Come work with me unlocking the secrets of island genetic diversity patterns! And exploring how the severely elevated genetic erosion we have previously shown on island systems might impact communities. #postdoc #job #germany senckenberg.softgarden.io/job/65352091...

Tim Janicke, Göran Arnqvist and colleagues have a new paper out discussing how biological sex is rooted in anisogamy (different gamete sizes) and how this relates to broader evolutionary patterns of sex-specific selection. You can read more about it here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Cannot be more excited about the lineup for the inaugural Function of Evolving Systems GRC conference I am co-organizing with the amazing Joy Bergelson. Less than a month away: August 9 - 14, 2026. Still a few spots left! And do check out the amazing list of speakers: www.grc.org/function-of-...

Threatened Clouded Apollo butterfly conceals two species distinguishable by scent🦋 📕A study led by @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social reveals that they hybridised during the last glacial period, leaving a genetic signature in today’s Pyrenean populations.🧵 👉https://shorturl.at/0s5Zl

I often give similar advice to my former postdocs / students as they begin faculty jobs: the first year or two are really really hard. It gets much better and is worth it. The successful senior faculty had shitty first years too.

Thanks! I personally didn’t look at those, but much of the stock is currently being used in a large field expt (2nd year now!). They’re quantifying herbivory and will look at glucosinolates down the line. A related study from the lab on ~30 species found some cool macro level differences

Pre-game warmup

🌿 Collecting samples in remote forests can mean 3–5 days before reaching the laboratory, making a continuous cold chain difficult to maintain. 100% ethanol and Allprotect preserved DNA well enough for high-quality #PacBio genome assemblies, opening new possibilities for field #genomics. #Assembly

❄️🧬 Can we generate high-quality reference genomes without the cold chain? A new study suggests the answer is yes. DNA preserved at room temperature for up to one week produced chromosome-scale reference genomes. 📖 tinyurl.com/3zwtj9ka #Genomes @gigascience.bsky.social @sangerinstitute.bsky.social

1/4 I met Claudio (Cucini) at the @sibe-iseb.bsky.social meeting in 2022 and asked if he’d like to collaborate on springtails. A few years and many discussions later, our first preprint is finally out! Here are some highlights… #Phylogenomics #Evolution #Collembola #Systematics

🦇 Did you know brown long-eared bats love perching in their favourite spot and eat moths? They are not so keen on the wings though... This photo, taken by Mike Mullis, is a collection of moth wings left by a brown long-eared bat from underneath its feeding roosts in his barn in East Sussex (cont)

There's an OMB rule change that would require political oversight of scientific grants, and could pull any that don't "reflect presidential priorities" Another country has tried this before! It was the USSR and it was called Lysenkoism. By @thsaey.bsky.social www.sciencenews.org/article/omb-...

Coming late to this story: Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered an in-person final; scores fell 50% arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/w...

How far do intergenomic compatibility shape ageing trajectories? 🦠🧬🪰 Our latest study in PNAS @pnas.org, explores this. Check it out! doi.org/10.1073/pnas... Thanks to an amazing team: @fcamus.bsky.social, @dk-dowling.bsky.social, Avi & Finley. #mitochondria #mitonuclear #ageing #diet #hormesis

🧪 Physiology is a hidden dimension of diversity in the radiation of woodland salamanders | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Here at the @ece2026tours.bsky.social to talk about the amazing @10klepgenomes.bsky.social COST Action and how we are collaborating with @projectpsyche.bsky.social and #LepEU to obtain reference genomes of all European moths and butterflies!

If you are interested in the sequencing and analysis of the genomes of European butterflies and moths, do visit the @10klepgenomes.bsky.social website and get in touch! It is a great opportunity to be part of an exciting community driving timely and interesting research! 10klepgenomes.eu

How good is MiniBWA, the successor to BWA? To test it, I ran MiniBWA on sequencing from 76 different species, comparing mapping speed, rate and accuracy with BWA MEM. In short, it's really good. If you map short reads, it's well worth your time. andrewcarroll.github.io/2026/06/30/t...

Our paper is out! 📣 we find that molecular measures of genetic variation do not predict heritable genetic variation across species - important implications for the application of genomic data for conservation! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

For those interested in more sustainable (evolution) conferencing options like #NOFLYSMBE, consider the next @eseb.bsky.social meeting #eseb2027 which is a 4 city hub meeting aimed at allowing #nofly participation eseb2027.org #smbe2026 #Istanbul #London #Munich #Gothenburg

I took Claude Science for a test drive today blog.stephenturner.us/p/test-drivi...

Upon being notified he killed the last living great Auks … Ketill Ketilsson stares into the far distance

I’m really hoping that when Sweden’s National grants are announced in November, my department and I do well .. so I can suggest we rent a truck and drive around Nobel science town Stockholm screaming SCIENCE for a couple of hours, with Acapellascience blaring on repeat.

Screaming drunk teens in trucks … this is normal this time of year at these latitudes. They’re celebrating the end of high school better than we ever did #SMBE2026

Need a quiet place to read/write/contemplate with good free wifi? The Royal Danish Library, check out the old reading halls (+ The Black Diamond for design thrills)

Congratulations to Prof Richard Durbin, winner of the 2026 Genetics Society Medal! His pioneering work in computational genomics has transformed how we analyse and understand genome sequences.

The formatted paper is now out in MBE - describing OPTICS software to predict color sensitivy based on opsin sequence alone: academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Oh WarPigs, it’s good to be back in your BBQ laden air …. Great to be back in CPH, excited for #SMBE2026

I'd put Colassal Biosciences somewhere in between Greenwater Services and Four Seasons Total Landscaping on a scale of trustworthiness and competence. Trump always finds the worst goddamn people.

Bit late posting this... MicroFinder is now published in GigaScience: academic.oup.com/gigascience/....

So excited to announce our search for 4 postdocs (funded by the Simons Foundation) who will use genomics to "test how ecological interactions, natural selection, natural enemies, hybridization & environmental gradients shape...tropical tree communities" in Panama: stri.si.edu/story/bci-ev... ...1

So I'm finally thoroughly parsing through this preprint from @bjesseshapiro.bsky.social & Patrick Lypaczewski where they homebrewed targeted ONT library prep, and it's even more brilliant than at first glance. Plus they've been so generous in answering my questions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Just to help sift through the literature, I made a tool for myself where I maintain an interests document, a bunch of RSS feed, and a claude account and it scores titles and abstracts of new papers for me and delivers them in a nice web page. It definitely finds things I wouldn't have read.

How to give a bad talk www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Seth Frazer & @ostratodd.bsky.social advance ML modeling of the opsin genotype–phenotype map, introducing the Opsin Phenotype Tool for Inference of Color Sensitivity platform, and present the Mine-N-Match (MNM) pipeline. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag138 #evobio #molbio

An enigmatic rarely collected South African species and an undescribed mystery species from South America turn out to belong to a new Lepidoptera family in the superfamily Geometroidea! Museomics solves the mystery! doi.org/10.1111/syen...

Friends and followers in Copenhagen: I'm looking forwards to visiting in just under two months to speak at the next Science and Cocktails event. Hope to see you then.

"I know there's a lot of concern about the proliferation of journals, slop in the in the literature — the best way to combat this is to publish in society-owned journals." — @asn-amnat.bsky.social President @beckyfuller82.bsky.social preaching the Gospel #Evol2026

Norway is banning generative AI for schoolchildren under 13 starting in September.

Exciting talk at #Evol2026 by the 2026 Gould Prize recipient @neilshubin.bsky.social! An advocate for “curiosity-driven research”!!

"We didn't become biodiversity scientists to preside over decay." — Becky Chaplin-Kramer Eight times more papers document biodiversity loss than recovery. We're better at describing what's broken than understanding how to fix it. That needs to change. More here 👇

0/ 💡💡💡Had one of those slightly weird moments reading something today. Two seemingly very different research traditions—starting from opposite directions—appear to be converging on almost the same conclusion about one of biology’s biggest questions: How do genomes generate phenotypes? 👇🧵

18/ Maybe the challenge is no longer: “What gene causes trait X?” but: “How do regulatory systems transform genomes into phenotypes?” That feels like a much bigger—and much more interesting—question.

One of the world's leading brain research centers is shifting away from fruit flies and toward a tiny, transparent fish. The goal: to understand how brains control the behavior of an animal or human. n.pr/4vV8dYM

Kicking off @10klepgenomes.bsky.social field workshop in Vlahi 🇧🇬 Butterfly & moth afficinados from all over Europe start deploying their beautiful light traps to capture undersampled #biodiversityhotspots for #referencegenome sequencing. Stay tuned for more! @projectpsyche.bsky.social

This is one of my favorite pieces of footage from space. Remember the early Macs had a motorized floppy drive that would eject the disk?

Jeremy Wang developed rammap, a minimap2 rewrite in Rust. It achieves comparable or better performance than minimap2 and produces identical output to minimap2. During rewrite, Jeremy found two long-existing bugs in minimap2 which are fixed in v2.31. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Latest paper lead by Asia Hoile with @peterhox.bsky.social is out! 🦋 Nymphalid butterflies have reduced forelegs. Gene expression patterns show support for more palp-like genes involved in sensory processes in the forelegs relative to the walking legs. doi.org/10.1111/imb....

Polymorphisms are fun to study, here is a butterfly one. Negative freq.dependence works to maintain things but where does it come from? Temporal variation works but not always! @koraklein.bsky.social and @chriswheat.bsky.social looked into this in detail. royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Applications are now open for the Workshop on Genomics 2026 (11-24 Jan) in Cesky Krumlov, Czechia. For the first time, we are offering Early Bird Registration discounts! 🐣 Do not miss the chance! 🤩 Help us spread the word among friends and colleagues! 🙆🏽‍♀️ #evomics2026 evomics.org/apply-worksh...