Screenshot of Science commentary articleL Scientists stunned by ‘fundamentally new way’ life produces DNA. Newly discovered bacterial defense system challenges genetic code’s central dogma. Image: In a newly discovered bacterial defense system, paired strands of DNA (orange and cyan) are synthesized by two enzymes: One (yellow) uses an RNA template (beige) to guide the assembly of the nucleotide bases that make up DNA, while a second, highly unusual enzyme (light blue) uses its own amino acids as a template."

As a scientist, I am here to report that this headline is indeed accurate as I am in fact STUNNED!!

Wow. This is incredible. 🧪

"Newly discovered bacterial defense system challenges genetic code’s central dogma.":
www.science.org/content/arti...

Rapid evolution predicts demographic recovery after extreme drought Populations that are declining as a result of climate change may need to evolve to persist. Although evolutionary rescue has been demonstrated in theory and in the laboratory, its relevance to natural...

Rapid #evolution predicts demographic recovery after extreme drought
#evoSky

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

$2.45 billion NIH grant cuts and ~2300 terminated active research grants were DOGE'd in early 2025
Who were most affected?
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
Early career and women researchers

A few years ago an undergrad designed & executed an experiment to test quorum sensing in Schistocephalus. Today we published it in @peerj.bsky.social. I’m excited to see this work come to fruition & proud that we published a null result in a respected academic journal
peerj.com/articles/206...

It’s a bit late, but thank you @wisconsinevolution.bsky.social for inviting me to present at the Evolution Seminar Series! It was my first seminar and I had so much fun discussing how we can integrate epigenetics with current evolutionary theory

I really love Figure 1E! It’s super interesting to see how the literature across time coincides with the way people talk about this debate. I remember some of my undergraduate profs being passionately team ctenophore in 2017

The sponge-ctenophore debate was one of the first that excited me as an undergrad. It’s so cool to still see new papers coming out on the topic!

2 years ago the first PhD student from my lab graduated. Last week we submitted his second chapter for review, a project that we collaborated on from start to end after the two of us independently converged on the same idea to test thermal tolerance in benthic & limnetic stickleback

Heritable differences in metabolic stability underpin thermal tolerance of threespine stickleback (Gasterostues aculeatus) ecotypes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09....

I'm dissecting a fish under a dissecting scope. I'm wearing a light blue dry suit and gloves. The dissection table is in a wood garage. There's a white pickup truck parked behind me and moose and deer antlers on the walls.

I'm working in a fume hood with a student. We're both wearing lab coats and safety glasses. We turned around and are smiling at the camera.

I wrote an op-ed on the importance of federally funded science for my hometown newspaper as part of the #McClintockLetter initiative. Thanks
@cornellasap.bsky.social
for organizing this initiative! Here's some action shots of NSF and NIH funded science. www.tbnweekly.com/opinion/arti...

Four photos for the four research jobs I’ve had. Two as an intern for the NPS and USFS, one as a USFS employee, and one as a NIH and NSF-funded grad student. The future is uncertain, but I love doing science and I don’t plan to stop

Letter from the SSE/SSB/ASN councils on the scientific understanding of sex and gender, pls RT

Does Motility‐Restricting Fibrosis Influence Dispersal? An Experiment in Nature With Threespine Stickleback Factors that affect dispersal can have important eco-evolutionary implications. Here, we show that an inflammation and tissue repair response—peritoneal fibrosis—does not influence threespine stickle...

How does fibrosis (an inflammation and tissue repair response) affect dispersal? We investigated this question with stickleback in a mark-recapture experiment in Alaska: dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3... @danielbolnick.bsky.social @nataliesteinel.bsky.social @ecoevoevoeco.bsky.social

Wisconsin Evolution is accepting applications for Early Career Awardees! Please pass this along to any PhD students or post docs who may be interested in visiting UW-Madison to give a guest lecture at our Evolution Seminar Series

evolution.wisc.edu/seminars/ear...

New preprint up! We sequenced hundreds of samples from across one of Earth's oldest living organisms - the Pando aspen clone - to understand how mutations accumulate and spread in long-lived clonal organisms. Our results were…surprising. 1/30

NSF GRFP changed the submission process so that letters of rec. are due ~10 days BEFORE the student application deadline. So dumb.

Students need to start their submissions so the recommenders will be notified by NSF about the request.

Hyp.: # of 2023 applications > # of 2024 applications

Excited to share a new preprint:
biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
In 2019 we founded 9 whole lake populations of stickleback, as part of a massive eco-evo experiment. Here, we report the first half decade of host-parasite & immune trait dynamics...
(thread, 1/N)

It was cool to arrive in AK after driving for 3 days (from BC) to then receive an email indicating our paper describing the big Alaska stickleback experiment is out.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Do you work in ecology/evolution? Did you do a study that is too small to publish as a full manuscript? Negative results? Part of a larger effort? Consider publishing in microPublication Biology: EEB!

www.micropublication.org/journals/bio...

Short papers, one figure. And we peer review! Please RT

I just left the annual Wisconsin Epigenetics Symposium! Listening to researchers from across UW-Mad who study everything cancer to cellular differentiation to evolution, it’s always a pleasant surprise to be reminded of just how broad and cutting edge the field of epigenetics is

The 2024 AGA Awards round is open!

Evolutionary, Ecological, and Conservation Genomics (EECG) Research Awards to grads & postdocs. Up to $6,000 to conclude genomic research projects and prepare results for publication. 

More info at www.theaga.org
Deadline: Midnight EST, 13 Dec 2023

Analysis of NIH K99/R00 Awards and the Career Progression of Awardees bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

"Shockingly, there has yet to be a K99 awardee at a historically Black college or university."

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

"Coincidently, the DNAm changes observed in aging, cancer, and proliferation share some notable patterns. In general, they tend to be characterized by gains in methylation at promoters (...) and loss of methylation in intergenic regions and repetitive elements"

Neat! Identifying genes that underlie the development of sensory legs in sea robin.