"The era of the business idiot" freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/87139

this is how you science: "What’s True About the Evolution of Men’s Greater Average Height?- Why men are taller than women may have nothing to do with testosterone—or sexual selection." from @dunsworth.bsky.social and @prosocialworld.bsky.social www.prosocial.world/posts/whats-...

A nice opinion paper (doi.org/10.1016/j.pb... ) from @anneroulin.bsky.social that highlights the need for caution when generalizing about the importance of TEs in local plant adaptation. #TEsky #transposon

Now TWO great new papers on why frequencies of disease genes rarely match expectations Here was the first: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

GWAS has been an incredible discovery tool for human genetics: it regularly identifies *causal* links from 1000s of SNPs to any given trait. But mechanistic interpretation is usually difficult. Our latest work on causal models for this is out yesterday: www.nature.com/articles/s41... A short🧵:

RegEvol: detection of directional selection in regulatory sequences through phenotypic predictions and phenotype-to-fitness functions https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.26.690685v1

Excited to share our latest preprint! @mheuertz.bsky.social & I just completed a review covering methods and empirical studies on adaptive introgression in a climate context. We likely missed a few refs & ideas, so your feedback is highly welcome (ideally by email)! Preprint➡️ doi.org/10.32942/X2B...

The domestic cat may be a far more recent arrival to Europe than previously thought, a new Science study. finds. The results offer new insight into one of humanity’s most enigmatic animal companions and identify North Africa as the cradle of the modern housecat. Learn more: https://scim.ag/44kov1S

I taught (and co-taught) a course on human population genetics from 2000-2024. Having retired, I'm now making all the course materials public: github.com/alanrogers/p... #popgen #evbio

We set out to investigate polygenic footprints of altitude adaptation in a moth species, but instead we uncovered a major selective sweep at genes often associated with insecticide resistance @prrnhd.bsky.social @schifanoalexandre.bsky.social @mgda76.bsky.social @cbgpmontpellier.bsky.social

An efficient, accessible solution for #genome annotation in both research and applied settings www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Début 2025, un gigantesque incendie a ravagé plus de la moitié de l’île Amsterdam. De retour sur place plusieurs mois après, des scientifiques tentent d’en estimer les conséquences sur ce havre de biodiversité à la croisée de l’océan Indien et de l’Antarctique.

Thrilled to finally share the magnum opus of my PhD that focuses on the genetic basis of evolutionary change! Specifically, we know we can map the genetic basis of a trait, but can we tell which genes will underlie the trait shift when it evolves? doi.org/10.1101/2025...

SG: The 'forgotten' curve - the problem of p values. The chance that your replicate experiment of an experiment with p=0.05 will be reproducible is only 0.5 - it's a toss up! Science publication is Darwinian: a survival pressure to publish. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.... #IRICSydney

Le groupe LVMH de Bernard Arnault va devenir entièrement propriétaire du magazine économique « Challenges » et des revues « Sciences et Avenir » et « La Recherche ». Les salariés craignent de voir leur indépendance s'envoler. Lire l'article ➡️ https://l.reporterre.net/S0B

This is out now: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Association between lactase persistence and height in the past (indicating people with the persistence allele were better nourished by drinking milk than those without it) provides a potential explanation for why it was under strong selection.

We are in Bluesky and we are happy to share our two last consortium publications: the DrosEU expanded DEST dataset and a Continent-wide study of phenotypic differentiation among European #Drosophila melanogaster populations (1/7)

Genetic architectures of #ComplexTraits vary widely. @yuvalsim.bsky.social @jkpritch.bsky.social @gs2747.bsky.social &co show these diffs arise from mutational target size & heritability per site; when controlled for, all tested traits have similar architectures @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/47mZXqT

7 reasons to use Bayesian inference! statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/10/11/7...

Just published an interactive article about a magical algorithm known as the Burrows-Wheeler Transform, which powers sequence alignment tools like bowtie and bwa: sandbox.bio/concepts/bwt It's also notoriously unintuitive so I'm hoping this article helps you build that intuition.

Molecular evolution of dietary shifts in ladybirds 🐞 expansions of digestive & detoxifying #gene families in the herbivorous ladybirds, & absence of most plant cell wall-degrading enzymes in the ladybirds from the transition to carnivory link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Red devil spiders from the Canary Islands have a genome half the size of mainland counterparts - Pisarenco, @jrozasub.bsky.social et al. show how purifying selection against slightly deleterious DNA and TE insertions is the primary mechanism. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf206 #evobio #molbio #TEsky

Does #dengue virus hijack #mosquitoes' brain? Study led by Felix Hol @pasteur.fr discovered that infected mosquitoes take smaller blood meals. As a result, they bite more often, and potentially infect infect more people. (video in French with English subtitles available) youtu.be/2u_qckfAQa4?...

Dogs are humanity's best friend—but how long has it been that way? 🐕 This Science study investigated ancient dog genomes, revealing a complicated genetic legacy that reflects a long, shared history with humans. Learn more on #InternationalDogDay: https://scim.ag/41mQvR6

For those interested: 🚀 BayPass v3.1 released! 🔹 Improved MCMC adaptive phase 🔹 Computation reduced >6X with default (recommended) options, while keeping similar accuracy 🔹 Plus other minor edits 📖 Details in the manual / changelog 🔗 Repo: forge.inrae.fr/mathieu.gaut...

interesting pre-print arxiv.org/abs/2408.07300

doi.org/10.1093/molb... Thrilled to share our new paper in MBE! 🎉 Presenting DEST 2.0: 530 pooled Drosophila populations spanning 12 years across 6 continents. We map genomic footprints of adaptation, from pesticide resistance to seasonal changes. #PopulationGenetics #Drosophila #Genomics #Evolution

If someone you know buys into claims about "genetic optimization" of embryos using polygenic scores of cognition, just send them our 2024 paper on Beethoven & musicality. We wrote it to help communicate limits of individual-level genetic predictions & complexity of links between DNA & behaviour. 🧪👇

In #GENETICS, Williams et al. present a novel statistics—haplotype score—for summarizing identity-by-descent (IBD) sharing that can distinguish half-sibling pairs from avuncular or grandparent-grandchildren pairs and assign individuals to ancestor vs descendant generation. buff.ly/SaZP3CA

In @elife.bsky.social: Effective population size does not explain long-term variation in genome size and transposable element content in animals doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...

We wrote a review on Transposable Elements (TEs) and almost all aspects of TE silencing and their roles in biological processes & disease. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks Kew! The paper itself can be found here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Is a world without #beer, #wine #sake #bread, #cheese livable or even imaginable? All of these delights & more, we owe to the domestication of one particular kind of #fungi by our ancestors. Jose Paulo Sampaio & Ana Pontes review the biology of #yeast domestication www.cell.com/current-biol...

Yay! @genomeofforrest.bsky.social work published today in PLoS Genetics. Forrest took a large maize common garden dataset and asked whether Environmental GWAS was actually useful for predicting which individuals would have highest fitness. Turns out, the answer is no. 1/2

🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬 Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025

❗🦟 Info @leparisien.fr : deuxième cas autochtone de #chikungunya en France hexagonale, cette fois à Prades-le-Lez dans l'Hérault (le premier était dans le Var). Ils vont vraisemblablement se multiplier cet été, au vu du grand nombre de cas importés - notamment de La Réunion. 1/n

Here we used population genomics to investigate a well-known case of allochronic divergence, reconstructing demographic history, assessing inbreeding and genetic load, and identifying loci associated with allochrony. @cbgpmontpellier.bsky.social

Nucleotide diversity 🧬 and k-mer-based metrics of genetic diversity across 112 plant 🌱 species, amounting to over 205 terabases of DNA sequencing data from 27,488 individuals academic.oup.com/evlett/advan... #biodiversity #genomics

Legendary singer, songwriter, and musician Sly Stone has died

We currently have a call for support that has gone out to European labs, to support FlyBase-UK. We are asking our colleagues from labs in the US and other countries to wait for a similar call to them that will go out in the near future, to support the US sites. We thank you for your patience.

The rest of Mendel's alleles characterized! So, out of 7 traits, 3 caused by TE insertions!!! (though apparently there are two different green alleles, one cause by a TE insertion, but another a promoter deletion allele) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fun collaboration with Mélodie Bastian and Nicolas Lartillot. Pi_S and Pi_N/Pi_S extracted from genome assemblies follow nearly neutral predictions across 150 mammals. Getting closer to getting the constraint controls needed to detect ancient epidemics mammals-wide. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Annotation of 200 insect genomes. Work driven by @stepbystepsolution.bsky.social and Mario Stanke within @gevol.bsky.social : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Comparative gene annotation of 304 species of Drosophilidae https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.14.648771v1

Excited to see our article on the cover! @drk-lo.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17550998...

Awesome new paper by @lucalivraghi.bsky.social et al. doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... in @currentbiology.bsky.social on the evo-devo of a butterfly color variation enjoy the show!

🚀 A new version of BayPass (v3.0) is now available for GEA/pGWAS analyses. This update brings support for Genotype-Likelihood data, hybrid datasets (allele counts and/or Pool-Seq and/or GL), or local-score computation (see updated manual). 🔗 forgemia.inra.fr/mathieu.gaut... #BayPass #popgen

Our study analyzing the DNA of ~7ky-old Pastoralists from the "Green Sahara" is out! Who were these people, and how did herding spread into the region when the present-day desert was dotted with water bodies? 🧬🦴🏜️ (1/7) #PopGen #GreenSahara #aDNA www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 Postdoc Opportunity in Quantitative & Population Genetics! We’re hiring a 2-year postdoc at CBGP (INRAE, Montpellier, France) to work on quantitative and population genetics applied to Drosophila biarmipes. 📍 More details: umr-cbgp.fr/rejoindre-le... #Postdoc #Genetics #Drosophila