Finally! Here is our perspective on why cooperation maximizes diversity and how it promotes additional coexistence mechanisms that do not occur under competition
journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...
This is a hard topic with strong opinions... Thanks @asn-amnat.bsky.social for publishing it! 🧵👇
I am hiring a popgen postdoc!
Looking for a creative scientist to join us at USC to investigate recessive variation and complex traits in model or non-model species. The project is funded by a multi-year NIH grant, contract can be renewed.
Job add & details 👇🏽
usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-ange...
Your favorite hybrid microbial ecology and evolution conference is back! #meehubs2026. I am hosting a Hub for the US West in Irvine, CA and there will be travel fellowships for some students. Abstract deadline extended to April 26th!
meehubs2026.oa-event.com
MEEHubs2026 registration and abstract submission is now online! 🚨🦠✨
Join us Aug 3 - 5, 2026 at one of the 7 hubs or online.
We are incredibly excited about our lineup of speakers, and hope that you submit an abstract to contribute too!
More information and registration links at:
meehubs.org
For an update on our preprint about the mysterious signature SBS5, see: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... New analyses throughout, but see Figure 5 in particular.
Reposting this old thread on the "Pervasive findings of directional selection" from ancient DNA. While the authors extended their results in various ways, I think many of these points still stand.
I thought it was an Onion article
It's looking increasingly likely that I'll be hiring a 3-year computational pop-gen postdoc/PhD-level scientific programmer to start this Fall (2026). If you or someone you know is defending soon, and looking for a position, please DM/write to me! Thanks!
Join us in Montreal for the Canada/US Northeast hub!
I will give a talk and @gmdouglas.bsky.social @nagissa.bsky.social & Tim Blower will surely give *great talks*
Opportunities for student talks and posters and a good time guaranteed!
Our paper is out m in BioEssays! We explore how a process-based view of biology, focusing on dynamic interactions rather than individual molecules, can reshape how we think about cell polarity, opening up new questions and ways of doing cell biology.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
It looks like there will be an open postdoc position in my lab soon. I'll be looking for someone with substantial wet-lab experience in microbiology / microbial ecology / evolution / physiology. If everything goes well, an ad will be coming. But if you know someone, ask them to reach out already.
I’ve been warned that by engaging in politics, I might undermine myself as a scientist. Or worse, reduce the trust that people have in me or scientists as a whole.
This latter point is the thesis of a recent article by Byron Hyde: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
I disagree for multiple reasons.
1/25 New paper out in PNAS! We show that the fitness costs of reproductive specialization, where somatic cells give up reproduction, scale inversely with organism size. Larger organisms can afford far more soma, removing a key barrier to multicellular complexity.
So, thing that is apparently better understood inside academia than outside of it:
International students pay sticker price. Most domestic students do not. International students are subsidizing the education costs for domestic students, as per student governmental funding drops.
In this state, traits improve at the same rate (so that their ratio remains constant). We see genomic patterns consistent with this balance in Lenski's LTEE.
We think of module-selection balance as an evolutionary constraint imposed by modularity.
I am eager to hear honest opinions on this.
We posted a new theory preprint. I am very interested to hear what the community thinks about it.
We looked at the dynamics of evolution on several (simple) models of modular genotype-phenotype-fitness maps and found that populations approach a quasi-steady state we call "module-selection balance".
Excited to see our work out in Science today! Using machine learning to identify prokaryotic immune systems www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
If preparing figures please consider "colorblind friendly" approaches (www.nature.com/articles/d41...). I am missing the long-wave opsin, which manifests in strange ways: I can't discern red vs. black. This dichromacy is rare and severe, but ~300 million have more common forms addressed in link.
Yeah, it's real. My proposal has been sitting at NSF for over a year now!
tl;dr: NIH is running at about 60% of pre-Trump levels and NSF is running at about 20% of pre-Trump levels of funding-outlays (some directorates far below even that). Utterly catastrophic. An unforced disaster for U.S. society, and the world
For #NSF and #NIH watchers, Grant Witness now has interactive data on numbers of grants and total funding obligations, broken down by institute and directorate, new awards and non-competitive renewals.
The stranglehold on new awards is still a disaster.
grant-witness.us/funding_curv...
"AI scientists are building ever-larger models, and then claiming that each model can solve even more than the previous one.
Then, model in hand, they go around looking around for problems to solve"
stevensalzberg.substack.com/p/ai-is-star...
Two models for the nature of pleiotropy in adaptation. Left: Schematic of the environmental structure in this study. Environments can be mapped onto a multidimensional environment space characterized by chemical and physical compositions. The large green circle represents an environment where adaptive mutants evolved, and the large pink circle is a distant environment. Around each base, a set of identical environmental perturbations (arrows) is applied, generating clusters of similar environments around distinct base environments. Top right: Schematic of fitnotype map for adaptive mutants near their home base environment. By measuring fitness in each of the green environments, one can infer how many fitnotypes matter for this set of mutants in their home environment. Here, only four of the possible 8 fitnotypes matter. Bottom right: When the mutants are moved to the distant base environment, and their fitness is measured in all pink environments (base and perturbations), there are two possibilities. Either more fitnotypes become important and the space appears higher-dimensional (left, pleiotropic expansion), or the set of fitnotypes that matters remains low-dimensional, but shifts (right, pleiotropic shift).
Predicting the effect of a #mutation on #fitness is hard. @oliviamghosh.bsky.social @petrovadmitri.bsky.social &co use fitness effects of adaptive yeast mutants to show that underlying genotype-phenotype-fitness maps are low-dimensional but context-dependent @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4dLy2Ez
Our new experimental evolution study across 30+ locations using the plant Arabidopsis thaliana —— we direct "see" adaptation and extinction to different climates at the genetic as it happens!
Read it in Science
dx.doi.org/10.1126/scie...
@ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social
@hhmi-science.bsky.social
The conference is quickly filling up! Don't wait to sign up. We also received some funding and can offer fellowships to graduate students and postdocs. Won't cover the whole cost but will certainly make it much easier!
We're hiring a *post doc*!
Are you a global change ecologist (broadly defined) and want to work with Jenny McGuire, @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social, me & many others?!🦎🐦🦴⛰️
Come join an amazing, hungry, and very exciting eco-evo group here at GT!
careers.hprod.onehcm.usg.edu/psc/careers/...
If you're a senior PhD student or recent graduate interested in doing work at the intersection of AI and microbial genomics and/or microbiomes, please feel free to reach out to discuss the possibility of applying together for an MIT Novo Nordisk Fellowship engineering.mit.edu/novo-nordisk
NIH/NSF funding is, for all intents and purposes, frozen again. This somehow almost feels worse than last year. They are running out the clock on biomedical science and all PIs can do is scramble to finish projects before our resources dry up. www.science.org/content/arti...
A line graph of the number of NSF awards in fiscal 2026 compared to fiscal years 2021-2025. The fiscal year 2026 is well below the other curves and increasing only very slowly.
NSF Update through March 13, 2026
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