Our new experimental evolution study across 30+ locations using the plant Arabidopsis thaliana —— we direct "see" adaptation and extinction to different climates at the genetic as it happens! Read it in Science dx.doi.org/10.1126/scie... @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social @hhmi-science.bsky.social

Clustering proteins using DIAMOND is out now @natmethods.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Now out! We show that TEs can be horizontally transferred between fungal species via Starships. Once transferred, these TEs can become active, changing the genome organization and affecting the lifestyle of the recipient fungus. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @oggenfussursula.bsky.social #TEsky

How much protein diversity can Life on Earth actually generate? With DIAMOND DeepClust, we show how billions of proteins across the tree of life can be clustered at low-identity for downstream analytics tasks. 📚Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 💻Code: github.com/bbuchfink/di...

LongcallD: joint calling and phasing of small, structural and mosaic variants from long reads https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.20.713111v1

Tandem and tandem

Excited to share my first preprint from my PhD w/ @justinmcrocker.bsky.social. We show that cell type-specific regulatory dominance promotes robustness and evolutionary innovation through interallelic transcriptional hubs, potentially expanding the mutational paths available to diploids. (1/18)

1/11 🔥 New preprint alert 🔥 We wanted to know what plants in the wild really care about. So we asked them 🎤. Here is what we learned: “Biotic-response networks are an important organizer of the transcriptome in wild Arabidopsis thaliana populations” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A deep-time landscape of plant cis-regulatory sequence evolution www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

@pratikkatte.bsky.social and I just released Lorax 🌲, a tool for interactive exploration of biobank-scale ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs). If you’ve ever wanted to scroll across the ancestries of thousands of genomes… this is for you.

Recently we're working with SNPs from whole genome assemblies to estimate ARGs. It's a pain to go from alignment files to vcf, keeping track of masked and invariant sites. So we wrote a snakemake/SLURM pipeline. Hope it's useful to others, and don't hesitate to post issues if there are problems!

Molecular and phenotypic footprints of climate in native Arabidopsis thaliana https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.02.709013v1

We are very excited to share a new resource from our team: spatial subcellular proteome maps in plants! We developed an MS-based method that registers localizations of about 8000 proteins in Arabidopsis roots in a single experiment. (1/9) www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

“Aneuploidy was identified in inbreeding and outbreeding populations of cultivated potato, with frequencies ranging from 14.8 to 24.0%, indicating notable genomic instability.” Plant genomes tolerate instability—more akin to human tumor evolution than stability. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New paper alert: Paralog interference contributes to the preservation of genetic redundancy www.cell.com/current-biol...

Heya science peeps, my first first-author paper is on Biorxiv! We show how transcriptome-wide expression variability in outbred animals responds massively to an environmental stressor and is underpinned by cryptic variability- (not just mean-) controlling alleles. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This article is now published! academic.oup.com/nargab/artic... We’ve added a few new analyses. First off, we show that, while gene presence absence variation (PAV) scales with evolutionary distance in both plants and animals, the base level and rate of accrual are both twice as high in plants.

I had intended to post something about this new Google DeepMind paper that appeared yesterday in Nature, but the press coverage has added to what there is to say. So this is a long 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I am looking for a postdoc to develop high-performance algorithms in computational genomics. Email or DM me if interested. For more information, see hlilab.github.io/vacancies. RTs appreciated!

Just sharing new tool written by Vincent Ranwez to view and manipulate sequences and alignments directly in your terminal github.com/ranwez-searc... Pretty convenient!

Characterising the detectable and invisible fractions of genomic loci under balancing selection https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.13.698512v1

The (Yoav) Voichek lab has opened its gates at the Weizmann Institute, and is actively recruiting students and researchers at all levels - come explore gene regulation and computational genomics in a fun, friendly sprouting lab 🤗🥼⚗️🧪 www.weizmann.ac.il/plants/voichek

Novel genes arise from genomic deletions across the bacterial tree of life www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧬🖥️🧪 github.com/aryakaul/pre...

🧵 Just out in Cell after more than 10 years in the making! 🎓 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... Plants and animals evolve radically different body plans. Do they also operate under fundamentally different molecular evolutionary constraints during organ formation? @cellpress.bsky.social

Have we been overstating the role of transposable elements in adaptation to local or rapidly changing environmental conditions? Happy to share my (somewhat unpopular?) opinion paper on this matter: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Thanks to those who already shared the link!

The genetics, evolution, and maintenance of a biological rock-paper-scissors game | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Genome editing in brown algae! 🧬🪸🌿 Now out in Cell Reports Methods! Excited to share this highly efficient, transgene-free CRISPR–Cas genome editing protocol for brown algae, requiring no cloning and no specialized equipment. doi.org/10.1016/j.cr... #CRISPR #BrownAlgae @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social

Pandagma: A tool for identifying pan-gene sets and gene families at desired evolutionary depths and accommodating whole genome duplications academic.oup.com/bioinformati... 🧬🖥️ github.com/legumeinfo/p...

If you’ve heard me talk in the past ~5 years, you will know I have developed an obsession with acrocentric chromosomes. This is all of that, condensed into one paper. I will do a full thread in the new year, but for those that want something to read over the holidays, have at it. Such a cool story!

Our new preprint is out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We show that GRN benchmarks commonly used can overestimate performance due to negative-sampling choices, sometimes allowing simple degree-based baselines to rival more complex GNNs. A reminder of why bias-aware evaluation matters!

I've been thinking about the "virtual cell" concept and wanted to write up a few thoughts. Specifically on how I think the prior experience in GWAS informs the most likely way these models will be useful. andrewcarroll.github.io/2025/12/23/t...

We are thrilled to announce the first official release (v0.1.8) of #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗿, the successor to one of our flagship tool, #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀! Based on ideas we conceived of long ago (!), this was achieved thanks to the dedication of Brent Pedersen. 1/n

With the 50-year rise of Arabidopsis as the most studied plant, is it time for its downfall? Let’s investigate it’s history and outlook 🧵

We (Nordborg & Weigel labs) need input on the next generation of genome browsers & data download modes for the #Arabidopsis #1001GenomesPlus project. We have now a curated collection of over 500 long read genomes. Please help us by filling out this questionnaire: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

Revisiting the evidence for long-lived balancing selection in humans. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.10.687682v1

🌱 Postdoc position in Plant Genomics/Bioinformatics! Love genome plasticity, computational methods, and solving big questions in plant biology? Join our newly established Institute for Crop Biology at HHU Düsseldorf. More info on schneebergerlab.org/career/ Apply by Nov. 30 | 3-year position

I recently moved my lab to Purdue University and am looking for graduate students. We are working at the interface of population genomics, quantitative genetics and functional genomics to understand how plants adapt to extreme environments. Reach out if you would like to discuss potential projects.

1/2 Want to become up to date with pangenomes and genome graphs and their history? Check out this fantastic review by @zbao.bsky.social! Complexity welcome: Pangenome graphs for comprehensive population genomics #pangenomes #plantscience #genomegraphs www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

1/10 Genome maintenance by telomerase is a fundamental process in nearly all eukaryotes. But where does it come from? Today, we report the discovery of telomerase homologs in a family of antiviral RTs, revealing an unexpected evolutionary origin in bacteria. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

✨ Latest exciting story of the group in @nature.com. Here, we go beyond SNPs and built a species-wide atlas of genetic variants in yeast. With >1,000 near T2T genomes, we show how large genomic variations affect trait diversity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Remember this paper "Low overlap of transcription factor DNA binding and regulatory targets" ? (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) well, well, well 🍿 ⬇️ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We are excited to share GPN-Star, a cost-effective, biologically grounded genomic language modeling framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of variant effect prediction tasks relevant to human genetics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/n)

A deep-time landscape of plant cis-regulatory sequence evolution https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.17.676453v1

Happy to share the results of a long-haul post-doc project, now online @science.org, aiming at understanding the rules of transgeneration epigenetic inheritance over TEs in plants and its extent and impact in nature. More below! doi.org/10.1126/scie...

The #Drosophila Dscam1 gene generates 10000s of isoforms, but only a small fraction supports neuronal functions. This study shows that #fitness & #immunity are the likely primary evolutionary drivers of Dscam1 isoform diversity in #arthropods @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4gp8cWd

Hybridization and introgression are major evolutionary processes. Since the 1940s, the prevailing view has been that they shape plants far more than animals. In our new study (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... ), we find the opposite: animals exchange genes more, and for longer, than plants

"We show that unrelated proteins have a universal tendency towards convergent evolution of secondary and tertiary motifs, causing an excess of high-scoring FP alignment... previous methods routinely overestimate significance by up to six orders of magnitude." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Evolutionary and methodological considerations when interpreting gene presence-absence variation in pangenomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.14.670405v1

2/2 With ‪@derekseveri.bsky.social‬, Joy Bergelson, Fabrice Roux and Talia Karasov. Illustration: Genetically diverse Arabidopsis grown in the lab | Closely related wild Arabidopsis during the natural growing season | Diversity of Arabidopsis habitats.