genomeevolution.
The photo shows the cover of the nature journal, displaying a colorful moth sitting on moss. The caption says: Heat Sensitive. Tropical insects show limited ability to cope with a warming world.
Really happy that a moth made it to the cover of @nature.com! Thanks to my co-author Gunnar Brehm for this great photo 📸
Find our study on thermal limits in this week's issue:
www.nature.com/nature/volum...
@ecoresearchzoo3.bsky.social
@biologie-uniwue.bsky.social
@uni-wuerzburg.de
This graph shows exponentially increasing publications for the term genomic offsets from 2015 to 2024
Special Feature in AmNat @asn-amnat.bsky.social just out on Genomic Forecasting. "Collectively, the articles underscore both the promise and the limitations of genomic forecasting while [showing] predictive performance is context dependent" 🧬🧪👨🔬🖥️🌲🐋🌿 www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
A map of anatolia, indicating the spatial distribution of yellow and white bees.
Figure 1 from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13596-2
I've just had a jaw-to-the-floor moment with this new paper from the Hines lab. They describe a yellow-white switch in bees, which maps to the same TF as the yellow-white switch in Colias butterflies, previously described by the @chriswheat.bsky.social lab. journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...
The first release of #iqtree 3 since last may is available github.com/iqtree/iqtree3 @bqminh.bsky.social
Fig. 1. (From Alves et al. 2019) Rabbit origins and sampling locations. Historical (circles) and modern (triangles) sampling locations. Dates in red inside the maps show the date of the first myxomatosis outbreak in the respective countries. Orange dashed arrows and dates reflect historical and archaeological records of the colonization of European rabbits from France to the United Kingdom and Australia.
#RIP European rabbit 🐰 When myxoma virus devastated rabbit populations in Australia, UK & France in the 1950s, survivors in all three places independently evolved resistance driven by changes in the same immune genes.
Evolution finding the same solution 3X! #2026MMM
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
How biological invasions are silently remodelling ecosystems:
our paper in @plosbiology.org about the extension of the #EICAT impact classification of biological invasions has now an outreach piece!
Read the (shorter and easier) version of the story here:
theconversation.com/how-biologic...
