The end of an era: the Tree of Life Web Project is going dark after 3 decades. Anyone interested in communicating phylogeny online should read David's account of goals, history, and future. @bembidion.bsky.social subulatepalpomere.com/2025/11/02/t...

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

It's not every day that you get a new imputation reference panel. allofus-anvil-imputation.terra.bio

This is how I integrate Quarto and Zotero with minimal suffering (long rambling post, scroll down to the section on bibliography or search for Zotero): cameronpatrick.com/post/2023/07...

🚨 Position Alert! 🚨 I am looking for a full-time Research Scientist 1 to join my lab in Albuquerque, NM at the Center on Alcohol, Substance Use, and Addiction (CASAA). We will be studying how stress and trauma influence cannabis and substance use. 🧠🌿 (1/5)

Non-paywalled link to my commentary on @vw1234.bsky.social and colleagues new paper in @nature.com rdcu.be/eI2NG

University of Colorado Boulder Department of Psychology & Neuroscience is searching for TWO tenure track assistant professors. This is open to all department areas, including Behavioral, Psychiatric, and Statistical Genetics🧬 jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta...

'Is artificial intelligence a scientific study?' 'Not really…' — Muriel Spark, Symposium, 1990

Brilliant paper by Visscher et al. Populations differ in traits/disease burden. Are these differences due to genetics? Comparing single variants or polygenic scores between populations is biased due to environmental confounders correlated with the variants. 1/3 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

At a symposium celebrating the 20th year of the @genscot.bsky.social cohort. David Porteous giving an overview of the origins of the cohort, answering the question "Why Scotland"

We're looking at setting up a trusted research environment (TRE) for our cohort, to enable observability and governance, smooth rollout of updates, limit proliferation of outdated copies. Need some pointers on how to provision these environments up so that they aren't exasperating to researchers.

Good evening from Scotland. Go Home Tae Yer Bed [Fhalbh Dhachaigh Don Leabaidh Agad] — Brògeal feat. Josie Duncan youtu.be/__ezRGsYsuo

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Excited to share our new preprint for the tskit_arg_visualizer Python package! ARGs can sometimes feel like a black box, so @yanwong.bsky.social and I have been developing a method to programmatically drawing these graphs. 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2508.03958 1/6

Our study in @JAMAPsych ja.ma/4lVx1eu Using 🧬 we found that disruptions in #energy pathways link to specific #MDD symptoms (⬆️ appetite & sleep). This suggests a #depression profile linked to #metabolic risk, opening doors to targeted treatments. #metabolicpsychiatry

In Lilongwe for the kick-off meeting of the Genetics of Anxiety in Malawi project. Toward African-led, context-specific genomic research, supported by @wellcometrust.bsky.social Meeting at the Kwaza Arts centre.

"Behavior drives morphological change during human evolution" Our new article is out in @science.org today www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Thanks! This is amazing! So the term 'Manhattan Plot' is not originally a GWAS term at all. Screenshotting the image here from a 1994 book on nuclear physics, for others who may be interested:

The University of Edinburgh has published its Race Review. The report goes way deeper than just ties to slavery: "…the UoE formed a central point in a network of knowledge about 'civilization' and 'race' from the period of the Enlightenment onward." www.ed.ac.uk/about/race-r...

In #GENETICS, Williams et al. present a novel statistics—haplotype score—for summarizing identity-by-descent (IBD) sharing that can distinguish half-sibling pairs from avuncular or grandparent-grandchildren pairs and assign individuals to ancestor vs descendant generation. buff.ly/SaZP3CA

My university has new guidance about generative AI. Requirements and restrictions are set on a course-by-course basis, but AI outputs must not be presented as a student's own work and the exact use must be acknowledged. information-services.ed.ac.uk/computing/co...

If you are new to GWAS, the lectures by Matti Pirinen are a good place to start. Conceptual foundations rather than how to use software. www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/mjxpiri...

Very happy to share our new paper now on @medrxivpreprint: “Genetic risk effects on psychiatric disorders act in sets”, a great effort led my PhD student @jolienrietkerk.bsky.social, and performed together with collaborators Andy Dahl, Jonathan Flint, Andrew Schork etc. Thread 1/n

🧬 New @emblebi.bsky.social service beta launched: Perturbation Catalogue 🔎 Browse genetic perturbation datasets 🧠 Train models 🧬 Interpret variant function 🧭 Explore gene dependencies Search, test APIs, suggest datasets, send feedback! 🔗 www.ebi.ac.uk/perturbation... Funded by @opentargets.org

This work is now officially published! Little has changed, but with added analysis to further support our original claim! bsky.app/profile/ajhg...

Reading about the plan for the "NEW UNIVERSITY" building in Edinburgh, built in the 1790s but now called "Old College". A. J. Youngson, The Making of Classical Edinburgh.

Come join us! We have an exciting PhD opportunity in statistical genetics at the University of Oxford. More info here: bit.ly/biomedDPhil 🗓️ App deadline: June 30th 2025. Please share!

Is there a quantitative genetics/evolutionary biology conference happening in Europe between Dec 2025 - April 2026?

I can now finally speak out loud my honest thoughts on missing heritability or the genomics/family gap in h2 estimates. Based on new paper the *issue* is a feature and not a bug. TLDR: SNP h2 only captures mutational variance and family h2 captures everything but mutation. 1/n

Psychiatric Genetics Beyond Heritability: Q&A with Michel Nivard ( @michelnivard.bsky.social ) “We look for genes as a means to an end—biology, epidemiology, and etiology of complex human outcomes.” www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/psychiatri...

Illuminating: "the proportion of genetic variance relative to the overall trait variance varies significantly across individuals. Therefore, we cannot obtain a single summary of the relative contribution of genetic and non-genetic factors for everyone in the sample, let alone in the population."

My talk from this year's probgen is finally out. Where do linear mixed models and random effects come from? They emerge from *mutations* on Ancestral Recombination Graphs.

Mojo (the new make-GPU-go-Brrr programming language) got a commit that lets the build system detect Apple Silicon 👀 github.com/modular/modu...

As we have learned, genes have dose-dependent effects on psychiatric traits. DOSAGE, it turns out, is a key element that helps unravel mechanisms of gene → pathway → cell type → brain region → diagnosis. Here we developed a framework to characterize cellular processes that mediate genetic effects.

LLMs are universal approximators: 𝜙₁, 𝜙₂, …, 𝜙ₙ → 𝑓 But what function 𝑓 are they approximating?

I almost forgot to say that our paper www.nature.com/articles/s41... has now been published 🥳 How amazing is it to work with medical records and genealogies of 17 million people from 🇩🇰 and 🇸🇪 to derive familial risk estimates, heritabilities, and 🧬 correlations of #anorexia, #bulimia and more!

Comparison of different ways of measuring trait polygenicity, and what properties a "measure of polygenicity" should have. Authors have a really useful section on how to interpret deviations between the measures for a specific trait www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The field of neuroscience views the goal of human genetics as "finding genes". This is an outdated view. In whole genome studies of rare variants, finding genes is the easy part. The more interesting and important goal is to map out the causal pathway from genes to brain function to cognitive traits

New Publication: Epigenetic clocks and DNA methylation biomarkers of brain health and disease @uoe-igc.bsky.social @edinunilbc.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Theoretical justification for buying more memory the next time you upgrade your computer? www.quantamagazine.org/for-algorith...

"people already in an extreme neurological state should be seen as highly valuable. What was severe mental illness…if not an extreme phenomenon?" www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/unmeasured...

The author has a couple of events at the Edinburgh International Book Festival: www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival...

Here's my attempt to summarize the main result: no genetic model fits the data! When fit to biological relatives, the model is off for in-laws and twins (by a little). When fit with in-laws, it is off for twins (by a lot). And it is always off for adoptees.

📣New today! 📄Haplotype analysis reveals pleiotropic disease associations in the HLA region 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 @jkpritch.bsky.social @finngen.bsky.social & colleagues

"Animal origins: Looping back in time" by Omar Matar & Ferdinand Marlétaz (@ferdix.bsky.social) This is a Spotlight on new work that helps answer the question, "how did the chromatin folding mechanisms controlling gene regulation emerge during animal evolution?" Check it out: rb.gy/k53o8p

SURF (where the @pgcgenetics.bsky.social datasets reside) will move some of its network from a commercial data centre to a cooperative one. www.surf.nl/nieuws/surf-...

Registration is open! 🗓️ Join us for a day of engaging discussions, networking and learning as we celebrate the 20th year of Generation Scotland. We are also offering the opportunity to join online Register today! www.eventbrite.com/e/generation...

New database for the synaptic proteome (comes with an API, too!) www.synaptopathydb.org Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...