Brooke Weinstein

Thank you, Pleuni! 😊

Effective population size does not explain long-term variation in genome size and transposable element content in animals A large-scale survey across animals reveals no general association between genome size expansion and the relaxation of natural selection.

To clarify the scope: we didn’t test GS–TE relationships ourselves, but we discuss animal studies showing that GS differences often reflect lineage-specific TE dynamics not predicted by Ne (e.g., elifesciences.org/articles/100...; link.springer.com/article/10.1...).

Hello Bluesky!

Does Nₑ really explain mutation rate (μ) or genome size (GS) in vertebrates?

We find the apparent Nₑ–μ link in Bergeron et al. (2023) is a “back-door” path via generation time, and GS is decoupled from both Nₑ and life-history traits.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

#evobio #PNAS