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...

Check out our paper in Evolution Letters! We used D. melanogaster pigmentation as a focal trait to explore parallelism in phenotypic and genomic responses to environmental change - read more at the link below 👇

Wish I could be at #Evol2025 this year! I’ll be starting a new lab at NYU this fall, and will be recruiting at all levels. Please spread the word if you know anyone who wants to work on evo. genomics, phylogenies, and comparative development of inverts (like Hawaiian Drosophila!) shchurch.github.io

I am delighted to be starting as an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology at the University of Florida in January 2026. The lab is broadly interested in the functional, developmental, and evolutionary genetics of cell types and organs across flies and beyond 🪰🧬

Super excited to share my latest preprint with @klohmueller.bsky.social! Here we leverage the unique signature that recessive deleterious variants can lead to an increase in archaic ancestry to tackle a classic question - the dominance distribution on the human genome www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to share the first manuscript from my PhD in which we leveraged ultra-long Nanopore sequencing, D. melanogaster inbred lines, and a ton of manual validation to investigate the effects of long-read length on population-level structural variant (SV) calling accuracy! doi.org/10.1101/2025...

To my fellow #Drosophila colleagues & friends... As you know @flybase.bsky.social has been under financial pressure due to #NIH cuts for several years. With the threats Harvard is currently facing, supporting FlyBase is even more essential. If you have the means, make a tax-deductible donation.

A lot of folks have asked about gene annotations for the Drosophila genome data. @pankajd.bsky.social and @darrenobbard.bsky.social have something for you!

I know you like #Drosophila and I know you like #Genomes - but do you also like #Genes? Coding DNA annotation of 304 species of Drosophilidae! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Preprint alert: FlyCADD! 🧬 Excited to share FlyCADD: impact prediction tool scoring the functional impact of any single nucleotide variant across the entire Drosophila melanogaster genome, to distinguish causal from neutral SNPs www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Please share! In addition an important resource for improving human health, it will grow to be an incredible resource for science. E.g. we envision layering population genomic data across all species and connecting to other insect systems. There are so many cool questions to ask w/this kind of data.

How is functional variation at large-effect loci maintained in natural populations? Thrilled to share our work showing how beneficial dominance reversal helps fruit flies maintain a resistance polymorphism as selection varies in their environment! A thread 🧵 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hello Bluesky friends! I am a #newPI starting at UC Irvine in April, interested in gene regulation and functional genomics in stem cell models of development (esp neural crest). We are hiring at all levels – please reach out/spread the word! sskimlab.org

With Hannah Gellert, Sam Church, Anton Suvorov, @petrovadmitri.bsky.social, and others, we use low-input (down to 30ng), single-insect Nanopore sequencing to help do 184 new genomes and address the near absence of genomic data for drosophilid species that cannot be cultured in the lab.