SMBE Early-Career Excellence Award - Leo Speidel

The 2026 awardees of SMBE's Faculty Award are now known. We start by presenting the SMBE Early-Career Excellence Award winner - Leo Speidel - working at RIKEN, Japan.
@leospeidel.bsky.social

Visit our website to learn more about the SMBE Faculty Awards
🔗 smbe.org/faculty-awards

#society

Fix your hearts or die.

We are looking for a postdoc to help with a project on eelgrass genomics, in collaboration with the O'Connor and Rieseberg labs at UBC - see ad here tinyurl.com/2yd487p4! Come and join us in beautiful Vancouver 🌊🌾🏔️

📢Oportunidad de investigación con mariposas🦋

Se buscan estudiantes voluntarios para trabajo de campo y de laboratorio en distintos bosques de #PuertoRico, comenzando en agosto 2026.

✉️ Comunícate con la Dra. Osmary Medina (osmary.medina2@gmail.com) para más información.
#CienciaPR #CienciaBoricua

Synolog: A Scalable Synteny-Based Framework for Genome Architecture Characterization www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

The Evolution conference w/ @asn-amnat.bsky.social @sse-evolution.bsky.social @systbiol.bsky.social is in Cleveland this June. It's an excellent conference center, in a town with many good restaurants.
But wait, you'll say... weren't we just there a few years back?
Here's why...
(thread)
1/N

1/ BRAKER4 hatched!
The Earth BioGenome Project is on track to sequence ~1.5M eukaryotic species. Every one needs a structural annotation. No Perl monolith was going to survive that. So we rewrote BRAKER from the ground up. github.com/Gaius-August...

are we back in medieval times cause everything sure is mid and evil illustration of a goblin on a snail

🎨 @wizardofbarge.bsky.social

GitHub - jpwares/molecoltext: molecular ecology - interactive textbook molecular ecology - interactive textbook. Contribute to jpwares/molecoltext development by creating an account on GitHub.

I’m happy to share github.com/jpwares/mole... it’s got a long way to go but I felt a need to change my approach a few years ago. It’s clunky AF. I enjoy shaping it and keep useful stuff like your shiny apps there to help folks learn more experientially.

Evolution 2026 meeting logo. Clip art of a laptop showing a speaker giving a presentation. Text: Society for the Study of Evolution W. D. Hamilton Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Presentation, register and apply by April 15.

Current and recent PhD students: abstract submissions are due April 15 to be considered for the Hamilton Award Symposium at virtual #Evol2026! Learn more about how to apply to be a finalist: shorturl.at/qDIP4

We interrupt your scheduled scientific programming to ask some *very* important questions:

Are lightsabers sharp? How do they cut?

I have (strong) opinions, but I need to gather some data.

A colorful mess: Widespread exchange of pigmentation genes across the Parulidae phylogeny Featured image: Magnolia Warbler (Setophaga magnolia) © Cephas | Wikimedia Commons

New story on the Avian Hybrids blog!

A colorful mess: Widespread exchange of pigmentation genes across the Parulidae phylogeny
avianhybrids.wordpress.com/2026/03/11/a...

Based on the PLoS Biology paper by Kevin Bennett and his colleagues | #ornithology

I am still actively looking for postdoc positions — please lmk if you (or your friends and colleagues) need a hardworking postdoc with field, lab, and bioinformatic skills!

I am broadly interested in evolution in the ocean, conservation and population genetics, and rapid evolution.

Nominations are open for the 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 𝗛𝗮𝗿𝗿𝘆 𝗦𝗺𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘇𝗲!
This award recognizes early career research published in MEC/MER in 2025. Nominations are due on Friday, 𝟮𝟰 𝗔𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗹 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲.
For more info, see: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal...

It has been really useful. I was able to redo a whole suite of MK analysis in my barnacle data in minutes!

Thanks to Andy for spearheading this project and to the KR colab for their feedback. Keep an eye out for future publications from the lab using MKado!

MKado is written in Python can be easily installed using pip. Its only dependencies are widely used Python libraries (Numpy, Scipy, etc).

Also, the docs have tons of examples on how to use the software and interpret the results. Check them out: mkado.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

MKado can also generate publication-ready plots, including volcano plots showing NI and MK test significance and asymptotic curves showing the fit of the asymptotic MK test. Here's an example in human-chimp orthologs:

Given the need, Andy spearheaded the development of MKado, an unified, all-in-one tool for MK tests. MKado runs both standard and extended versions of the test. It takes aligned coding sequences as input and can analyze thousands of genes in parallel. It can run >12k genes in under 1 minute!

Clara and I independently needed to run MK tests for some of our projects, but we had a problem: there was no single unified tool to run the test, and particularly, it's extensions (e.g., asymptotic MK, polarized MK). Same for MK-related statistics like NI, DoS, alpha, etc.

Check our new preprint from the KR-colab with @ramencult.bsky.social and Andy Kern:

MKado: a toolkit for McDonald-Kreitman tests of natural selection

doi.org/10.64898/202...

Molecular Ecology Molecular Ecology is an international journal for research using molecular genetic techniques to address questions in ecology, evolution, behavior and conservation.

Hello! Molecular Ecology is now on @bsky.app!
Follow us for updates about Molecular Ecology and Molecular Ecology Resources publications, as well as special issues, events, and awards!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1365...

Nominations are open to the annual 𝗠𝗼𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗿 𝗘𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘇𝗲!
The award recognizes the work of outstanding scientists for their contribution to the field of molecular ecology. Nominations are due on 𝟮𝟰 𝗔𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗹 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲.
Read more: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal...

Society for the Study of Evolution Site description

Are you a grad student attending #Evol2026? Submit your talk for the SSE Hamilton Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Presentation! Finalists will present their talks during the virtual portion of the meeting. Apply during registration. Deadline April 15! shorturl.at/qDIP4 @evolmtg.bsky.social

Water off a manakin’s back: How sexual and natural selection shape plumage coloration in manakins Plumage coloration mechanisms shed light on introgression patterns.

New story on the Avian Hybrids blog!

Water off a manakin’s back: How sexual and natural selection shape plumage coloration in manakins
avianhybrids.wordpress.com/2025/12/10/w...

Based on the Science Advances paper by Haw Chuan Lim et al. | #ornithology

Estimating Organism Abundance Using Within‐Sample Haplotype Frequencies of eDNA Data Environmental DNA (eDNA) provides powerful insights into species presence and community composition but remains limited in its capacity to infer species abundance or population structure. Here, we sh...

🧬 My haplotype paper is out!

We show that deviations between within-sample and population-level haplotype frequencies can be used to estimate how many individuals contributed to an eDNA sample.

No tissue references needed, just metabarcoding data and some population genetics.

#eDNA #PopGen

Charles Darwin Quote I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.

Don’t forget the barnacles! www.azquotes.com/quote/1095192

The missing data problem in population genomics and statistical methods to address them The “Missing Data” problem is prevalent across all statistical inference, owing to the “absence of some part of a familiar data structure” (Efron 1994). Po

I wrote a short op-ed in @genetics-gsa.bsky.social G3 this month’s issue on missing data problems in population genomics that I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years. Lemme know your thoughts! Comments/suggestions/ideas welcome! doi.org/10.1093/g3jo...

My sculpture of an acorn barnacle—a crustacean!—in steel, bronze, and sterling silver, sitting on a white background. My hand touches the steel barnacle shell and provides scale (barnacle is just a bit smaller than my hand). The barnacle’s filter feeding legs (cirri) are spread dramatically wide.

Merry #Crustmas to all who celebrate! Hoping you are firmly attached to people you love, are able to scoop up large amounts of food, and can hide in an impervious shell when the social situation requires it ❤️

A colorful legacy of hybridization in wood-warblers includes frequent sharing of carotenoid genes among species and genera Introgression between species can shape evolutionary trajectories in important ways. This study of the entire family of the colorful wood-warblers (Parulidae) uses whole-genome sequencing to reveal fr...

New paper out. If you like colorful birds, hybridization, and phylogenetics, read on! 🧵https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003501