SO EXCITED to be finally talking about some funky preliminary results on the eyes of this funky harvestman at #SICB2026 on Tuesday! Here are a few sneak peak pics :D

Just making sure that 2025 is definitely over

Just in time for the New Year we have a new preprint up that focuses on white cells, often used as ornaments in fish. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Not that long ago, in vivo mouse enhancer design was a dream. Today, it's a reality! Using transfer deep learning to design de novo synthetic embryonic enhancers active in the heart, limb, and CNS. Great collab with @alex-stark.bsky.social lab! @ucibiosci.bsky.social @impvienna.bsky.social

Live thread of the NSF biology virtual office hour: 🧵

#WntA is a crucial marker of stripe elements early in development for the Nymphalidae butterfly family. @jasminealqassar.bsky.social & co explore if WntA has maintained its role in stripe elements over 95 million years of evolution in the Hesperiidae family of butterflies. doi.org/10.1242/bio....

New paper covering what we think is a pretty nice and comprehensive overview over tools suitable for neuroethology in butterflies and moths. Also, check out the whole special issue if you're an insect neuroethologist. @neuroethology.org @dzg-neurobiology.bsky.social doi.org/10.1007/s003...

Our paper on ancestral conditions of caddisflies (described in the quoted post) is now out! doi.org/10.3897/zook...

I taught Genetics again this year. We need to include discussion of the problematic history of our field, especially as the claims of eugenics are once again centered in our political discourse. Last year I wrote this piece, explaining my reasoning and approach 🧪 1/n www.cell.com/trends/genet...

Applications are open for @dev-journal.bsky.social 2026 Pathway to Independence (PI) programme, supporting postdocs applying for group leader positions: Mentoring Profile raising Leadership training Network building Spread the word... www.biologists.com/grants/devel...

This Gemini-image generated figure looks accurate and cosmetically good...yikes...scary. Pretty sure this is ripping of the Biorender style, btw.

Here's the lad at the end of a 9-inch journey to a female. He's got wings but he just derpily ambles along the tree bark with the singular mission of finding the Source of those pheromones and then get scraped off as the lass crawls into a crevice for the winter

🚨New paper! 🚨 @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 🧵THREAD🧵

NEW pub in @science.org 🥳 Is it sponges (panels A & B) or comb jellies (C & D) that root the animal tree of life? For over 15 years, #phylogenomic studies have been divided. We provide new evidence suggesting that... 🔗: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I am so excited to share new work on a TE insertion that regulates iridescence in swordtails, led by fantastic grad student @nadiahaghani.bsky.social and with help from many coauthors! In a time that has been so difficult to navigate, this & other projects have kept my spirits up: shorturl.at/NE65A

It's out, Minos transgenesis in the pantry moth by @donyaniyaz.bsky.social @lucalivraghi.bsky.social High efficient, glowing eye and silk gland markers peerj.com/articles/202... @peerj.bsky.social

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 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

@royalsocietypublishing.org @royalsociety.org Greetings, is your journal server down? please let me know if this will fixed shortly or if there is a workaround, I need students to access Biology Letters for a class 🫶 Thanks!

A month after Bari Weiss hired to lead CBS News division, heretic eugenics philosopher Jonathan Anomaly is on the morning show pitching bell curves and embryo scores. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvVM...

We must debunk this crap. Preimplantation diagnosis is much safer than germline editing & w/o slippery-slope ethics in 99.9% of hered. disease cases. Only exceptions are dominant genet conditions where 1 parent is homozygous, with extremely rare occurences for Huntington's, some AD and BRCA

Looks cool 👀

When all your PCRs fail, except for the negative control 😱

Heredity did a podcast on our paper from Nitin's dissertation! Listen to learn more about the cool results.

I'll be heading to @sacnas.bsky.social #NDiSTEM later this week to shamelessly plug my soon-to-open lab (Fall 2026). If any students are interested in studying the plant-insect interactions of the Sonoran Desert, please get in touch!

Not today, parasitic #wasps!✋🚫 #Stinkbugs use a fungus-carrying organ on their hind legs to coat their eggs in #fungi🍄🦵 This provides a physical defense against #parasitic wasp oviposition🛡️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Rod Page @rdmpage.bsky.social spoke today at #LivingData2025 about journals that disappear from the web. To learn more about his example: the hijacking and fraudulent DOI Assignment of The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera, see our BHL blogpost: blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2022/10/jour...

New preprint up with collaborators Jianguo Lu, @mpodobnik.bsky.social, Uwe Irion, Braedan McCluskey, John Postlethwait and others. New Danio genomes, evolution and pigment pattern variation. Long time in the making www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The final version of our paper on how ants and possibly other insects use a crazy mechanism involving extensive transcriptional interference to regulate odorant receptor expression is now open access in my favorite journal, @currentbiology.bsky.social authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Neuronal diversity is written in transcriptional codes 🧬. But what is the logic of these codes that define cell types and wiring patterns? To find out we built a #scRNAseq developmental atlas of the Drosophila nerve cord and linked it to the #connectome 🪰🧠 #preprint thread ⬇️1/8

We're excited to share with everyone a preprint of our manuscript that resolves the cellular origins of the symbiosome in cnidarian-algal symbiosis through proteomics of the symbiosome, RNAi, and CRISPR/Cas9 experiments. ⬇️ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Read on below! 1/12 🧵

Courtney Mattison, Gyre I, stoneware and porcelain, 2023. "references the fragility, diversity, and resilience of marine ecosystems" #sciart

I'm very excited to announce that UNC Biology has 6 faculty positions open this year! The first is for an Asst Professor who studies organismal resilience using an integrative approach 1/n unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lake Superior, 2003, silver gelatin print

New paper out! A nice collaboration. We explore how olfactory brain structures and receptors evolved across this remarkable group, Heliconiini butterflies.

My entry for today’s #FluorescenceFriday: a pupal #Drosophila testis with muscles expressing 🔵 lifeact & 🔴 RFP-nls Honored & grateful to receive an honorable mention at @healthcare.nikon.com Nikon Small World 🌍🔬✨ 🔗 www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/20... #NikonSmallWorld #Microscopy #ScienceArt

It's official! We are moving to Stowers! Very exciting opportunity to expand our studies of insect-plant interactions. We have many opportunities available in biochemistry, development, behavior, genetics, evolution, genomics, AI, and even pest control. Interested in any of these things? Reach out!

Calling early-career developmental biologists! Apply for a funded place at our #Workshop, Novelty, Co-option and Divergence During Gene Network Evolution. Application deadline: 5 December www.biologists.com/workshops/ju... #DevBio #BiologistsWorkshops #Collaboration #Networking

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]

Our lab is 2.5 years into #ERC funding✨ Grateful for the support that enabled us to uncover the syncytial nerve net in a ctenophore - a discovery reshaping our understanding of nervous system evolution. Stay tuned for more exciting discoveries to come @erc.europa.eu www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DAE...

Flybase lost all of the NIH support overnight - it is a disaster for the community. Please consider donating. I just did! www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

The buff-tip moth (Phalera bucephala) has mastered a very particular kind of camouflage. When they close their wings up, they resemble a broken twig. Native to large parts of Europe, there's regional pattern variation that reflects the local tree species. This one best resembles birch twigs?

Look at this crazy thing! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

USDA post-doc position in Hilo (HI) in new lab of Chan Heu. Functional genomics (CRISPR, RNAi, transgenics, etc.) in tephritid pests of agriculture. www.zintellect.com/Opportunity/...

Another big paper by Francesco and members of the lab @ebablab.bsky.social. 😍👏

Among insects, lepidoptera 🦋 show one of the most diverse photoreceptor types 👁, explaining diverse spectral sensitivities including a convergent evolution of red vision. Lu & Kronforst review the lepidopteran eye evolution. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

how I feel using the keyence

Orange tip, Anthocharis cardamines. Five years after I found the butterfly, I was finally able to photograph the caterpillar and the pupa 🎉

Enhancers are "just DNA" - finding all of them in the genome is hard. www.nature.com/articles/s41...