Delighted and grateful for this recognition from @sse-evolution.bsky.social. The Dobzhansky Prize is a special honor, and I'm thrilled to have been in the conversation this year. Big congrats to Wendy Valencia-Montoya!
GHIST logo
Congratulations to the winners of the 2025 Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament challenges!
Among the 9 challenges, we had five winners: @alwaysrong.bsky.social, @adaigle.bsky.social, @andrewhvaughn.bsky.social, @thymelicus.bsky.social, @rgollnisch.bsky.social
MBE | GHIST 2024: The First Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament
Community competitions help benchmark approaches in computational biology. Struck et al. now present GHIST 2024 - The First Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament, for the inference of evolutionary history from genome data.
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf257
#evobio #molbio #compbio #popgen
New research by
@tylervkent.bsky.social @samurscicop.bsky.social & D. Matute analysed 131 genomes of the globally invasive Aedes aegypti, and found high genomic resilience despite historical eradication attempts for this globally invasive vector.
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...
#genome #mosquitoes
Excited to share the first manuscript from my PhD in which we leveraged ultra-long Nanopore sequencing, D. melanogaster inbred lines, and a ton of manual validation to investigate the effects of long-read length on population-level structural variant (SV) calling accuracy! doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Excited to see the final version of this paper with @samurscicop.bsky.social and Daniel Matute out in @genomebiolevol.bsky.social!
We took a dive into the complicated demographic history of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes and its impact on the distribution of genetic diversity
doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...
Amid the chaos, it was great to share results from the first Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament at ProbGen25. Watch the talk to learn about the future of GHIST and @andrewhvaughn.bsky.social's nefarious metagaming of demographic inference. 😀 www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_dv...
Every day I wake up to new horrors and my Id demands blood but I have written this paper on pseudo-overdominance in polyploids instead www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
These results highlight a key challenge for population-genetic analyses in highly selfing species or low-recombination genomic regions. Check out the paper for a deeper dive into other potentially relevant factors like beneficial mutations, dominance coefficients, and population structure!
If HRI was the cause mis-inference, we’d expect it to be caused by the reduced levels of effective recombination in selfers. Indeed, when we ran simulations with lower recombination (but no selfing), we saw the same patterns of DFE mis-inference.
We hypothesized this mis-inference was caused by HRI, where linked deleterious mutations interact and reduce the efficacy of selection. The site frequency spectrum (SFS) had a U-shape at high selfing rates, a pattern often linked to HRI and not modeled by current DFE inference approaches.
In simulated highly selfing populations, the DFE was mis-inferred by two unique DFE inference methods—nearly neutral and strongly deleterious mutations were overestimated, while mildly deleterious ones were underestimated.
Excited to share my first PhD project with my mentor, @johriparul.bsky.social! We examine how Hill–Robertson interference (HRI) in highly selfing species biases estimates of the distribution of fitness effects of new mutations (DFE).
doi.org/10.1093/evol...
@journal-evo.bsky.social #popgen #evobio
Thrilled to have been part of the inaugural GHIST competition in population genetics inference! Big thanks to the organizers for a fun and challenging event. Congrats to Andrew Vaughn and Ekaterina Noskova for their impressive performance, I'm looking forward to reading about everyone's methods.