Leipzig U and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) have an open faculty position (W2) in evolutionary population genetics! This position is tenured and comes with generous core funding. We are eager to welcome a new colleague! Deadline March 11.
www.uni-leipzig.de/en/newsdetai...
Excited to see our FML Research Group Leader
@luisapallares.bsky.social
in the latest Max Planck Research! 🎉
The article follows her journey from Colombia to Germany and her work on how genes and environment shape complex traits using fruit flies.
Read the full story: www.mpg.de/26180374/W00...
@jomcinerney.bsky.social proposes that genomes do not encode fixed functions but rather “probability distributions” over functional and phenotypic outcomes, and introduces “genomic perplexity” as a measure of gene-context incompatibility.
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag041
#evobio #molbio
New teaching neurosis drops.
Student: It's funny. When I listen to the lecture recording the microphone picks up you heart beating, and so I can hear when you get nervous.
<sees look on my face>
Oh don't worry, it's not very noticeable.
2nd Student: Oh yeah, I've totally noticed that too!
I used Claude Opus 4.5/4.6 (and a bit of Codex GPT-5.3) to port edgeR to Python. See edgePython github.com/pachterlab/e...
This allowed me to develop a single-cell DE method that extends NEBULA with edgeR Empirical Bayes. All in one week. Details in doi.org/10.64898/202...
1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology.
We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.
Have you ever wondered 🤔... Does phenotypic variance respond to environmental perturbation? Does it have a genetic basis? Are mean and variance regulating loci exposed to different selection pressures? These and more questions are explored in our new preprint 🔥
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Our BehaveAI paper has just come out!
Easy & effective tracking & behavioural classification, even with tiny (2px), fast moving, camouflaged objects.
Paper: doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Download: github.com/troscianko/B...
@uniexecec.bsky.social @kevinjgaston.bsky.social @jimamclgalloway.bsky.social
Proud to present: Suitcase Science, a new outreach format containing 6 assignments to take on a journey to schools in the region, to teach kids about terns, how to study them, their fascinating behaviour and some of the things that threaten them. Wanna book us? Drop me a line. :-)
"Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance. A broken field of black basaltic lava, thrown into the most rugged waves, and crossed by great fissures, is everywhere covered by stunted, sun-burnt brushwood, which shows little signs of life. The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noon-day sun, gave to the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove: we fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly. Although I diligently tried to collect as many plants as possible, I succeeded in getting very few; and such wretched-looking little weeds would have better become an arctic than an equatorial Flora."
In celebration of #DarwinDay, here are his decidedly mixed first impressions after landing on the Galápagos (17 Sept 1835; from 'the Voyage' Chap X):
"Nothing could be less inviting..."
Zhang et al. compared the genomes of six hibernating mammals, identifying an ancient amino acid substitution in POMT2 exhibiting signals of both convergent and positive selection. Functional studies demonstrated a role in hypoxia adaptation.
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag001
#evobio #molbio
elifesciences.org/articles/105...
Postdoc Yannick Günzel, who studies how clonal raider ants interact with their larvae, went to a comedy show in NYC. Now he’s famous… 🤪
youtube.com/shorts/ZETUy...
Throat coloration in common wall lizards (Podarcis muralis). From top to bottom: White morph with the characteristic green and black coloration of the nigriventris syndrome; White morph with the ancestral brown phenotype; yellow and orange morphs from populations where individuals show varying expression of the nigriventris characters.
Two new Science studies on lizard coloration reveal how a delicate interplay of genetics, environment, and social dynamics can either preserve or erase polymorphic diversity in species.
📄: https://scim.ag/4srYKHi
📄: https://scim.ag/4qCcsWn
Some researchers are now studying ecology without touching a single plant
go.nature.com/4aRGile
It is out, it is out! Our study on neural crest cells and micro to macroevolution in lizard skull 🦎
Final version of paper with @smishra677.bsky.social now published in a wonderful issue of GENETICS!
academic.oup.com/genetics/art...
In a new GBE Review, @david-peede.bsky.social et al. overview the SMC model and extensions, discuss examples of discoveries made with the help of SMC-based inference, and comment on the assumptions, benefits, and drawbacks of various methods.
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...
#genome #evolution #compbio
What looked like a hearing organ on a tiny stinkbug’s leg turned out to be something far stranger: a fungal nursery that mother bugs use to coat their newly laid eggs in protective symbiotic hyphae, shielding their offspring from parasitic wasps, a Science study finds. https://scim.ag/3MXQ4bt
🧬 Just out in Bioinformatics Advances: “tskit arg visualizer: Interactive plotting of ancestral recombination graphs.”
Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1093/bioadv/vbaf302
Authors include: @kitchensjn.bsky.social, @yanwong.bsky.social
Can we predict gene expression evolution? In flour beetles, transcriptome-wide selection predicts expression change, with indirect selection acting strongest on pleiotropic, network-central genes—linking co-expression architecture to adaptation.
academic.oup.com/evlett/artic... Photo: Udo Schmidt
demografr: A toolkit for simulation-based inference in population genetics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.18.694482v1
Took me a year (😱), but I finally published a blog post about our article on the #quantgen variance partition of phenitypic plasticity with @lmchev.bsky.social, published in @peercomjournal.bsky.social.
🇬🇧 devillemereuil.legtux.org/quantitative...
🇫🇷 devillemereuil.legtux.org/fr/genetique...
The 2026 Guarda Summer Course in Evolutionary Biology is now accepting applications. Amazing place, amazing course, amazing opportunity for early grad students.
tb.ethz.ch/education/gu...
Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too!
preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵
Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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