What do you mean I have to publish another paper after I am done with this one. That doesn't sound right. That sounds like a pyramid scheme
10.03.2026 12:23
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What do you mean I have to publish another paper after I am done with this one. That doesn't sound right. That sounds like a pyramid scheme
Species-specific spectral tuning of motion vision in butterflies: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...
π¦βοΈπ§¬ π§ͺ New preprint! Led by @donyaniyaz.bsky.social CRISPRβCas9 knockouts of ABCG transporters across butterflies & moths reveal how pigment pathways shape color during development. #CRISPR #Lepidoptera #pigmentation
Feedback welcome π©βπ¬
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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!
Fantastic work, congrats to all the team!
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.
Can't wait to release a 10-year-old birthday version for SeqKit!
- 10 years
- 2 papers, 3500 citations
- 20 contributors
- 40 subcommands
- 880 commits
- 500 issues
- 685.5K Bioconda total downloads
Thank you all, dear contributors and users!
I'll keep maintaining it.
github.com/shenwei356/s...
Something Iβve learned - the best research environments aren't sterile. They're alive with creativity and warmth, with huge fish murals and dogs who have no idea what a p-value is but show up to lab meeting anyway. Science is a human endeavour and humans need to be inspired by their surroundings.
Super excited about these results and new system.
Mapping, Expression, Loss-of-Function
I'm floored by how this locus seem to integrate all the spatial info to sketch the minute details of the phenotype, and how this is prone to evol tweaks
Large hyperdiverged haplotype without an inversion.
New pre-print with some updates on ivory:miR193 in a highly polymorphic moth.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We mapped ivory (again!?) this time controlling aspects of camouflage in Anticarsia gemmatalis. Mapping, SVs, Expression and Function.
Comments/suggestions welcome!
Me when trying to submit sequences to SRA
Weβve been working on this paper longer than it took adaptive alleles to cross the species barrier (in both directions) and make two pests ever more resistant to the things we throw at them.
New preprint out π§¬π±π
Here are just a few of the many fish I painted this year (not to scale). It's fun to stick a bunch of them together into a collage and see some of the incredible diversity of body shape and color patterns. Merry Fishmas!
π‘ππ
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We are thrilled to announce the first official release (v0.1.8) of #π―π²π±π±π²πΏ, the successor to one of our flagship tool, #π―π²π±ππΌπΌπΉπ! Based on ideas we conceived of long ago (!), this was achieved thanks to the dedication of Brent Pedersen.
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Shades of blue and red in a slice through an immuno stained brain showing some deliciously lovely looking mushroom body lobes - ripe for investigation during a funded PhD - and the central complex. Image credit: Dr Max Farnworth
π¨RA/PhD position available in evolutionary neurobiology π¨
Working on a deep dive into circuit changes during mushroom body expansion in Heliconius butterflies @camzoology.bsky.social
- employment benefits
- 4 years funding
- 1000% fun
Deadline: 14/1/2026
Details:
www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...
π¨New paper! π¨
@jasminealqassar.bsky.social led this work on the silk glands of the pantry moth.
These two long tubes inside the caterpillar continuously make a ton of silk
How does this special organ work?
www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
@cp-iscience.bsky.social
π§΅THREADπ§΅
Beautiful work, as always
Hey Lep researchers!
"Given the risks of transgene remobilization and instability associated with piggyBac transposases of lepidopteran origin,
we urge researchers interested in developing transgenesis in moths or butterflies to consider using Minos-based tools."
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishersβ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authorsβ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in βossificationβ, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchersβ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices β such as reading, reflecting and engaging with othersβ contributions β is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 𧡠1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Interested in doing a PhD in how extinction processes can inform conservation? Do you see yourself working at the intersection of genomics, museums, conservation and butterfly biology. If so consider applying for the ILESLA PhD programme at Oxford Brookes: www.brookes.ac.uk/courses/rese...
A scientific figure showing speciation and explaining the concept of species delimitation, and including a quote by the paper's first author.
Check out the recent publication in Annual Reviews of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics where the authors explore genomic species delimitation in depth. You'll see a number of #sciart figures I created to help explain some of the concepts!
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
π§ ππ Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity!
We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have:
(1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs)
(2) better hand dexterity
(3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN numberπ§΅
Really like this paper, led by @ficusorganensis.bsky.social, the supplementary videos arenβt up yet but will post them when Iβm back in the office!
Latest work out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social
We find the fly development gene bicoid is much older than previously thought (~20 million yrs older!) πͺ°π§¬
To pinpoint its origins we tackled the Diptera phylogeny, providing some resolution (many open questions remain).
π tinyurl.com/2vyuevpy
Evolutionary geneticists: I need your help! Can you think of examples of recurrent introgression of different alleles at the same locus into a single recipient population/species?
ie Allele A is introduced to taxon 1 from taxon 2, then allele Aβ is introduced to taxon 1 from taxon 2
I'm recruiting graduate students!
If you're interested in the genetics and physiology of seasonal plasticity in butterflies and moths, feel free to reach out!
I'm looking for one or two students for the fall of 2026.
Also check out my website:
www.vanderburglab.com
This only happens to you once
ππ¦ Across 6 continents, 21 sites & 15,000 paper moths, we joined a worldwide experiment led by @wlallen.bsky.social & Iliana Medina, showing how ecological context shapes the evolution of animal colouration.
Proud to be part of this global team effort: doi.org/10.1126/scie...
