Please get in contact if you are interested in studying the evolution of plants and their pathogens combining contemporary and ancient DNA! #aDNA Check our latest publications here: www.burbanolab.org/publications

Current UCL students – join us for an information event about Bioscience master’s degrees with refreshments. “How to get a Master’s” will be held on Thursday 5 February starting at 4pm in UCL Anatomy Building G29 JZ Young Lecture Theatre. Register here: https://forms.office.com/e/s3BV1AvKXD

Looking for something new to integrate into an #evolution or #microbiology course? Useful for lectures, labs, homework? Have a look at our STEPS program, which simulates bacterial evolution, including the #LTEE. Easy web-based interface & lab manual w/ exercises to help develop students' intuition.

New Teaching Tool! blog.aspb.org/new-teaching... Check out the latest unit in the Teaching Tools in Plant Biology series, “Genomic Analysis of Botanical Collections: Opportunities and Challenges,” by M. Deglialberti, C. Paleni, F. Fainelli, C. Lambertini, & Silvia Manrique. @tank-silvia.bsky.social

See UGI's Dr Marina Escalera Zamudio (Rosetrees Fellow) and Dr Cenk Celik (Research Fellow) @cenkcelik.bsky.social presenting at the Norwich Science Festival @niscifest.bsky.social session on "Reimagining Health with Big Data". norwichsciencefestival.co.uk/whats-on/rei... #NISF26

A new preprint from the lab, with postdoc @deboraycb.bsky.social and collaborators @aidaandres.bsky.social and Tim Connallon: “Characterising the detectable and invisible fractions of genomic loci under balancing selection” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New species of oomycete named after Sophien Kamoun @kamounlab.bsky.social 🥳 🥳

Join Peter Grant FLS FRS & Rosemary Grant FRS on Wed 4 March as they discuss their landmark research on Darwin’s finches and how new species form. Peter and Rosemary are renowned evolutionary biologists, having studied these finches on the Galápagos islands since 1973. buff.ly/ZbYnmf2

NLR-like immunity in bacteria A new study from the Alex Gao lab. The scope of this work is incredible!!! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Welcome to Term 2! ❄️ We hope you had a restful break and are feeling ready for the weeks ahead. As the campus comes back to life this winter, we’re excited to welcome back our returning students and say a warm hello to those joining us for the first time this term. #WelcomeToUCL 📸: @yuislucky

Congrats Saskia! @saskiahogenhout.bsky.social

Beautiful study of the population history of Sudan, including a striking signature of adaptive admixture in the Duffy-null blood group gene, potentially as a mechanism of local adaptation to Plasmodium. Congratulations @lvilavalls.bsky.social, what a great regal de reis!

Proud to announce SimPhyNI, a new tool for bacterial GWAS with higher precision and scalability than existing tools. Try it out and let us know what you think!!

The distinction between virulent & temperate phages gets fuzzier if one can find so many virulent phages in the sequences of bacterial genomes coming from standard lab "pure" cultures. Check Peter's thread on our work and the N&V by Carson & Hynes: doi.org/10.1038/s415... #phagesky #microsky

New preprint on pop #genomics of #spittlebug—the main insect vector of Xylella, the bacterium that has ravaged olive groves in southern Italy 🇮🇹 🫒 Take-home: problematic insect vector may be less widespread than initially thought—important implications for disease control 💥 👇

Congratulations to Johannes for his #LeibnizPreis, Germany’s most prestigious research funding award. @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social

Rewriting the code of plant immunity- New approaches to engineering plant immunity can more broadly protect crops against pathogens and disease, once they get through regulatory hurdles. @resurrectbio.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s415...

ICYMI, this new preprint is just awesome. "Here, we show that O-antigen–dependent trade-offs between pathogenicity and interbacterial competition have persisted for over two centuries in natural P. viridiflava populations." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We are thrilled to announce the first official release (v0.1.8) of #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗿, the successor to one of our flagship tool, #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀! Based on ideas we conceived of long ago (!), this was achieved thanks to the dedication of Brent Pedersen. 1/n

Cool work from my colleagues @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social just dropped! Merlin Szymanski, @janetk.bsky.social et al. developed quicksand, a fast, accurate and beautifully designed Nextflow pipeline for taxonomic classification of mammalian mtDNA from ancient sediment DNA. doi.org/10.1093/molb...

Boris Shraiman points a physicist’s eye on biological quandaries news.ucsb.edu/2025/022264/... 🧪

A PNAS Special Feature exclusively about dogs? Woof! Here are 3 of the 8 that we were involved with. Congrats to @lachiescarsbrook.bsky.social & @undeaddandy.bsky.social Dingoes! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... German Shepherds! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Imputation! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

An amazing paper! Give it a read - you won’t be disappointed.

We (Nordborg & Weigel labs) need input on the next generation of genome browsers & data download modes for the #Arabidopsis #1001GenomesPlus project. We have now a curated collection of over 500 long read genomes. Please help us by filling out this questionnaire: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

And now we have Arabidopsis plants with 8 chromosomes instead of 10 and no obvious phenotypic differences, this week in @science.org #PlantScience Paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Perspective here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Fascinating study! A pathogen locked in an evolutionary trade-off with strain antagonism for centuries and HGT has not caused escaping it 🤔

#PhageSky A bacterial long-term evolutionary tradeoff, dating as far as 200 years in the past. Very proud to have a small contribution in this great work from Karasov & Burbano Labs led by @taliamycota.bsky.social & Jiajun Cui & Emma Caullireau. Please read the thread by @hernanaburbano.bsky.social:

Our new collaborative work led by @taliamycota.bsky.social Jiajun Cui & Emma Caullireau between my lab @ucllifesciences.bsky.social @cloeucl.bsky.social & the Karasov Lab (tkarasovlab.org) @uofubiology.bsky.social and collaborators: @plantricia.bsky.social et al. tinyurl.com/5yx2wmz5 (1/n)

A PhD project on historical genomics in the declining red squirrel in Britain is available in my group, through the @aries-dtp.bsky.social. Use historical genomes to track the effects of decline and genetic rescue in this charismatic species. aries-dtp.ac.uk/studentships...

A fantastic day of talks and discussions. Thanks to the organisers and @gensocuk.bsky.social

It's been a busy few months for our group so wanted to highlight a few other recent preprints we’ve posted that I haven’t had the chance to share yet... (1/n)

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Our research, published today in Science, reveals remarkable concordance between human and dog genomes through time, highlighting how deeply intertwined our evolutionary histories have been over the past 11,000 years. 🔗 Read the full paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

What a great week at Nanjing Agricultural University! Huge thanks to Prof. Souomeng Dong for the invitation to share my research and to his entire team for being such generous hosts. I learned so much from hearing about their work and am thrilled about our future plans together

Pleased to share our review on S-layers with @bupbuse.bsky.social, Andriko von Kügelgen, and @tbharat-lab.bsky.social, where we explore recent advances and argue that deeper insight into S-layers is key to deciphering microbial interactions and community organization. @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social

Great to have Priya Moorjani visit UGI and give a talk on inferring Neanderthal ancestry in ancient individuals, and to share a bit about her work on Indian genetics, including insights into the evolution of lactase persistence.

🌱 Postdoc position in Plant Genomics/Bioinformatics! Love genome plasticity, computational methods, and solving big questions in plant biology? Join our newly established Institute for Crop Biology at HHU Düsseldorf. More info on schneebergerlab.org/career/ Apply by Nov. 30 | 3-year position

Applications due by Dec. 1

Looking forward to seeing David Moi's talk about Foldtree and the upcoming Foldtree II at #APSPM2026 in sunny Brisbane. biosig.lab.uq.edu.au/strphy26/spe... @official-smbe.bsky.social

Plz RP. Come join us at @slcuplants.bsky.social @cam.ac.uk to study effector-targeted plant processes impacting plant cell biology and development. www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/post-do... www.schornacklab.net

Nice, intelligent review of my book "The Tree of Life" in Nature Ecology and Evolution by @bethanyjallen.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.amazon.co.uk/Tree-Life-So... Out in USA next Tuesday! www.amazon.com/Tree-Life-So...

Hey Yaniv Brandvain is not on Bluesky but his most recent biostats ebook is live ybrandvain.github.io/biostats/. His stats resources have been so helpful to me as I develop my own stats course, so check it out. Github repo here: github.com/ybrandvain/b...

This month is my turn to bust science myths in our institute's mini-videos series. This month's topic: fruit flies and evolution! 🪰🧬 @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social

Have you recently read about a particular field in depth? Perhaps you have just finished your PhD thesis? @jevbio.bsky.social is seeking Review Articles! Find out more about Reviews and Target Reviews at JEB here: academic.oup.com/jeb/pages/re...

In a new paper led by Jiaqi Yang we trace the distribution of Denisovan introgressed DNA in ancient modern human genomes over time. www.cell.com/current-biol...

We have just published a paper in Genome Biology, rdcu.be/eIMLf. We explore the information flow between genome, gene body methylation, transcriptome, translatome and proteome in Arabidopsis. This is part of a BBSRC-funded collaboration with UCL, Rothamsted Research and University of Cambridge.

Excited to share that I’ve been awarded an @snsf.ch Ambizione grant to begin my independent research, starting summer 2026 at the Institute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zürich! I will use (epi)genomics to study altitude adaptation in Arabis alpina - stay tuned for more updates & PhD opportunities!

You like phages ? In this publication, we use metaHiC and our new version of the MetaTOR pipeline to challenge the traditional view of phages with a narrow host range. @rkoszul.bsky.social @natmicrobiol.nature.com @cnrs.fr @institutpasteur.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/ So pleased to share our paper on genetic adaptation to micronutrients in humans! Our biggest conclusion? Trace minerals in the diet have shaped human evolution far more than previously appreciated 🧬🌍👇 www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltex...

Jasmin Rees PhD chapter as a paper just out at the AJHG @ajhgnews.bsky.social, with Sergi Castellano, who first envisioned the study. Jas investigated signatures of human local genetic adaptation in hundreds of micronutrient-associated genes.

Our latest work on how chloroplasts contribute to immunity: Membrane contact sites between chloroplasts and the pathogen interface underpin plant focal immune responses url: academic.oup.com/plcell/artic...