#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....

¿Conoces casos de hormigas adheridas a otros animales? @adsalbert.bsky.social está recogiendo datos de este tipo de interacciones.

It's been a good few weeks for cool bird genomcis - incl this, on warblers sharing colour genes through hybridisation (with evidence of between-genus introgression journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Fantastic people and environment, wanna join? 👀

New paper out. If you like colorful birds, hybridization, and phylogenetics, read on! 🧵https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003501

I’m still in a bunch of immigration subreddits from when I was going thru the Green Card process. It’s transitioned from questions about form filing and wait times to people saying their family members have been taken by ICE and can’t be located.

Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :) The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used > neal.fun/size-of-life/

The meta AI automatic translation of Instagram reels is so smooth that I’m not 100% sure I’m not being pranked.

Excellent title - and I'm a sucker for mapping any de novo mutations in insect pigment and pattern mutants. In this case, the culprit seems to be an ncRNA!?!? resjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

I do love the irony that the article literally starts with... an accommodation for people who would find it easier to listen than read.

eyes progressively rolling harder and harder as i read through these threads today.

Seeking a postdoc position? ​Balancing selection is a fascinating process: malaria resistance, self-incompatibility,etc. Yet, countless examples remain hidden in genomes! ​If this question intrigues you, the project led by Laure Segurel and Violaine Llaurens (Paris + Lyon) is perfect! urlr.me/Huj2De

Amanda Sabatino, @jpjahner.bsky.social and I have a new paper on @biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social. Amanda, in her undergraduate thesis work, found variation in Colias colour phenotypes is associated with different metrics of urbanization in Toronto. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨RA/PhD position available in evolutionary neurobiology 🚨 Working on a deep dive into circuit changes during mushroom body expansion in Heliconius butterflies @camzoology.bsky.social - employment benefits - 4 years funding - 1000% fun Deadline: 14/1/2026 Details: www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

Team fish - we need your help! We are trying to build a database of all the fish chromosome-scale genomes where sex chromosomes have been identified. Have you build one or some? Do you know someone who has? Can you post the link in the comments? Please spread the word and repost! Thank you!

Does anyone know if there are any biographies of Alfred Sturtevant?

Can’t figure out which virus is killing your bacterial culture? Problematic phage gap.

Crossing the Spanish border from France on a train? Problematic gage gap.

In my capacity as your friendly neighbourhood blind person, I approve of this message.

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

Join us! 🧬🪰🎉🔬 We are currently advertising two #PhD projects to study the #evolution, #development and #genomics of sexual traits in stalk-eyed flies. Deadline for applying is Wednesday, January 7, 2026. Get in touch for more info!

These have to be some of the weirdest-looking nuclei that exist. What on earth is going on!?! Check out this thread and follow @jasminealqassar.bsky.social, who is working on the biology of secretory organs in Lepidoptera!

🚨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🧵

Putting aside the deeper issues of why this analysis was done and how it has been promoted, the choice to broadcast a tv show before releasing a preprint should make people skeptical of the results. How can one be sure of their scientific claims?

wild to me that whenever Epstein is in the news, bsky science folk are up in arms about a couple of famous academics who barely knew the guy rather than Martin Nowak, who took millions of Epstein dollars to run his lab, hosted Epstein there often, and somehow is still teaching at Harvard

Absolutely top notch preprint which has it all - a large effect mutation causing iridescence polymorphism, active TE as the basis of the mutation, AND ecological context for the phenotype. Cant wait for more on this!!!!

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

All I have to say is that this applies to some very senior academics who still get invited to give plenary talks at large conferences.

Minos transgenesis enables robust, stable germline integration of transgenes in Lepidoptera; providing a reliable alternative to piggyBac, whose native transposases can cause transgene remobilization or instability in moths and butterflies:

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

Wound healing is a hallmark feature of all life, including single cells. In a new preprint, Ambika Nadkarni @biochembika.bsky.social investigates a new dimension in cellular wound healing: how cells recover AFTER the wound has been closed www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

we all ready for Trumpsgiving?

what's that feeling? Hope?

A personal favorite, long time in the making. Adelina and David (@dduneau.bsky.social) were instrumental in getting this done. doi.org/10.1186/s129...

Explaining academic job searches to my brother and he says “so basically, you’re through to Judges’ Houses” - and like, yeah, no notes.

The Hopkins Lab (hopkins-lab.com) at the University of Florida is looking to recruit a postdoc to work on the genetics of organ function and evolution across Drosophila and beyond. Please visit tinyurl.com/vcsjpmzz or email me for more info. And please RT or send to anyone who might be interested!

My main PhD work @monteirolab.bsky.social is now in @natecoevo.nature.com! We found a Hox gene promoter that helps butterflies🦋adjust their wing eyespots in response to seasonal temperatures🍃🍂, shedding light on the evolutionary origin of phenotypic plasticity. 1/9 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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/

I've just seen, for the first time, a paper with author names both in latin characters and the language-of-origin characters. Apparently it's been Cell Press policy since 2021? I think this is great! I wonder if other journals have policies on this?

More journeys through fly gene etymologies.

Funded PhD position available 🎉 Come and work with me in Helsinki to uncover the pathways producing colourful tiger moth wings. Lots of options for genomics, CRISPR, fieldwork, behaviour experiments… Email with questions! jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki...

We're excited to be recruiting an NIH funded postdoc to work in the Coop lab at UC Davis. We're specifically interested in candidates who are want to work at the intersection of human genetics, GWAS, and population genetics modeling. Please RT

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!

👀👀

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!!