Time for a thread on our Christmas preprint “Origin and evolution of acrocentric chromosomes in human and great apes”. I had so much fun with this project and paper. It will be hard to summarize in a thread, but I’ll try www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... [1/21]

This was such a fun project. Adam's thread on it is a great summary!

Origin and evolution of acrocentric chromosomes in human and great apes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.22.696095v1

Congratulations, To you, Steven and Prajna. Super cool findings.

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!

periodic reminder of the existence of Atkinson Hyperlegible, a free font available from the Braille Institute designed to improve readability for people with low vision I use it in talks because it's pretty and also because, as an audience member, I am perpetually squinting at people's slides

As the Moon eclipsed the Sun on 8 April 2024, birds took note. Leveraging nature’s own experiment, scientists and the public joined forces to show how different species responded to sudden midafternoon darkness followed by a new “dawn.” Learn more this week in Science: https://scim.ag/48WbhLL

🦒Long read giraffe is out!🦒 Mapping long reads to pangenome graphs is ~10x faster than with GraphAligner, with veeery slightly better mapping accuracy, short variant calling, and SV genotyping than GraphAligner or Minimap2

Our work looking at the effects of using autosomal assumptions for calling variation on X and Y. We used simulated data to compare to a ground truth. Tldr: Accurate ploidy is important for reducing false positives; appropriate alignment reduces false negatives. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The human pangenome continues to grow and improve! Release 2 is here! Click through for the details, but this is a pretty amazing dataset including not just the phased assemblies, but PacBio HiFi, ONT Ultralong, Dovetail/Illumina Hi-C, PacBio Kinnex, and Illumina WGS for all samples

📢 HPRC Release 2 is here! Now with phased genomes from 200+ individuals, a 5x increase from Release 1. Explore sequencing data, assemblies, annotations & alignments in our interactive data explorer ⬇️: humanpangenome.org/hprc-data-re...

Our primate T2T paper came out in Nature yesterday! It was a huge effort and I'm so grateful that I got the opportunity to work with this amazing group of scientists over the first two years of my PhD! www.nature.com/articles/s41...