❗We recall that our Call for Volunteer Mentors for Undergraduate Awardees at SMBE2026 is ongoing.

If you are interested in supporting the next generation of researchers, please contact Aya Takahashi (ayat@tmu.ac.jp) or Ravinder Kanda (rkanda@brookes.ac.uk).

#SMBE2026

lifestyle evolution in Rickettsiales: time will tell Rickettsiales is an alphaproteobacterial order. Traditionally, most if not all of its members were regarded as symbionts or pathogens of animals, including humans. This includes Wolbachia, one of t…

lifestyle evolution in rickettsiales: time will tell sishuowang2022.wordpress.com/2026/04/09/o...

a simplified evolutionary tree of eukaryotes with pictures of various microbes

New #ISEPpapers #preprint by @deemteam.bsky.social: Re-evaluating the eukaryotic Tree of Life with independent phylogenomic data www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#Protists #Microbes #Evolution #Eukaryotes #TreeOfLife #Phylogeny #Phylogenomics #Bioinformatics #Algae

Are you going to #SMBE2026 Copenhagen by train, or are you hesitating? Let's share experiences and give ideas to those who think to fly from Western or Central Europe with the hashtag #NoFlySMBE.
If you're coming from 🇨🇭, there are night trains from Zürich or Basel to Hamburg.
✅🚆
❌✈️

MBE Call for Papers on the Major Transitions of Life

MBE is excited to launch our newest Call for Papers on the Major Transitions of Life, covering all aspects of phylogenomic research.

🔗 academic.oup.com/mbe/pages/call-for-papers-on-the-major-transitions-of-life

Guest Editors:
Davide Pisani
Anja Spang

#evobio #molbio #phylogenetics

Dating Alphaproteobacteria evolution with eukaryotic fossils - Nature Communications Dating early bacterial evolution is challenging due to the limited bacterial fossil record. Here Wang and Luo use the close evolutionary relationship between Alphaproteobacteria and mitochondria to le...

sorry for shameless self promotion: testing hypotheses regarding the ancestral host/lifestyle of Rickettsiales using #molecularclock (Fig. 1) and #ancestral_state_reconstruction (fig. 2D-2E)

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

piqtree: a python package for seamless phylogenetic inference with IQ-TREE Abstract. piqtree (pronounced pie-cue-tree) is an easy to use, open-source Python package that provides Python script based control of IQ-TREE’s phylogenet

McArthur et al. present piqtree, an easy to use, open-source Python package that provides Python script based control of IQ-TREE’s phylogenetic inference engine.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag061

#evobio #molbio #compbio

Thx Gaurav! I think mixture subs model is not implemented there; if so it would be more fantastic to have those models in piqtree.

Evolution 2026 meeting logo. Clilp art of a globe and laptop showing a virtual presentation. Text: Society for the Study of Evolution Global Meeting Participation.

SSE offers free virtual #Evol2026 registration to all countries in our Global Membership Assistance program, including India, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and 152 countries and territories around the world. Request your free registration code today! www.evolutionsociety.org/index.php?mo...

fantastic! even more fantastically, can consider these subs models in #molecularclock dating. see a blog article "Late better than never: time to consider complex subs models in inferring div time" sishuowang2022.wordpress.com/2026/03/17/l...

GitHub - iqtree/iqtree3: IQ-TREE version 3: software for phylogenetics IQ-TREE version 3: software for phylogenetics. Contribute to iqtree/iqtree3 development by creating an account on GitHub.

The first release of #iqtree 3 since last may is available github.com/iqtree/iqtree3 @bqminh.bsky.social

I’m looking for a post doc (up to five years) interested in phylogenetics and earth systems - please spread the word!

great collaboration with andrew meade. special thx to @mariodosreis.bsky.social and @bqminh.bsky.social for suggestions, and Charley McCarthy for testing the tool

see also another fantastic, independent work IQ2MC @mariodosreis.bsky.social @bqminh.bsky.social ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v... the two studies collectively highlight the importance of more appropriate subs models for molecular clock dating

very happy to have this work published in mbe @molbioevol.bsky.social can now use phyloHessian to get a (hopefully) improved div time & subs rate estimate, particularly for deep-time or fast‑evolving lineages github.com/evolbeginner... #julialang #iqtree #mcmctree #molecularclock

Newick-formatted timetrees of the α-proteobacteria (Wang & Luo 2021) and bTOL (Wang & Luo 2025) are made available separately, such that no need to download the entire online datasets in case you r interested in only the timetree files. sishuowang2022.wordpress.com/resources/ #phylo #molecularclock

Inaugural Lecture: Professor Richard Mann, School of Mathematics Join us on 24 March for the upcoming Inaugural Lecture of Richard Mann, Professor of Mathematical Ecology and Evolution in the School of Mathematics.

Inviting anyone who is interested to come to my inaugural lecture, 'Why the Cambrian Explosion happened', on March 24 at the University of Leeds eps.leeds.ac.uk/faculty-engi...

lmca

“We are extremely proud of the manuscripts published in MBE. MBE is a highly respected journal within and beyond our immediate molecular evolutionary community. It remains so because of our vibrant and active volunteer community of reviewers and editors, whom we applaud for their willingness to support a society-owned, non-profit journal in an environment of ever-escalating for-profit journals.” Claudia Russo and Brandon Gaut MBE Editors-in-Chief

Intergeneric chromosomal transfer in yeast results in improved phenotypes and widespread transcriptional responses - Nature Communications Transferring genetic materials between distantly related yeasts, presents technical challenges but can yield industrially interesting phenotypes. Here the authors establish a method to transfer indivi...

Happy to share a recent publication to which I contributed as a corr. author:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
This work is in collaboration with Dr. Yao Yu at Fudan University, where the team managed to transfer S. cerevisiae chromosmes into K. marxianus, a species diverged from Sc ~114 mya. (1/4)

Tom Cavalier-Smith in Cornwall UK 23 August 2017, photo by Neal C-S

I am happy to share the unfinished but nevertheless fascinating autobiography of the late Thomas Cavalier-Smith, written in 2020, shortly before Tom passed away in 2021. I thank Ema Cavalier-Smith for sharing the text with me. I recently finished curating […]

[Original post on biologists.social]

Coming to #evol2026 this summer? The SSB Early Career Travel Funds competition is now live! Apply by February 27 for this years’ Tri-Society meeting.

More info:

www.systbio.org/early-career...

meetings.embo.org/event/26-mic... Announcing the 2026 EMBO course in Computational and Experimental Microbiomics, to be held at Bath. The course brings together experiments and bioinformatics to study host-microbe interactions and co-evolution. Register now, or at least by 11 May, if interested :)

Only one week left to register to MCEB 2026 in Crete! mceb2026.sciencesconf.org

Benchmarking of software for Bayesian sampling of divergence times using genomes

We have a new Bayesian sampler of divergence times that is smoking fast! Benchmarking by the exceptional @lauramulvey.bsky.social

Systematic Biology’s January 2026 issue (75.1) is out! It launches our 75th anniversary series, debuts the new Invited Review article category, features a Tillandsia Spotlight, along with a nice mix of empirical & methods papers. Check it out: academic.oup.com/sysbio/issue...

@systbiol.bsky.social

SMBE2026 Symposium 6 | Synthetic and systems biology approaches to dissecting the molecular mechanisms of evolution

SMBE2026 Symposium 6 | Synthetic and systems biology approaches to dissecting the molecular mechanisms of evolution

📨 Abstract submission
smbe2026.org/abstracts

📋 Programme details
smbe2026.org/programme

#SMBE2026

If you’re conducting research in the relevant area and want to share your work, we’d love to hear from you! Get in touch if you're interested in presenting or learning more.

Abstract deadline: 19th January 2026!

#MicrobialSymbiosis #CSEE2026 #Symbiosis #Parasitism #Mutualism

how to do +ASC (Ascertainment bias correction) manually under JC69 This blog article will show you how to calculate the phylogenetic logL under a subs. model given +ASC in a (semi-)manual way. So, what is +ASC? As shown at it refers to An ascertainment bias correc…

what is +ASC (ascertainment bias correction) and how to do it manually under JC69 #phylo sishuowang2022.wordpress.com/2026/01/03/h...

Bayesian Selection of Relaxed-Clock Models: Distinguishing between Independent and Autocorrelated Rates Abstract. In Bayesian molecular-clock dating of species divergences, rate models are used to construct the prior on the molecular evolutionary rates for br

Happy to share that my PhD paper published in Systematic Biology. My paper explores the #Asymptotictheory of Bayesian rate model selection and explore how misspecified calibrations can affect this. Also test rate model selection with large #Phylogenomes

Link below:
academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...