Evolutionary diversification of Lepidopteran larval appendages. Left: Representative morphological diversity among Lepidopteran caterpillars. Phylogenetic relationships are indicated by the cladogram and family names for each representative species are indicated. Bombyx belongs to the Bombicidae (highlighted in red). Right: Representative caudal horn diversity among species in the Bombycinae sub-family. Shown are the posterior larval segments for each species; the cladogram depicts their phylogenetic relationships.

Closely related species often exhibit distinct morphologies. Kenta Tomihara @pinharanda.bsky.social Takashi Kiuchi @pandolfatto.bsky.social &co uncover the #genetic basis of caudal horn size differences between the #SilkMoth and its wild relative @plosbiology.org 🧪 #evolution plos.io/4b3kwdR

What sets the mutation rate of a cell type in an animal species? Germline mutation rates per generation are strikingly similar across animals, despite vast differences in life histories. Analogously, in at least one somatic cell type, mutation rates at the end of l...

Happy to highlight an essay I wrote together with @marcdemanuel.bsky.social,
@natanaels.bsky.social and Anastasia Stolyarova, trying to think through what sets the mutation rate of a cell type in an animal species: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/n

Join your local protest on April 19th. Spread the word.

Flyer with images of blossoming flowers, accompanied by text: 4/19 New York Fights Back Protect Migrants Protect Our Planet Date: Saturday, April 19 Time: 12pm Location: Bryant Park

Flyer with images of blossoming flowers, accompanied by text: April 19, 12pm Saturday Before Earth Day March for Migrants & Protect the Planet! New York Fights Back No broligarchs! No kings! Put people over profits!

Flyer with images of blossoming flowers, a large butterfly, and a group of smaller butterflies in the distance, accompanied by text: Declaration of Interdependence

Flyer with images of blossoming flowers, accompanied by text: Our fates are intertwined — when ICE attacks migrants, when polluters poison neighborhoods, when billionaires cut our jobs, they attack us all. This Earth Day weekend, we declare our interdependence and fight back as one.

NYC, it’s time to take to the streets again.

We’re joining over 40 cosponsors to protest authoritarianism, and march for a planet where we place people over profit.

📅 Saturday, April 19
⏰ 12pm
📍 Bryant Park

We’ll see you in the streets.

1. For the past thirty years I've had the best job in the world.


I've had the opportunity to follow my curiosity; explore the workings of nature and society; mentor students and junior colleagues in the same process; and teach generations of students about it all.

📢 Institut Jacques Monod Seminar

📅 February 14th
📍 Institut Jacques Monod

Next Friday, @pandolfatto.bsky.social , will give the IJM Seminar "The evolution of toxin-resistant Na+,K+-ATPases: new insights from frogs and fireflies"

➡️ https://buff.ly/40wHF1R

The distribution of highly deleterious variants across human ancestry groups A major focus of human genetics is to map severe disease mutations. Increasingly that goal is understood as requiring huge numbers of people to be sequenced from every broadly-defined genetic ancestry...

“The distribution of highly deleterious variants across human ancestry groups”. Preprint with Anastasia Stolyarova and @gcbias.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Admixture mapping reveals evidence for multiple mitonuclear incompatibilities in swordtail fish hybrids How barriers to gene flow arise between closely related species is one of the oldest questions in evolutionary biology. Classic models in evolutionary biology predict that negative epistatic interacti...

Although it feels bizarre to be posting about research with what has been going on in the US this week, I want to highlight new work from graduate student @nemovrobles.bsky.social whose first-first author paper on mitonuclear incompatibilities in swordtails just posted on bioRxiv. shorturl.at/gC71V

A naturally occurring mitochondrial genome variant confers broad protection from infection in Drosophila Author summary The strength of immune response and the disease symptoms vary among individuals even when exposed to the same pathogen. Much of this variation is due to the genes directly involved in a...

"We describe a #mtDNA variant that confers protection against variety of pathogens in #Drosophila. This protection was at least partially caused by enhanced cell-mediated innate #immunity, including higher numbers of immune cells prior to and during infection."

journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...

Current Biology by Cell Press on LinkedIn: Carotenoid color ornaments play important roles in social signaling and… Carotenoid color ornaments play important roles in social signaling and species recognition. Hooper et al. show that bill-color variation in long-tailed…

www.linkedin.com/posts/curren...

This year I always had my camera and a small photo box to hand when I was gardening. My children are always finding caterpillars outside, and I wanted to document that a bit this year. With the exception of the garden tiger moth (Arctia caja), they all came from my garden.

Want to perform HIGH EFFICIENCY Homology Directed Repair in Drosophila spp? Try Atalanta plasmids. About 10X higher efficiency than other methods!
Tag or delete genes, invert chromosome regions, make scarless site-specific modifications. All with easy cloning.
This paper is proudly bioRxiv only!

Banner for job offers

📣 Two ERC-funded positions are available in the lab! If you are interested in exploring the mechanisms underlying mutation, we’d love to hear from you.

PhD: shorturl.at/Oc04N
Postdoc: shorturl.at/1ShHB

RPs and shares would be greatly appreciated!
🧪🧬🖥️ #ScienceJobs #PostdocJobs

Releases · cooplab/popgen-notes Population genetics notes. Contribute to cooplab/popgen-notes development by creating an account on GitHub.

Just posting this to #popgen
Here's a link to my notes on population & quantitative genetics:
github.com/cooplab/popg...
Hoping to extend it more after the winter holidays, as I'm just finishing up teaching the undergrad version of class.

Please share widely: The 2025 Speciation Gordon Research Conference (March 2-7 2025) is now open for registration to anyone. If you wish to attend, apply here:
www.grc.org/speciation-c...
Attendees can present posters, and there are a couple open talk slots to be filled from poster abstracts.

A really nice News and Views about our paper by @tollkuhn.bsky.social 🙏🏽
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Hi Nathan, I couldn't get the biorxiv link to work

How do animals know when it’s their turn to communicate during a conversation?
In our latest preprint, we study the behavior and neurobiology of aggressive visual turn-taking of Siamese fighting (betta) fish to find out.
Work lead by Claire Everett
🧵 1/8
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Nice write up in Science Magazine about our ivory lncRNA color patterning preprints! Way to go @hwkmthcrspr.bsky.social, @lucalivraghi.bsky.social, and Tian Shen!
www.science.org/content/arti...

Excited to share a new pre-print from our lab that demonstrates surprisingly repeatable genome evolution in replicated Xiphophorus hybrid populations! Led by former postdoc Quinn Langdon with substantial contributions from Jeff Groh from @gcbias.bsky.social's lab: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hey don't forget that both World Central Kitchen (wck.org) and Doctors Without Borders (msf.org) are on the ground in Gaza helping out.

And they can use your help too.

Zach Baker's paper modeling the rapid evolution of PRDM9 is now out in eLife: elifesciences.org/articles/83769

This is me trying out Blusky! I am interested in #viruses #genomes #Drosophila #evolution and #popgen.

Here is a pretty picture of some flies from the UK, as an attention-grabber (visit obbard.bio.ed.ac.uk/photos.html for more!)