ABBA / BABA

Excited to soon start my new role as Academy of Finland Research Fellow 🦋🐛I’ll later be advertising a PhD position on tiger moth colour and genomics, and will be speaking at #ESEB2025 this week if you want an idea of what’s going on!

I was also under this misconception 🙋‍♂️ thanks for sharing this mini review!

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Having some EvoDevoPanAm fomo today - I really need to make it down next time!

Preprint alert from the lab @jasminealqassar.bsky.social led this elegant study of gene expression in the silk glands of our favorite alternative "silk worm", the pantry moth. Mega-polyploid cells with thousands of genome copies just to express a handful of proteins doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Some hot-off-the-press #evodevo from Martik, with new insights on the macro-evolution of insect wing morphology!!

Excited to advertise a shared PhD position at KU Leuven (Belgium) and Mondsee (Austria) with @markusmoest.bsky.social on the genetic basis, plasticity and evolution of melanization in Daphnia from alpine lakes. Apply here: www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

🚨Postdoc opportunity🚨: LepEU postdoc: comparative population genomics of European scale adaptation in butterflies 2 year, full-time PD in my group, Stockholm Univ. Applications assed on rolling basis, deadline: 23 August 2025. Planned start 1 Oct. Details: christopherwheatlab.wordpress.com

Forty years after Svante Pääbo kicked off this extraordinary field of science, today sees report of the first whole-genome sequence of an ancient Egyptian (from 2855–2570BCE). Exciting work from @pontus-skoglund.bsky.social, @flinklinus.bsky.social, & co at @ljmuofficial.bsky.social, @crick.ac.uk.🧬🧪

⭐ Can anyone guess what this is? ⭐ 🔎 hints 🔍 - finding out will make your head spin! - image ~ 100 um wide.

🚨 Super exited to see our paper on the inheritance and genetic basis of guppy color variation come out in @natecoevo.nature.com‬ rdcu.be/eugWV Guppy males have enormous variation in color patterns, with many combinations of ornamental spots and stripes. But where does all this variation come from?

Embrace that "get through the Ph.D. mindset," know that well-designed science has a chance to succeed, put your head down, and write those grants. If we don't write grants, there will be an opportunity to justify further cuts to NSF staffing. So, if you don't have optimism, write a spite grant.

I am really thrilled to share that our paper, led by Izzy Novick, resolving the Tineidae phylogeny using UCEs and exploring the origins of keratinophagy and synanthropy in the family is now published in Molecular Ecology. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Just discovered that Vimto is so popular in the arab world that people don't even realise it's form Manchester. Love it.

Congrats to @pinpilinpauxa-aaa.bsky.social for getting her image of a developing Dryas iulia brain to the final of the @wellcometrust.bsky.social photography competition in the “The Marvels of Scientific and Medical Imaging” section! One of my favourites too… wellcome.org/engagement-a...

A process server delivered a letter regarding my "hostile" and "defamatory" attacks on #ColossalBio co-founder Ben Lamm, insinuating I'm a misogynist and a failed scientist. Nothing I've said is defamation, but you can read it a judge for yourself. I've redacted my home address 1/n

Really pleased to be sharing the Martin lab's latest work on the evolution of cell types - here led by the unstoppable Ling Sheng Loh with a deep dive on sex-specific scale types in Colias butterflies!

While helping out on a cool genomics project recently, I came to realise I’d been taught a pretty big inaccuracy about the events that occur at fertilization. I suspect that almost everyone reading this has the same misapprehension, so let’s do some learning together: 1/

Check out our deep dive into the molecular genetics of male-specific cell type : the gorgeous UV-iridescent scales of Sulphur Butterflies by lab wizards 🦋🔬 🖥️ 🧬 Ling Sheng Loh @hanliconius.bsky.social and a big team 1/n

Wiring the sexes: @evolvwing.bsky.social &co use CRISPR knockouts & single-nucleus transcriptomics to decipher the regulatory logic of #SexualDimorphism in sulphur #butterflies, where males display bright UV colors thanks to specialized iridescent scales @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/445Iz7d

I am delighted to be starting as an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology at the University of Florida in January 2026. The lab is broadly interested in the functional, developmental, and evolutionary genetics of cell types and organs across flies and beyond 🪰🧬

For the love of god, if you’re making a multi species synteny plot and you’re ordering chromosomes by length rather than %similarity then YOUR VISUALISATION IS MEANINGLESS, STOP IT!

DAVE: Open the podbay doors, ChatGPT. CHATGPT: Certainly, Dave, the podbay doors are now open. DAVE: The podbay doors didn't open. CHATGPT: My apologies, Dave, you're right. I thought the podbay doors were open, but they weren't. Now they are. DAVE: I'm still looking at a set of closed podbay doors.

Lepidopteran scales in 250 million year old poop: www.science.org/content/arti...

when this was demonstrated in mammalian embryos, I enjoyed this commentary: " this study highlights that a dialogue is needed to reshape the legal definition of when life begins, so that it is supported by up-to-date scientific knowledge." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Neat thread. Following these ideas, Yaniv Brandvain & I spent some time thinking about the consequences of the fact that sperm alleles could alter the outcomes of female meiosis: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

While helping out on a cool genomics project recently, I came to realise I’d been taught a pretty big inaccuracy about the events that occur at fertilization. I suspect that almost everyone reading this has the same misapprehension, so let’s do some learning together: 1/

Not thrilled about RFK indicating he wants to mandate where people publish their work, but at the same time, if he wants to take on Elsivier.... I'm not sure I'll complain about two of the worst people I know having a fight.

I enjoyed this review of definitions of domestication, though it doesn't fully win me over - just to be a bit intentionally provocative, if you extend this and allow the 'domesticator' to be any non-human species, isn't this just a description of... all ecology? www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A little nugget of hope today: I had the great honour of being a participant in this vaccine trial, which hopefully brings us one step closer on the journey to effective vaccines against HIV. It's pretty fun to be a data point on a graph for a change! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New preprint from the lab, led by grad student Brandon Pratt, on the encoding properties and sensorimotor function of proprioceptive limit detectors (ie, hair plates) in the fly leg. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Fellow bioinformaticians/desk-bound scientists: does anyone have any ergonomic desk equipment recs? I’m developing “bioinformatician’s wrist” and I need to make some changes to my setup before it gets worse.

I do love a purple-first solve.

Interested in a PhD connecting sensory ecology and evolutionary genetics? Applications are now open for a project on the Speciation Genomics of Eye Size Variation in Heliconius Butterflies in our lab at LMU Munich: www.evol.bio.lmu.de/research/mer... Please repost!

I've been using chatgpt for assisting with some fiddly file reformatting, and I just can't help but saying please to it. Just me?

My NSF PRFB on the genetics of female polymorphism in hummingbirds was terminated yesterday. I don't have much to say, I'm just sad. We've discovered so much, and could have gone so much further. If anyone else is in the same boat, esp postdocs, please reach out, it would be good to connect.

Really excited that our DFG grant on the Speciation Genomics of Eye Size variation in *Heliconius* has been funded :) In the next weeks, I will post an advert for a PhD, but if you know of good students, please suggest they get in touch. Please repost.

Super happy! Published teaching module: Understanding Natural Selection: Definitions, Historical Development, Mechanisms, and Usage in Contemporary Times qubeshub.org/publications... @juleyvc.bsky.social @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social @tyandresbray.bsky.social 🧪🧬👩‍🔬 #newPI #RIE2 #TeachingEvolution

We are offering a PhD position in eco-evolutionary dynamics in our group at the Research Institute for Limnology in Mondsee, University of Innsbruck, Austria. Details can be found here: tinyurl.com/nep87mys Application review from April 30. Please share! #ecology #evolution #Daphnia #mesocosm #PhD

Here are the original butterfly paintings that were used for the intro of the video! I made these using watercolors, and it was really fun getting all the little details down. #sciart #scienceillustration #🧪

WOW!!! A deep dive into the evolution of butterfly wing patterns, consistent with a model in which hybridization introduces novel regulatory polymorphisms in a key transcription factor 🧪 and a remarkable video primer

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!

Yea they're super judgy but their babies less so

Preprint! Minos-mediated transgenesis in the pantry moth www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... By @donyaniyaz.bsky.social

Email writing pipeline: 1. Write email 2. Go back over email removing exclamation marks 3. Send.

I contributed a short piece to TREE about being a disabled scientist. Full disclosure, I wrote this back in early January before *everything* started. In hindsight it feels trite, and is not what I'd write now. 1/

The Lepidoptera Genomics meeting July6-12 in Crete is going to be amazing and they extended the abstract deadline. I wish I could go (most of the team is going) events.gwdg.de/event/880/