Yes I think we need to know!
12.03.2026 00:49
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Yes I think we need to know!
In a new study, Sarah Marion &co use genetic mapping and whole genome sequencing in wild #Drosophila to reveal the genetic basis of naturally occurring lethal mutations and introduce a new model that could explain their frequencies in natural populations.
🧪 #genetics
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...
Careful, or you’ll have the climate nutters pointing to this as good news due to climate warming!
"The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in 1 year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm"
@thelancet.com
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
It’s fine for Russia to use drones to freeze out your population — by the way, can you give us your drone defenses? This is the actual US position.
Here's another cool paper on a novel sex determination mechanism (for Lepidoptera) in Bicyclus anynana : van’t Hof, A.E., et al. 2024. Zygosity-based sex determination in a butterfly drives hypervariability of Masculinizer. Science Advances 10:eadj6979. doi.org/10.1126/scia...
So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).
Come join us!
We are looking for a Professor or Associate Professor of Computational Genomics in Health and Disease at University College London.
Details 👉 www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...
Post funded by UCL Health Strategy.
Beautiful review paper on Lepidoptera evo-devo! I had missed this when it came out. Monteiro, A., Murugesan, S.N., Prakash, A., & Papa, R. 2025. The developmental origin of novel complex morphological traits in Lepidoptera. Annual Review of Entomology 70:421–439. doi.org/10.1146/annu...
Read the Lancet's opinion of RFK jr's actions! www.thelancet.com/action/showP...
Eric Lander (left) & Richard Botstein (right) in 1989 revolutionized mapping of quantitative traits. The method does inflate any genes with major effect, but is useful. doi.org/10.1534/gene...
If true, it's the most remarkable political document!
Richard C Lewontin lab 1976:
See Russ Lande, top left; Jerry Coyne bottom right. Who are the three others? Help me folks!
Screech owls, I hear them walking the dog in Cambridge MA every jan/feb (curiously, not this year, though). But I've never seen them. youtu.be/XuRlfeMkK1k
Heliconius erato demophoon sat on a pink, yellow and white lantana flower. The left side of the butterfly is white, while the right side is the usual black and red, but with some white clonal patches.
New preprint form me and the McMillan lab at STRI and Martin lab at GWU, digging into scale cell type specification and differentiation in Heliconius wings, with some insights on the lncRNA gene ivory.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Comments/suggestions welcome!
Amazing peppered moth story from Saccheri lab - same locus, but different structural variants, underly parallel evolution of industrial melanism in the UK and across continental Europe.
In case you missed it: our review titled "Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities" is out! 🚨
Let me hit you with some highlights on why spatial structure matters. (and why you should care!)
Sharing is appreciated 🙏 🧵👇
doi.org/10.1093/fems...
Rhode Island and Massachusetts just shattered their 24-hour state snowfall records.
Rhode Island: 36.2” (Warwick) | State record 30”
Massachusetts: 33” (Dartmouth) | Record 29”
New Jersey: 29.5” (Bogota) | Record 29.7”
Connecticut: 26.5” (N. Stonington) | Record 36”
Breaking the species barrier: recurrent genomic introgressions from very distant lineages in a ciliate https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.20.707023v1
Adaptive evolution of Topoisomerase II triggers reproductive isolation in Drosophila https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.20.707007v1
And as an older teacher, here are my old-fashioned lecture notes ca. 2006 on inbreeding and genetic drift (beware, UCL has informed me that my website does not meet current standards and will be deleted in the next year): www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucbhdjm/cou...
Hey #PopGen #EEB #PUI friends! Do you have a cool paper demonstrating the power 💪 of "modern" PopGen that would be exciting to upper-level undergrads? I feel like students leave the PopGen unit thinking it's some kind of dead science b/c we're limited to introducing simple models in Evol classes. 😢
Damn! I MEANT to post the paper! It's: Blanckaert, A., & Sousa, V.C. 2026. Interactions between mechanisms of reproductive isolation. American Naturalist xxx:000. doi.org/10.1086/740888
Here's an interesting theoretical paper on speciation that agrees with my intuition: divergent ecological selection is the most powerful driver of speciation with gene flow, while mate choice and intrinsic incompatibilities (Dobzhansky-Muller Incompatibilities) are subsidiary forces in speciation.
My impression was that they could not disprove the null hypothesis of haplodiploidy being no help, but nor could they disprove the hypothesis that it helped eusociality either. It’s a little like the comparative method so called disproof of Haldane’s Rule.
This is the 670th anniversary of the St Scholastica Day riot between town and gown in Oxford on 10 February 1355! The violence continued over three days... Around 20 townsfolk and 63 members of the university were killed. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Scho...
Here is the research article: Shenhar et al. (sorry for the typo earlier): "Heritability of intrinsic human life span is about 50% when confounding factors are addressed." What do we all think about this? doi.org/10.1126/scie...
Rethinking the heritability of aging: it's really 55%?!! doi.org/10.1126/scie... -- News article referring to research article by Shenkar et al. 2026. By using a theoretical method to remove inferred environmental variance Ve, the authors increased heritability h^2= Vg/Ve. Why am I not surprised!
