Grateful to have worked with such an incredible team on this project. Excited to finally share this story about Top2 evolution and hybrid incompatibility in Drosophila. More to come!

DEADLINE APPROACHING! Apply to Zebrafish Development and Genetics by March 2. This two-week course is designed advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and independent investigators. Financial aid is available. 🔗More info here: go.mbl.edu/zebrafish

This is the true State of the Union, such as it is

I sat down with Dr. Jenna Norton, an NIH employee & my guest at the People’s State of the Union. She was put on leave by the Trump Admin after speaking truth to power. Dr. Norton told me Trump’s actions risked creating a super-bug that would endanger us all.

Read this article if you want to be even more infuriated.

So well deserved! Congratulations @ishmailsaboor.bsky.social!

As of tonight, licenses of trans people across Kansas are being invalidated en masse, enabling the overnight criminalization of an entire group of people for going about our lives. It’s often said you never know when you’re living through history, so let me assure you: that’s what’s happening now.

1. Numerous transgender people in Kansas are reporting that the state has sent them a letter demanding the immediate surrender of drivers licenses. Those driving could be arrested, charged, and see privileges revoked. Subscribe to support our journalism. www.erininthemorning.com/p/kansas-sen...

Are you a grad student or postdoc who needs financial assistance to attend #Evol2026 in person? SSE offers registration waivers for the early registration rate - apply by March 15! www.evolutionsociety.org/content/soci...

Proposals due Monday, March 2 for the Small Grants for Local and Regional Outreach! This program awards up to $1,000 USD for a variety of evolution education and outreach projects, workshops, and events. Apply now! shorturl.at/I8HqO

We have a postdoc position available. Please forward to anyone who may be interested.

Cara will continue her work on coevolution between DNA satellites and essential host proteins in her new lab in the Dept of Genetics at Rutgers! See: genetics.rutgers.edu/people/facul...

So excited to share this manuscript led by the inimitable Cara Brand, who discovered that Topoisomerase II evolution causes hybrid female lethality in Drosophila. Congrats to Cara, @nickbr0wn.bsky.social, Anirban, and @buszczaklab.bsky.social! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Judge Goodwin: "An anonymous government is no government at all. It cannot be held accountable. A masked agent freely uses force without justifying his actions, and the public cannot name him to challenge his conduct. A regime of secret policing has no place in our society."

Bay Area Popgen. FREE awesome popgen conference. Registration and application for talks now live on our website!

“Trainees are the most vulnerable people in science... They are the ones with new ideas, where a lot of our hope resides. Now they are losing their minds with worry about what comes next...” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Congratulations to Mariana Byndloss @maribyndloss.bsky.social for her promotion to Associate Professor with tenure at Vanderbilt University @vanderbilt.edu Photo credit: Bäumler lab archives

The next BAPG has been announced! April 11 at Davis organized by the inimitable @jrossibarra.bsky.social! bapg-conference.github.io

BREAKING: The Department of Education has ended its directive that attempted to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools nationwide. This is a victory for academic freedom and education equity.

Why are some males caring toward infants while others are neglectful or abusive? I'm so pleased to share work that my colleagues and I @princeton.edu have just published @nature.com (an explanatory thread to follow!) (1/8)

Our paper is now out in Nature: “Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres” www.nature.com/articles/s41... A short thread on how retrotransposons helped give rise to yeast point centromeres. 1/14

If you're an #EcoEvo #PhD candidate anywhere in the world looking for project funding, consider applying for the @asn-amnat.bsky.social Student Research Award. Ten proposals for $2k in research funds will be awarded. Due 13 March 2026. Please share widely! 🧪 #grants #ecology #evolution #behavior

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.” - 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas. Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children. www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

Great news for anyone using ARGs in non-model species: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

👥 SMBE is accepting proposals to host its 2029 International meeting; expressions of interest from a prospective local organizing committee headed by an SMBE member should be sent ASAP 🗓️ Aug 30 2026 ✉️ [email protected] Please consult our Conference Guidelines: smbe.org/conference-guidelines

Aspergillus fumigatus - 29.9 crossovers per homologous chromosome pair! That makes about 1500 recombination map units per chromosome....

"Early studies suggest versions of mRNA vaccines could be effective against certain kinds of cancer too. Now companies will have to wonder if the animus towards mRNA vaccine will spill over into those efforts too."

We are holding our annual Rising Stars in Genetics and Genomics Postdoc Symposium on September 24-25, 2026! Please nominate postdocs who are conducting cutting edge, creative work, and are likely to be a leader in their field. Please nominate by April 30, 2026: forms.gle/85NZaxFezUk8... (1/2)

How does the piRNA pathway solve the self vs. non-self problem? 🧬 Since piRNAs come from single-stranded RNA, how does the cell choose the right ones? For years, "piRNA clusters" were seen as THE privileged source. But are they really special and earmarked for biogenesis? (1/19)

This is a genuinely huge, sweeping victory today for the University of California—or rather, for us, its faculty, acting through our faculty associations, while the UC itself maintained a strict policy of deer-in-headlights silence. The Trump admin has given up its appeal of a powerful injunction:

Biological Sciences 2/11

Lab celebrated Darwin day in style

Moderna has 2 trials for EBV vaccines in Phase 1/2 and Phase 2. EBV is now widely believed to be a causative agent for Multiple Sclerosis. Just under 3 million people in the world, about 1 million in the US have MS. trials.modernatx.com/study/?id=mR... trials.modernatx.com/study/?id=mR...

We have posted a Research Assistant (LSRP1) position to work on aging and 'rejuvenation' using mouse models!! 🐭 careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/life-sc... Apply and join our awesome lab!! (please share) 😎

We should talk more about the graduate admissions crisis that's taking shape in the US. Talking to colleagues across universities, many graduate programs are slashing admission numbers and reducing class sizes substantially for the upcoming academic year. This is shortsighted

NEW: Another NIH institute director hasn't been renewed — the director of NIAMS (arthritis, musculoskeletal and skin diseases institute). That leaves a whopping 15 of 27 institutes and centers without a permanent director.

This isn't shortread data, but alignments of genome assemblies with N50 > 100Mb. The plot is the # of bp per 100Kb window that are dropped because of missing data -- because those bp physically are not there in one of the other 25 genomes. This is what normal plant genomes look like, folks.

A position with prospects! We offer excellent researchers again the possibility to apply for a position as a Leader of a Lise Meitner Research Group in all areas of #science. Applications are possible between February 11th and April 15th, 2026. www.mpg.de/lise-meitner... #lisemeitnergroups

“Success in US science has come from sustained funding and welcoming the best talent from around the world, yet both of these advantages are in decline” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Research suggests that the observed cytotoxicity in certain experiments may be due to ivermectin precipitates, not the dissolved drug itself. At the concentrations required to kill cancer cells in lab settings, ivermectin may become toxic. Uh... what? Why are we continuing to study this?

NEW: The FDA just shot down Moderna's new flu shot. From me: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Holy shit—a terrible waste of $$ Bhattacharya is so kooky “If lots of people believe it & it’s moving public health, we as NIH have an obligation, again, to treat it seriously,” Bhattacharya said at a MAHA event Great reporting by @rachanadpradhan.bsky.social kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

ICE has now spent over half a BILLION dollars just on purchasing warehouses around the country to convert into detention camps. If these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they'll be the largest prisons in the country, with little real oversight. www.ajc.com/politics/202...

Fun news! @gcbias.bsky.social and I are teaching a 2-week online population genetics workshop this summer to raise money for the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis. We're trying to gauge interest -- please fill this out if you might be interested! And please share broadly!

We're excited to be recruiting an NSF funded postdoc to work in the Villanea lab at CU Boulder. We're specifically interested in candidates who want to work at the intersection of population genetics, ancient DNA, and computer modeling. Please RT jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta...

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken. Hundreds of kids are still detained. We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

This is a powerful message from Freeman Hrabowski. 🧵 1/12

@rbirger.bsky.social just reminded me that I defended my PhD 10 years ago today! Can’t decide if it feels that long ago or not — Princeton EEB was such a wonderful grad community

I think we have to be very careful here. The appropriations bills are one thing, but as you all know, this administration has a bag of dirty tricks they have and will continue to use to undermine research and frankly, methodically chip away at it until it is a shell of its former self. 1/

If you are upset about the WP layoffs and the billionaire takeover of the press, consider cancelling your Amazon Prime membership and stop giving them so much business. It took us a while to adjust from the convenience of it when we quit but it was worth it.