Murillo R.'s Avatar

Murillo R.

@mufernando

Computational biology and evolutionary genetics. Postdoc with Jeff Wall and Don Conrad at OHSU. PhD with Andrew Kern and Peter Ralph at UO. From πŸ‡§πŸ‡·. https://m-rodrigues.me

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23.08.2023
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Latest posts by Murillo R. @mufernando

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Introgression and parental conflict shape repeated occurrences of postzygotic isolation in Mimulus Postzygotic reproductive isolation is often thought to accumulate as a byproduct of neutral divergence. Yet it frequently evolves rapidly, in line wit…

I am SO THRILLED to share our first fully-lab lab paper!!!!!! Led by @hybridzones.bsky.social & @hagarsoliman.bsky.social, w/ a major assist from @pfschwarz.bsky.social!!!!!!!!!!!!! Read more below, if you're curious (you should be- it's AWESOME!!!!!!!)

link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

10.03.2026 15:44 πŸ‘ 66 πŸ” 31 πŸ’¬ 4 πŸ“Œ 2

MKado: a toolkit for McDonald-Kreitman tests of natural selection https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.02.709122v1

04.03.2026 23:40 πŸ‘ 14 πŸ” 8 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

This is a common reply to concerns about GenAI research as if it were just another computational tool that saves us times from tedious tasks and whose accuracy can be rigorously quantified.

It is not.

GenAI research poses at least 2 serious problems... /n

03.03.2026 22:39 πŸ‘ 64 πŸ” 18 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I CANNOT with the unspecific but fancy sounding adverbs I see cropping up in scientific writing. it's telltale sign of LLM use!1!!

28.01.2026 18:21 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

the link only works for uconn people!

20.01.2026 19:39 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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Rare variation in malaria parasites biases population-genetic inference Understanding how pathogens evolve is fundamental to disease control and is a basic question in evolutionary biology, yet pathogens with complex life cycles violate assumptions of classic evolutionary...

New preprint! and my first single-author paper, so bear with me.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Malaria population genetic studies have found some puzzling patterns: Ne estimates spanning orders of magnitude, genome-wide negative Tajima's D, and over a quarter of genes with Ο€N/Ο€S >1

1/n

14.01.2026 22:03 πŸ‘ 61 πŸ” 19 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 1

HARD agree!

14.01.2026 21:08 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

are there any examples of a paper where the title was a question and the answer was yes?

08.01.2026 22:17 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Gene-specific selective sweeps are pervasive across human gut microbiomes - Nature Development and application of the integrated linkage disequilibrium score (iLDS) reveals both selective pressures impacting the human gut microbiome and the mechanisms by which gut bacteria adapt to ...

Grateful to share our paper on gene-specific selective sweeps in human gut microbiomes, now out in Nature! It has been a joy to work with @rwolff.bsky.social, whose insights and hard work made this possible.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

17.12.2025 18:53 πŸ‘ 147 πŸ” 69 πŸ’¬ 10 πŸ“Œ 3
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Efficient Estimation of Nucleotide Diversity and Divergence Using Callable Loci (and More) Abstract. The increasing scale of population genomic datasets presents computational challenges in estimating summary statistics such as nucleotide diversi

@cademirch.bsky.social @erikenbody.bsky.social TB Sackton & @russcd.bsky.social introduce Callable Loci And More (clam), a tool that leverages callable loci to accurately estimate population genetic statistics (Ο€, dxy, and FST).

πŸ”— doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf282

#evobio #molbio #compbio

15.12.2025 15:09 πŸ‘ 20 πŸ” 14 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Neural posterior estimation for population genetics Simulation-based inference methods are increasingly being used in population genetics due to their flexibility and ability to be applied in settings where likelihood-based methods are intractable. Per...

Popgen folks, Jiseon, Nate, and Andy, along with Yuxin Ning and Franz Baumdicker, just released a really cool new method for simulation based inference (think ABC) using normalizing flows. It seems to work really well! full joint posteriors ftw!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

03.12.2025 15:41 πŸ‘ 23 πŸ” 14 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 1

How many papers outside your field of research have you read?

15.11.2025 05:53 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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Specificity, length and luck drive gene rankings in association studies - Nature Genetic association tests prioritize candidate genes based on different criteria.

How do GWAS and rare variant burden tests rank gene signals?

In new work @nature.com with @hakha.bsky.social, @jkpritch.bsky.social, and our wonderful coauthors we find that the key factors are what we call Specificity, Length, and Luck!

🧬πŸ§ͺ🧡

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

07.11.2025 00:05 πŸ‘ 171 πŸ” 74 πŸ’¬ 5 πŸ“Œ 11

The Johri Lab has an open postdoc position. Please send me an email, if interested. Start date is flexible. Please do share! Thank you in advance.

28.10.2025 21:31 πŸ‘ 23 πŸ” 37 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1
Make your donation now - Wikimedia Foundation Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and other crucial free knowledge projects. Each year, the generosity of the 2% of readers who donate allows us to expand the reac...

I set up my recurrent donation to wikipedia early this week! donate.wikimedia.org

29.10.2025 22:30 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Massively parallel interrogation of the fitness of natural variants in ancient signaling pathways reveals pervasive local adaptation The nature of standing genetic variation remains a central debate in population genetics, with differing perspectives on whether common variants are almost always neutral as suggested by neutral and n...

One of the most exciting works of my career, years in the making. We used high-throughput precision genome editing to test the fitness effects of thousands of natural variants. Our findings challenge the long-held assumption that common variants are inconsequential.

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

22.10.2025 17:45 πŸ‘ 165 πŸ” 85 πŸ’¬ 5 πŸ“Œ 6
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A mosaic of modular variation at a single gene underpins convergent plumage coloration The reshuffling of genomic variation from multiple origins is an important contributor to phenotypic diversification, yet insights into the evolutionary trajectories of this combinatorial process and ...

Agouti doing what it does best: making color patterns and jumping between species πŸ–€πŸ€

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

20.10.2025 13:57 πŸ‘ 10 πŸ” 4 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Transposable elements drive much of naturally occurring genetic lethality in Drosophila melanogaster https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.16.682755v1

16.10.2025 19:32 πŸ‘ 25 πŸ” 14 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1

I'm recruiting a postdoc for my group (based in beautiful Eugene, OR). Please get in touch if you're interested, esp if you'd like to chat at #ASHG25!

15.10.2025 12:52 πŸ‘ 40 πŸ” 42 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1

We're excited to be recruiting an NIH funded postdoc to work in the Coop lab at UC Davis. We're specifically interested in candidates who are want to work at the intersection of human genetics, GWAS, and population genetics modeling. Please RT

15.10.2025 15:53 πŸ‘ 162 πŸ” 210 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 5
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Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead - Consumer Reports CR tests of 23 popular protein powders and shakes found that most contain high levels of lead.

my latest investigation for @consumerreports.org is based on months of reporting and 60+ lab tests of leading protein supplements

we found that most protein powders and shakes have more lead in one serving than our experts say is safe to have in a day (🧡)

www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein...

14.10.2025 16:37 πŸ‘ 6136 πŸ” 3254 πŸ’¬ 285 πŸ“Œ 1489

Just an absolutely horrific self own, depleting the US of amazing students from all over the world who contributed to what used to make America great: its diversity, its openness, and its leadership in education.

06.10.2025 16:40 πŸ‘ 22 πŸ” 13 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Because we are historians ourselves?

05.10.2025 03:08 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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What if NIH had been 40% smaller? Replaying history with less NIH funding shows widespread impacts on drug-linked research

This may be the most important paper ever published about NIH funded research.

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

25.09.2025 21:19 πŸ‘ 413 πŸ” 250 πŸ’¬ 5 πŸ“Œ 19

I just had to hop through 5 papers to find the original methods (2025 -> 2018 -> 2014 -> 2013 -> 2005). what is your highest score? 🀯

25.09.2025 23:14 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧡]

24.09.2025 20:33 πŸ‘ 168 πŸ” 79 πŸ’¬ 5 πŸ“Œ 8
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We are excited to share GPN-Star, a cost-effective, biologically grounded genomic language modeling framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of variant effect prediction tasks relevant to human genetics.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
(1/n)

22.09.2025 05:29 πŸ‘ 174 πŸ” 91 πŸ’¬ 4 πŸ“Œ 5

Our paper Genomic diversity of the African malaria vector Anopheles funestus was published in Science today! It features inversions, selection in action, museum specimens and putative new ecotypes. doi.org/10.1126/scie...

18.09.2025 18:45 πŸ‘ 63 πŸ” 33 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 3

evergreen

11.09.2025 18:33 πŸ‘ 5144 πŸ” 1116 πŸ’¬ 13 πŸ“Œ 13