no I will not be navigating to your electronic calendar to schedule a meeting with you. You can just tell me when you are available 🤣 unless you are like a dean or a provost, then I get it. But another professor? Cmon

New paper out! 🤩 "Shrinking to bird size with dinosaur-level cancer defences: Evolution of cancer suppression over macroevolutionary time" with @kokkonut.bsky.social and @marcanthonytollis.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1371/jour... A short thread:

Check out our awesome review of squamates, covering fossils, phylogenetics, and genomics!

New lab preprint! Vahid Fard looked across mammals and found that species with more recently active LINE and SINE retrotransposons in their genomes also get more cancer, supporting a model where genome instability promotes neoplasia and malignancy

never forget what they stole from you

Yeah I’ll be skipping my usual conference not because it overlaps with the first week of classes (it always does) but rather the Knicks are coming to town that weekend

#PopGen #PopulationGenomics #PopulationGenetics

For a project, we needed a tool that will batch download phylogeographic DNA samples (like mtDNA and nucDNA) for lots of species, which have just been sitting on NCBI since the PCR and Sanger-sequencing era (ca. 2003-2015) and can still be hella useful, so I wrote one. It aligns the sequences, too 👍

Has anybody been consulted on the NSF “shakeup”? Should PIs not bother submitting proposals at this point? I mean odds for funding were always low but are we just throwing effort into the wind now?

Sophie Matthews’s lovely paper on gene copy number and cancer prevalence across mammals has been published in Molecular Biology and Evolution @official-smbe.bsky.social, check it out! academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

Morale is pretty low among scientists given the new regime. Funding scenarios are up in the air, many MDs and PhDs are unsure of their status. But don’t despair! Put the energy into your students. Teach like a MFer, light the fire, they will be ready when the smoke clears.

Haha Gen X has no complaints, just “whatever”

Fellow parents: amirite, it’s one thing to step on a lego but it’s even more infuriating to step on a cheerio

Here mt Xmas playlist ive been building for more than 10 years. Enjoy! open.spotify.com/playlist/0Qn...

the only time I want someone to be over-bubbly and friendly in an email is when they have to respond to my dumb question. Please be nice!

I’ve enjoyed reading my student evaluations and have tried to use them as opportunities to improve my teaching but around year 4 or 5 you realize if you cross out every “lectures were bad-lectures were great” pair of comments you’re not left with much to work with

Me seeing my January-February research-related travel schedule overlaid upon my spring teaching schedule

Happy birthday, T-Dubs!!!

No bookmarking on this site?

PI doing bioinformatics

If a person on FB Marketplace making plans to buy something from me says “see you on the morrow”, they are not real are they

GIF where you’re from

‘Tis the season. You know how we do up in here

My explanation is that each member of the voting public is capable of making decisions that are completely detached from your own concept of reality, right or wrong, which is impossible to predict at certain times, and Trump benefitted from that variance

I’d delete Twitter but my bookmarks are quite valuable

Optimist: the cup is 1/2 full Pessimist: the cup is 1/2 empty Bioinformatician: hold on, core dumped and I don’t know why

I love all the classic Vince Guaraldi Peanuts music but less known are the bangers on the Thanksgiving special soundtrack. Took a turn into some electric jazz funk and fusion for the old favorites but also some Herbie Mann- and Return to Forever-type stuff like this track. Give it a listen!

I love the smell of **massively parallel branch-site tests** in the morning

New pub out from my lab today in MBE, led by my PhD student Tamsen. We develop a forward time polyploid genome simulator, build an inference model, test it on empirical datasets to show that a majority of plant genomes are of allopolyploid origin. Do check it out! doi.org/10.1093/molb...

Me and the fam after I point out a red-tailed hawk predation event on the side of the road

Kind of not surprised it’s hard to find a herpetology-oriented group on here

Great preprint. We’ve been looking into this when it comes to phylogenomics and have been shocked - SHOCKED - at how some high “impact” results (i.e. in Science papers) are driven by alignment errors and other artifacts. Moral of the story: if you want to trust your results, start from scratch

Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn’t Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, or Alice in Chains.

If you’ve “left Twitter”, does that mean you’ve deleted your account and all its data? We still have to talk about that place here, for a while, it was kinda important what happened

Comparative genomics people: about RERconverge: it has helped develop lots of hypotheses. But someone recently explained to me that the method is “invalid”, and “it’s just published now so everyone just uses it” (paraphrasing). Are there any established critiques? academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

what's it like over here