Epigenetic constraints and enhancer innovation link neuronal plasticity to evolutionary adaptation | PNAS How nervous systems balance the generation of robust neuron types with gene expression plasticity mechanisms and how these processes impact cell-ty...

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Epigenetic constraints and enhancer innovation link neuronal plasticity to evolutionary adaptation

www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

WAT
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The abstract submission deadline for EvoWorm 2026 is today! Don't forget to submit an abstract!! Share your exciting science at *the* best meeting!!!

evoworm.org

Are you ready for *the* meeting about the evolutionary biology of Caenorhabditis and other nematodes? The abstract deadline is Wednesday!

EvoWorm 2026 will be held at McMaster University from June 16–19

Abstract deadline: April 15

Registration deadline: June 1

Details can be found at evoworm.org

Optimal male fertility and fecundity in Caenorhabditis elegans requires Microprocessor and Argonaute gene function Abstract. Small RNA pathways play key roles in the regulation of gene expression in the germ line and in somatic cells. The germ line in Caenorhabditis ele

Optimal male fertility and fecundity in Caenorhabditis elegans requires Microprocessor and Argonaute gene function

academic.oup.com/g3journal/ad...

Caenorhabditis elegans populations shape their microbial environment

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Whole-organism spatial transcriptomics at single-cell resolution in C. elegans www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

Analysis of Nematode Ventral Nerve Cords Suggests Multiple Instances of Evolutionary Changes to Neuron Number

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Fig 1: Study design and transcript discovery pipeline showing Nanopore cDNA libraries from villous placenta (n=72 term births, 36 controls and 36 GDM-affected); comparison of annotated features between GENCODE v45 and lr-assembly showing 63.5% reduction in isoforms and 73.1% reduction in genes; transcript distribution by structural category (FSM, ISM, NIC, NNC, and other classes) for all and high-confidence isoforms; transcriptional breadth across 15 GTEx tissues and cell lines; isoforms detected at increasing expression thresholds with placenta shown as thick black line; and transcriptional complexity as mean isoforms per gene (±1 SD) with placenta maximum of 108..

🎉 It's published! Our placental long-read transcriptome is now in @natcomms.nature.com! Thank you to @arjunbhattac.bsky.social, @jonhuang.bsky.social, and @mikelove.bsky.social for collaborating on this first project of my postdoc @mdanderson.bsky.social. A recap 🧬🫄🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Complexity and Innovation in Carnivorous Plant Genomes"
by Victor A. Albert et al.

"Here, we review recent research that has uncovered some of the more interesting genomic oddities and specializations among carnivorous plants..."

FREE till May 26th at
authors.elsevier.com/a/1muZP_3rsx...

1/25 New paper out in PNAS! We show that the fitness costs of reproductive specialization, where somatic cells give up reproduction, scale inversely with organism size. Larger organisms can afford far more soma, removing a key barrier to multicellular complexity.

Rethinking mitochondrial heteroplasmy: selection, conflict and adaptation Abstract. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation is increasingly recognized for its role in shaping evolutionary changes at the species and population levels.

Rethinking mitochondrial heteroplasmy: selection, conflict and adaptation

royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

The two papers: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

and

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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/...

An overview of bacterial multicellular formations: biofilms, filaments, free-floating aggregates, motile collectives and fruiting bodies. For each form, we mention an analogous eukaryotic multicellular form (respectively animal epitelia, filaments in fungi, Volvox, Dictyostelium/social animals, Dictyostelium and other slime moulds)

How common is multicellularity in bacteria? And archaea?
And how does it evolve?

We wrote a short review "On the architecture and evolution of prokaryotic multicellularity".

Preprint link: bit.ly/4ta06Gq

Sharing and comments are much appreciated.
1/4

Reconsidering cytonuclear discordance in the genomic age Abstract. Historically, phylogenetic datasets had relatively few loci but were over-represented for cytoplasmic sequences (mitochondria and chloroplast) be

Reconsidering cytonuclear discordance in the genomic age

academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...

A question for biologists: we often talk about evolutionary novelty. What does “novelty” mean for you? What’s your favorite definition if any? Or just a rule of thumb for what is and isn’t novel.

Transcript diversity reflects deleterious RNA processing errors shaped by population size in metazoans Alternative transcription initiation, splicing and polyadenylation generate extensive transcript diversity in eukaryotes, but its evolutionary significance has been disputed. This study analyses 166 t...

Back in the noughties when I was an academic, my lab did quite a bit of work on (conserved) alternative transcripts. This study in @plosbiology.org presents compelling evidence that most alternative transcripts are deleterious noise journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Intraspecific variation in the duration of epigenetic inheritance in wild isolates of C. elegans Frejacques, Saglio, et al. demonstrate variation among C. elegans wild isolates in the multigenerational memory of an initial RNA interference trigger. Genetic polymorphisms and environmental variable...

Intraspecific variation in the duration of epigenetic inheritance in wild isolates of C. elegans

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Tissue-specific DNA Repair Strategies Underlie Apparent High Transposon Activity in the C. elegans Soma Abstract. Transposons are parasitic nucleic acids that threaten genome integrity in all organisms. DNA transposons mobilize via a cut-and-paste mechanism,

Tissue-specific DNA Repair Strategies Underlie Apparent High Transposon Activity in the C. elegans Soma

academic.oup.com/g3journal/ad...

Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.

What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.

Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

Here is the "effective payline" for each institute, estimated (by Claude) as the percentile where one can expect 80% probability of funding from a logistic regression fit. The effective payline has gone from a historic ~12% to 6% in 2025.

Two complementary articles from the lab of Anming Meng and Katie McDole discussing the history and biology of organizer in 🐟, 🐸, and 🐭. Even after more than 100 years since its discovery, major questions remain, especially for mammals.
doi.org/10.1016/j.cd...
doi.org/10.1016/j.cd...

Parasite defense covaries with reproductive timing, not with resistance

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating).

A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)

Intracellular buffering enables developmental robustness after genome doubling in C. elegans embryos Genome doubling challenges animal embryogenesis. Using single-cell phenotypic analyses, Yang et al. show that tetraploid C. elegans embryos preserve developmental fidelity and molecular homeostasis by...

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Intracellular buffering enables developmental robustness after genome doubling in C. elegans embryos

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

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).

New blog post:

"Higher orders need higher standards"

skewed.de/lab/posts/hi...

I discuss our current work disentangling misconceptions around "higher-order" networks: arxiv.org/abs/2602.16937

Explainer thread for the paper here: bsky.app/profile/tiag...

Repeated evolution of supergenes on an ancient social chromosome Lajmi et al. describe a novel supergene associated with social structure in desert ants. Surprisingly, this supergene evolved on an ancient chromosome that also evolved an analogous supergene in fire ...

📄 Repeated evolution of supergenes on an ancient social chromosome 🐜🧬

⬇️
www.cell.com/current-biol...

A symbiotic origin of the ribosome? Abstract. The origin of life is one of the great mysteries of science. Of the multiple unsolved problems, the origin of the translation system (the means b

A symbiotic origin of the ribosome?
#OriginsOfLife #scienceSky

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...