We're about halfway through the submission period! We seek molecular evolution themed designs for a JME T-shirt. The winner will receive a FREE T-shirt featuring their design! Submit your design here by March 31st: tinyurl.com/ypk76t6z
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Are you a Drosophila researcher & member of @genetics-gsa.bsky.social (at any level of training)?
Please vote in the Flyboard elections (we have an amazing slate of candidates) before Feb 20, 2026. Please check your email or go to this website to vote: genetics-gsa.org/2026-fly-boa...
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We've already had some awesome submissions! Reminder to start working on your art and/or caption for our T-shirt design contest, where you can win a free shirt and have your design immortalized and worn by molecular evolution enthusiasts the world over! Due March 31! tinyurl.com/ypk76t6z
Love molecular evolution, design, and/or t-shirts? JME wants your help! We seek molecular evolution themed designs for a JME T-shirt. The winner will receive a FREE T-shirt featuring their design! Submit your design here by March 31st: tinyurl.com/ypk76t6z
Please RT!
We are excited to announce the winners of the 2025 Zuckerkandl Prize! Read the announcement here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Congratulations to our winners, Chun Wu, Nicholas Paradis, and Khushi Jain, from
@rowanuniversity.bsky.social !
Exciting news: our Quest for Orthologs special issue is now online, and all articles are currently freely available! Check it out here: link.springer.com/collections/... . Congrats to all of the authors!
Awesome team work with Nikolai, Ali, Felix, Stefano, Silvia, Erik Sonnhammer, @tonigabaldon.bsky.social @dessimoz.bsky.social Claire McWhite, Paul Thomas, Aida Ouangraoua, Edward Braun, Dannie Durand
Special thanks to @irenejulca.bsky.social Natasha Glover, reviewers & editors at @jmolev.bsky.social
🚨 We are hiring!
🧬 PhD Position – Genomic Architecture & Evolution
Join our team at UAB (Barcelona) in an international project
🔬 4-year FPI contract
🎓 Biology/Genetics background + Master’s + English
📅 Apply by Sept 30, 2025
📧 aurora.ruizherrera@uab.cat
🔗 grupsderecerca.uab.cat/evolgenom
Thanks @jmolev.bsky.social !! For more on our science, please follow us here at @evodevogenomeub.bsky.social
Erich and Marie travelled to Barcelona for #ESEB2025. Erich gave two talks: one exploring de novo and random proteins, and another discussing gene family losses in slave-maker ants. Marie presented her work on neORF emergence in Drosophila at Symposium 29, organised by @gevol.bsky.social. 🧬🪰🐜
Then came his scientific talk on evidence for different models of structural and functional divergence of paralogs following duplication, using salmon, whose extra whole genome duplication makes them a great choice of model system.
Our EIC David Liberles kicks off the meeting with a reminder of our journal's storied history - some of the many seminal papers published here. #JME2025
My personal favorite: Felsenstein 1981: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Overview and program can be found here: www.mncn.csic.es/en/investiga... #JME2025
Part two of our Spanish tour begins today, with the kickoff of our 2025 European meeting in Madrid! Follow here for coverage. #JME2025
Photo of the final slide of J Mappes's plenary at ESEB Text on the slide: Take-home Natural history matters Ecological reality is complex Fresh ideas matter Be ready to reject your favourite hypothesis Science moves forward when we keep both our curiosity and our humility
Final words of the last #ESEB2025 plenary by @jmappes.bsky.social:
"Science moves forward when we keep both our curiosity and our humility"
@criscanestro.bsky.social gives a lovely, thoughtful talk on this theme, on a tunicate species with very a scrambled genome; then reflects on what the patterns of scrambling can tell us about the underlying regulatory architecture. #eseb2025
They also made new centromeres out of their local TEs. Genomes totally blown apart and stitched back together. Amazing.
Great to see @vargaschavezc.bsky.social give a talk on this in person. Stunning findings on the origin of non-marine annelids, whose genomes are utterly scrambled: a statistically random distribution of ancestral linkage groups around the genome. #eseb2025
Common theme this year is structural genome rearrangements coinciding with ecological or lifestyle changes.
@NGuiglielmoni
contributes high rates of rearrangements in cryptobiotic nematodes, in extreme environments, compared to close non-crytobiotic outgroups. #eseb2025
Great symposium on Craniofacial Evolution in Vertebrates at #ESEB2025 kicked off with fantastic talk by @grumpydrfabre.bsky.social on the metamorphic blueprint,how life cycle type shapes salamander skulls. Is there an advantage of complex life cycle to create novel morphologies?
@r3rt0.bsky.social
The wild part: they find a facultative endosymbiont in aphids that protects against parasitoid wasps - but only because the bug itself has a phage that contributes the eukaryotic toxin. There's a bump in the log, and on the bump there's a frog, and....
Mind-boggling talk from Lee Henry on facultative endosymbiosis. Pitches as essentially a form of HGT - a source of adaptives genes that populations can pass around to deal as needed w/ common environmental challenges. Just another organism instead of only DNA. #ESEB2025
Must either be specifically transferred or specifically preserved while the rest of the genome is eliminated. Several histones/histone modifiers on the chromosome; hypothesizes that these are to mark it for special treatment. Cool!
#eseb2025 Hanne Griem-Krey finds accessory chromosome (AC) in a fungal insect pathogen that increases infectivity and can be horizontally transferred to other strains - solo, without the rest of the genome.
#ESEB2025 Several talks on mysterious germline-restricted chromosomes, which are eliminated from somatic tissue during development. In fungus gnats, @chodson.bsky.social finds that they look like they're derived from a hybridization event.
It seems to be targeting a neural "scramblase," which regulates lipid movement in cell membranes. Can't wait for the neural mechanism here.
A secreted peptide makes sense here, and they use omics to find a candidate, express it, and give it to the ants; it causes one component of the infected behavior, social self-isolation.
You may have heard of these fungi, but I didn't know that they're just a drop in the bucket. The phenomenon of small things controlling the brains of big things to their own benefit is literally a whole ecological niche.
#ESEB2025 Exquisite talk on the mechanisms used by fungi that parasitize ants into 'zombies,' controlling their behavior to make them move to a location optimal for spore dispersal, from Charissa de Bekker.
and b) in the back of my mind was sort of your paper with Nikos where you land on polyA/T tracts as the main source of bias toward yeast intergenic TMs - seems like a similar type of sequence idiosyncrasy could drive this? You're the expert.