Reposting this old thread on the "Pervasive findings of directional selection" from ancient DNA. While the authors extended their results in various ways, I think many of these points still stand.

The 16th DrosEU Meeting kicks off this Monday, April 13! 🧬

A great scientific program and discussions await: droseusuz.sciencesconf.org

#DrosEU2026 @droseu.bsky.social

With support from @occitanie.bsky.social, @umontpellier.bsky.social, GIS Fruit, IGH, GenoPolys, and @sfgenetique.bsky.social

🪰 🧬16th #DrosEU2026 Workshop & Satellite #DrosophilaSuzukii Meeting Conference will take place 13–17 April 2026 in #Montpellier, France 🇫🇷.

We look forward to connecting with colleagues across Europe to discuss new research in #Drosophila #genomics #evolution & #CitizenScience +info 👉 droseu.net

“Looking is not the same as seeing, after all, and this may be why some of us may stumble upon discoveries in data that others have already analyzed.”

#stats #statistics #DataExploration

I think this is our lab's first paper in a proper ecology journal. We are now card carrying ecologists!

couverture du livre introduction à la statistique bayésienne avec R

📘 Nouveau livre !

Introduction à la statistique bayésienne avec le logiciel R

Découvrez pas à pas la statistique bayésienne et sa mise en œuvre dans R : théorème de Bayes, MCMC, priors, régression, GLM/GLMM et comparaison/validation de modèles.

Aux éditions Quae 🙏

📷 Crédit photo : Yann Raulet

Escritor António Lobo Antunes morre aos 83 anos O escritor António Lobo Antunes, um dos maiores nomes da literatura portuguesa desde a segunda metade do século XX, morreu hoje aos 83 anos.

Médecin de formation, António Lobo Antunes avait vécu de près les horreurs de la guerre coloniale en Angola.
Il en tire un livre coup de poing : le cul de judas.
Suivront des dizaines d’autres ouvrages décortiquant le Portugal.
Il décède à l’âge de 83 ans.

www.lusa.pt/article/4669...

Phenotypic and Genomic Evidence of Adaptive Tracking in Thermal Tolerance of Wild Populations of an Invasive Drosophila. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02...

poolfstat: Computing f-Statistics and Building Admixture Graphs Based on Allele Count or Pool-Seq Read Count Data Functions for the computation of F-, f- and D-statistics (e.g., Fst, hierarchical F-statistics, Patterson's F2, F3, F3*, F4 and D parameters) in population genomics studies from allele count or Pool-S...

For those interested, a new version (v3.1.0) of poolfstat is now on CRAN, including new functions and updates, new stats (Fh, Fd, FdM) implemented in sliding.windows.fstat; and a revised vignette.
[cran.r-project.org/web/packages/poolfstat/i...

Time-calibrated phylogeny of the family Drosophilidae showing major species groups, surrounded by representative adult flies that highlight the remarkable morphological diversity of this model insect group. The composite image was created using Microsoft PowerPoint. Fly photographs were taken by Darren J. Obbard and are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License with permission.

The #fly community aims to achieve a comprehensive genomic study of the Drosophilidae family. @pankajd.bsky.social @bernardkim.bsky.social @petrovadmitri.bsky.social @darrenobbard.bsky.social present a comparative gene annotation for 301 #Drosophilidae species @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4c3pyrI

Michel Portal est mort. Il avait 90 ans. Avec lui disparaît l’un des musiciens français les plus singuliers de ces cinquante dernières années, un artiste qui n’a jamais accepté de choisir entre Mozart et Charlie Parker. Entretien de 2015 avec ce musicien inclassable https://l.franceculture.fr/uXP

Very nice work led @drghawkes.bsky.social,
showing convergence between rare and common genetic
associations, using whole-genome sequencing data to evaluate the
contribution of rare non-coding variants for commonly studied anthropometric traits 🧪🧬
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

No bull: This Austrian cow has learned to use tools.

Learn more: https://scim.ag/3LYTXNd

Ancestral sequence reconstruction using generative models www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01...

A stone sculpture displayed in a museum gallery, carved from rough brown rock.The figure is front-facing and stylized, with a rounded top, deeply incised facial features, and symmetrical patterns resembling eyes, nose, hands, and legs. Lines on the cheeks can be seen, as well as a pendant and a belt.. The surface is textured and weathered.

For #StandingStoneSunday a #Neolithic human-shaped stela with a necklace and a belt, found in La Serre, Aveyron (#France). The lines on the cheeks are interpreted as facial #tattoos or scars. Dating 3000-2500 BC. In the late neolithic period several cultures living....🧵 1/2

🏺 #archaeology

📷 me

MBE | SLiM 5: Eco-evolutionary Simulations Across Multiple Chromosomes and Full Genomes

Haller, Ralph & Messer present SLiM 5, a major extension of the SLiM simulation framework for simulating multiple chromosomes, enabling a heightened level of realism for full-genome simulations.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf313

#evobio #molbio #compbio

New paper out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We identify regulatory variants shaping embryonic heat tolerance in Drosophila, linking lab selection to clinal and seasonal patterns in wild populations. Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Now published in gigascience: academic.oup.com/gigascience/.... Key messages: SVs are highly enriched in low-complexity/tandem-repeat regions and are harder to call. They behave differently from transposon insertions. Always stratify if you study SVs.

Now published in Algorithms for Molecular Biology: link.springer.com/article/10.1.... Key message: a tiny CNN model with 7k parameters can capture main splice signals across vertebrates+insect and halves the minimap2 & miniprot junction error rate. I always use this new feature now.

“The era of the business idiot” Au printemps dernier, Ed Zitron publiait un texte passionnant, et certes, un peu long, The Era Of The Business Idiot, que j’ai découvert seulement au début des fêtes (désolé). Il ne se contente pas de...

"The era of the business idiot" freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/87139

What’s True About the Evolution of Men’s Greater Average Height? Why men are taller than women may have nothing to do with testosterone—or sexual selection.

this is how you science: "What’s True About the Evolution of Men’s Greater Average Height?- Why men are taller than women may have nothing to do with testosterone—or sexual selection." from @dunsworth.bsky.social and @prosocialworld.bsky.social www.prosocial.world/posts/whats-...

A nice opinion paper (doi.org/10.1016/j.pb... ) from @anneroulin.bsky.social that highlights the need for caution when generalizing about the importance of TEs in local plant adaptation.
#TEsky #transposon

Now TWO great new papers on why frequencies of disease genes rarely match expectations

Here was the first: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Causal modelling of gene effects from regulators to programs to traits - Nature Approaches combining genetic association and Perturb-seq data that link genetic variants to functional programs to traits are described.

GWAS has been an incredible discovery tool for human genetics: it regularly identifies *causal* links from 1000s of SNPs to any given trait. But mechanistic interpretation is usually difficult.

Our latest work on causal models for this is out yesterday:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A short🧵:

RegEvol: detection of directional selection in regulatory sequences through phenotypic predictions and phenotype-to-fitness functions www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11....

Excited to share our latest preprint!
@mheuertz.bsky.social & I just completed a review covering methods and empirical studies on adaptive introgression in a climate context.
We likely missed a few refs & ideas, so your feedback is highly welcome (ideally by email)!
Preprint➡️ doi.org/10.32942/X2B...

A shorthair domestic cat gazes upward.

The domestic cat may be a far more recent arrival to Europe than previously thought, a new Science study. finds. The results offer new insight into one of humanity’s most enigmatic animal companions and identify North Africa as the cradle of the modern housecat.

Learn more: https://scim.ag/44kov1S

GitHub - alanrogers/popgen: A course on population genetics A course on population genetics. Contribute to alanrogers/popgen development by creating an account on GitHub.

I taught (and co-taught) a course on human population genetics from 2000-2024. Having retired, I'm now making all the course materials public: github.com/alanrogers/p... #popgen #evbio

We set out to investigate polygenic footprints of altitude adaptation in a moth species, but instead we uncovered a major selective sweep at genes often associated with insecticide resistance @prrnhd.bsky.social @schifanoalexandre.bsky.social @mgda76.bsky.social @cbgpmontpellier.bsky.social

Helixer: ab initio prediction of primary eukaryotic gene models combining deep learning and a hidden Markov model - Nature Methods By leveraging both deep learning and hidden Markov models, Helixer achieves broad taxonomic coverage for ab initio gene annotation of eukaryotic genomes from fungi, plants, vertebrates and invertebrat...

An efficient, accessible solution for #genome annotation in both research and applied settings www.nature.com/articles/s41...