Congrats @jeffgroh.bsky.social et al. Some avocado trees open female-phase flowers in the morning & then male in afternoon. Others show complementary pattern (m->f), to synchronize pollination of two types. Jeff show this to be a >45Mya polymorphism at a transcription factor across 100s of species.

I’ll never look at avocados in quite the same way: The latest from UC Berkeley Miller Fellow Jeff Groh who sits in my lab and Ben Blackman’s lab. He works on balancing selection and molecular mechanisms underlying the coevolutionary phenomenon of mating type alternation (PhD with Graham Koop).

Very excited to share the capstone of my postdoc work with @stepheniwright.bsky.social, co-led by Wright lab grad student Cassandre with contributions from many others. We combined new methods with high-quality Rumex assemblies to dive into the remarkable history of rearrangement in this genus.

🧬 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

I am currently searching for a new postdoctoral researcher to study the evolution, genetics, and physiology of cold acclimation and freezing tolerance in switchgrass at Michigan State University. This work will be funded by a newly funded five-year DOE grant. careers.msu.edu/jobs/researc...

With @aconga.bsky.social we wrote a short Dispatch to highlight two awesome companion papers in @currentbiology.bsky.social by @jeffgroh.bsky.social, @gcbias.bsky.social and by Liu et al. on how the control of heterodichogamy is going nuts in the Juglandaceae : www.cell.com/current-biol...

Hermaphroditic plants also use TIME ⏰🌿 to avoid selfing. Two new @currentbiology.bsky.social papers explore the rapid turnover of this trait in the wingnut family. Both @vincentcastric.bsky.social and I summarized these findings 👉 authors.elsevier.com/a/1m2MA3QW8S... #Evolution #PlantBiology

Congratulations to @jeffgroh.bsky.social on the publication of his paper on an ancient balanced polymorphisms controlling heterodichogamy in two genera of wingnuts. The paper shows the putative turnover & reversal of dominance of a mating type polymorphism www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Sharing our new paper, "Distinct haplotypes and reversed dominance at a single-gene balanced polymorphism controlling heterodichogamy in two genera of wingnuts". Genomics & evolution of a mating type system involving two morphs with alternating sexes in walnut relatives www.cell.com/current-biol...

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

Work led by Marius Roesti, "A species interaction kick-starts ecological speciation in allopatry" now published - Varying degrees of divergence associated with presence/absence of a single interacting species predicts strength of prezygotic RI in freshwater stickleback www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New Article: "Ginger genome reveals the SMPED1 gene causing sex-phase synchrony and outcrossing in a flowering plant" rdcu.be/eJPdX SMPED1, located in a dichogamy-determining region in Alpinia species, controls the timing of sex-organ synchrony.

Quantitative system drift https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.17.676933v1

Please share broadly: I am looking for a postdoctoral fellow to work on a collaborative project on the temporal population genomics of invasive Capeweed (using contemporary and herbarium genomics), with ‪‪@shaky-dingo.bsky.social‬ and colleagues

Excited to share our new preprint for the tskit_arg_visualizer Python package! ARGs can sometimes feel like a black box, so @yanwong.bsky.social and I have been developing a method to programmatically drawing these graphs. 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2508.03958 1/6

Fields like Computer Science, Physics/Astronomy, and Chemistry saw the largest increases in NSF GRFP awards in 2025. Meanwhile, Life Sciences, Social Sciences, Psychology, and Mathematical Sciences experienced the steepest declines—marking a major departure from historical funding patterns.

Looking forward to #Evol2025! I’ll be presenting on the genetics of a balanced polymorphism for sex timing in hermaphroditic plants in the Reproductive Systems session on June 22 at 11:15 AM

How bad will it be? Catastrophic. Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come. But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget. Speak up now before it is too late. (inflation adjusted $-s below)

1/9 Excited to share the preprint for the second half of my PhD with @mollyschumer.bsky.social: Connecting human environmental impacts to hybridization in swordtail fish through genomics, GIS, water chemistry, and histology. Thread below! #SciSky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congrats to my wonderful PhD advisor @gcbias.bsky.social on being elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences! www.amacad.org/new-members-...

Biologist Jeff Groh wrote home to Hummelstown PA 🚜 to lay out the many costs of cuts to American science infrastructure. “Let’s not ruin a good thing” 🧪🏠

Inspired by others on here I wrote a short op-ed in support of federal research funding for a local newspaper in small town PA where I grew up

More than 1,200 demonstrations were held across the country on Saturday against the policies and actions of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. See images from some of the protests in California, Florida, Washington, D.C., and more.

We would love feedback on a new NCBI-BLAST service we are launching today: sky-blast.com Under the hood it's the same BLAST executable and databases provided by NCBI, with a replica of the NIH's interface - providing an alternative to the US gov service that's less congested, faster & more reliable

I'm excited to share our new preprint on the molecular evolution of heterodichogamy in two wingnut genera of Juglandaceae. Heterodichogamy features two morphs synchronously alternating male and female flowering phases in time to generate disassortative mating. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Allelic turnover and dominance reversal at a single-gene balanced polymorphism controlling heterodichogamous flowering in wingnuts (Juglandaceae) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.10.642504v1

WHERE WILL YOU BE TOMORROW?

1/10 *** New paper out *** (on behalf of Nick Peoples who is not on Bluesky). I am beyond excited to present our new paper out now in @Nature! Here, we show that rapid gain and loss of tooth complexity accelerates diversification in fishes! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This one hits close to home. Rachel was one of the collections managers for a nat'l germplasm repository in Winters, CA where I've done a lot of my research. Invaluable resource that that will take a big hit from this www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/u...

I usually reserve this account for my personal views; but today I want to represent my position as President of @asn-amnat.bsky.social to post a message that will shortly go out to the membership of the American Society of Naturalists from the ASN Executive Council

Postdoc jobs in the Gaut lab! Brandon isn't on here, so I can be frank: he is fantastic. I did my postdoc with him and he is not only an amazing scientist but one of my favorite humans. I would have happily stayed in his lab forever if that was feasible. recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF08999 #plantscijobs

It feels surreal to see my PhD research featured on the cover of Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/.... Incredibly proud of the work that went into this. And so grateful for the opportunities, resources, support and mentorship from co-authors and my whole scientific community that made it possible