Thanks to co-authors Charles C. Bell, Brendan R. Camellato, M. Joaquina Delás, Daniel M. Ibrahim, and @michaeltmont.bsky.social And also to all the participants of the 2024🤨 Company of Biologists meeting that inspired this.

Registration and abstract submission are now open for the SDB 85th Annual Meeting being held July 23-26 in Las Vegas! Submit your abstract by April 15. Travel assistance is available. Free t-shirt to the first 250 registrants! Learn more: www.sdbonline.org/2026mtg #2026SDB

Have you ever wondered 🤔... Does phenotypic variance respond to environmental perturbation? Does it have a genetic basis? Are mean and variance regulating loci exposed to different selection pressures? These and more questions are explored in our new preprint 🔥 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Happy to share a recent publication to which I contributed as a corr. author: www.nature.com/articles/s41... This work is in collaboration with Dr. Yao Yu at Fudan University, where the team managed to transfer S. cerevisiae chromosmes into K. marxianus, a species diverged from Sc ~114 mya. (1/4)

The #fly community aims to achieve a comprehensive genomic study of the Drosophilidae family. @pankajd.bsky.social @bernardkim.bsky.social @petrovadmitri.bsky.social @darrenobbard.bsky.social present a comparative gene annotation for 301 #Drosophilidae species @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4c3pyrI

Rethinking insecticide toxicology for the 21st century: a review written with Philip Batterham. Led by Lautaro Gandara @embl.org and Felipe Martelli: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Many said we were exaggerating a year ago when we argued that Trump is a clear and present danger to our democracy. A year later they are eating their words. It’s up to every single one of us to save our democracy. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/u...

🧬✨ New 2-part review on the evolution of regulatory DNA (enhancers & promoters)! What started as conversations between Gasper Tkačik @istaresearch.bsky.social and our group @embl.org grew into a broader synthesis. Preprints here: Part 1: arxiv.org/abs/2601.19681 Part 2: arxiv.org/abs/2601.21480

📣 Paper alert! I am delighted that our paper exploring the impact of Neanderthal-derived variants on the activity of a disease-associated craniofacial enhancer has been published in Development today! journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

We are thrilled that our study on the evolution of gene regulation in mammalian cerebellum development – led by @ioansarr.bsky.social, @marisepp.bsky.social and @tyamadat.bsky.social, in collaboration with @steinaerts.bsky.social – is now out in @ScienceMagazine! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Come join us in beautiful Roscoff for this Conference Jacques Monod on Developmental regulation: from molecular to ecological niches May 18-22, 2026 Roscoff, France Abstract deadline: January 31, 2026 Apply here: cjm.sb-roscoff.fr/en

I have been one of the many people across the world impacted by the sudden death of Peer Bork - a friend, colleague and remarkable scientist. I now have enough time this weekend to write some personal thoughts about Peer. www.linkedin.com/posts/ewan-b...

Happy New Year all. I know it's been a draining and difficult year for science in general, but wanted to share some good news: our intrabody paper has now been published in Science Advances with lots of additional data. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The call for Health + Life Science Alliance post doctoral fellowships has just opened: lnkd.in/dw9zxKSN. Joint with my group @embl.org , Victoria Ingham Uni. Heidelberg, and Felix Hol at Radboud Univ., we are exploring how climate and chemistry shape mosquito behaviour for next-gen. vector control

Sign up date coming quickly! Come join us in beautiful Roscoff for this Conference Jacques Monod on Developmental regulation: from molecular to ecological niches May 18-22, 2026 Roscoff, France Abstract deadline: January 31, 2026 Apply here: cjm.sb-roscoff.fr/en

Our work on #RegulatoryTrajectories is out today in Nat. Comms: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Led by @raquelrouco.bsky.social, this study establishes a new framework to study how enhancer landscapes act sequentially at developmental loci and are silenced to shape gene expression patterns. (1/n)

I am very happy (and a bit scared) to present to you what we have been working on over the last 4 years. This manuscript is exactly what I dreamt of when I started the lab and I could not be happier and prouder of the outcome!

Now out: The new ENCODE registry of candidate cis-regulatory elements (🐭/👶) Major consortium effort, led by @moorejille.bsky.social - stay tuned for her "meme-torial" www.nature.com/articles/s41... @berkeleylab.lbl.gov @biosci.lbl.gov

Our paper on the newest version of the Registry of candidate cis-Regulatory Elements (cCREs) is out 🧬 Huge thanks to the many collaborators, experimentalists, analysts and software developers who made this work possible — truly a team effort! A "meme-torial" of the science is coming soon 👀

What a year it's been at the DB unit @embl.org! 2025 brought us hard work, exciting discoveries, and numerous initiatives that advanced our science. As we wrap up this year, we want to wish everyone a restful and joyful winter break. We'll be back in 2026, ready for new challenges. See you then! 🎉

Now published as version of record at @elife.bsky.social ! Layers of Immunity: Deconstructing the Drosophila effector response. The tools are now deposited in the VDRC (link ⬇️) elifesciences.org/articles/107... shop.vbc.ac.at/vdrc_store/d... #Drosophila #IDsky #SymbioSky #Infection #Immunology

Apply for our Pathway to Independence (PI) programme, supporting postdocs in #devbio and #stemcell research during the transition to their first group leader position: www.biologists.com/grants/devel... Application deadline: 2 February 2026.

We are pleased to announce a new preprint by @mlweilert.bsky.social: “Widespread low-affinity motifs enhance chromatin accessibility and regulatory potential in mESCs” (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...). See summary and longer recap below: (TLDR; low-affinity motifs matter as pioneers!)

www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.... Our latest now online at EMBO Journal. Read if you are interested in how epimutations mediate antifungal resistance & how this might result in heteroresistance in human & cereal crop fungal pathogens. Big Thx & congrats to Andreas Fellas, Pin Tong & Alison Pidoux

How do new centromeres evolve while staying compatible with the division machinery? Discover it in our new Nature paper! We show centromeres transition gradually via a mix of drift, selection, and sex, reaching new states that still work with the kinetochore. 👉 doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09779-1

Now online! Thermodynamic principles link in vitro transcription factor affinities to single-molecule chromatin states in cells

Thrilled to share our new paper! With @tomtom-auer.bsky.social team, we asked how #evolution reshapes what animals #eat to match their ecological niches. Using pan-neuronal Ca2+ imaging, we show that the changes are in how the brain processes #taste. Link @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

High-resolution single-cell analyses reveal evolutionary constraints and evolvability of sexual circuits in Drosophila | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We are looking for a postdoc to join our team! If you're interested in translating a cutting edge genomics technology (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) to real-life applications in hematology, this is for you. We offer a unique working environment ON THE BEACH: recruitment.crg.eu/content/jobs...

✨This week at the DB unit seminar @embl.org, Noa Ottilie Borst, a PhD student in the Crocker group @justinmcrocker.bsky.social presented her work on cell-type-specific interallelic interactions, and how they simultaneously allow for robustness and evolutionary innovation.

🚨 TODAY: Abstract submission for #Dros26 closes at 7:59 pm EST, so make sure you've completed your submission by then: buff.ly/OGr96Zx Don't miss out on the opportunity to present your work to 1,200+ scientists from across the globe doing important work in Drosophila.🪰

Can confirm. I am okay and more motivated than ever to speak up. Nothing scares this administration more. Their power lies in our silence.

The European Drosophila Society #flyEDS extends the condolences on the passing of Antonio García-Bellido, considered the founder of the Spanish school of #Drosophila genetics and an influential figure in developmental biology research worldwide. May he rest in peace.

I am very excited to announce the opening of the submission site for the upcoming Conférences Jacques Monod on Developmental Biology, May 18-22, 2026 cjm.sb-roscoff.fr/en/conferenc... @lionlchristiaen.bsky.social and I have an exciting program of speakers and slots for selected short talks, etc.

If you’re applying to your dream lab for an internship/PhD/postdoc, always send a second email 1-2 weeks after the first one if you don’t hear back. I promise we will be grateful rather than annoyed. My email inbox is a disaster and I’m quite junior - and very few of us have secretarial support

Check out our new preprint on the evolution of enhancer loss. Turns out there are 50 ways to lose a function. We found four of them. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

After all these years, It eventually got the frame it deserves. Respect 🪰

Model organisms as platforms for training scientific minds www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A good day to remember John Gurdon’s school report from his biology master at Eton

The DB unit also celebrated Anne Ephrussi at this wonderful symposium! Anne was our unit head from 2007-2021. Congratulations on a remarkable career, Anne! 🎉

Congrats to my friends in the Boettiger lab for this really beautiful live imaging work. A big leap forward in understanding the dynamic side of genome organization. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very proud of our paper on "scrambling-by-hopping" LADs, which was just published: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... Congrats to Lise Dauban and the rest of the team – this was a real tour-de-force!

Functional maps of a genomic locus reveal confinement of an enhancer by its target gene by the @basvansteensellab.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very excited to see this work in press! I think there is a reason to believe that this is a common means of stabilizing large-effect polymorphisms in general and might be an important reason for why diploidy is so common. news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

Join this year's CSH Asia Systems Biology of Gene Regulation & Genome Editing meeting in beautiful Suzhou, China, Oct 20-24. Let's bring the international communities together! Abstract deadline Sept 19! Infos and registration at csh-asia.org?content/2767. Please repost!

‘Our Ancestors the Fish’, a course by Prof. @neilshubin.bsky.social, Univ of Chicago, invited Prof @college-de-france.fr. in Paris @psl-univ.bsky.social. Four conferences, free access, open to everyone, with Tiktaalik as a guest star. Friends, colleagues and fossils in Paris and around, please RT🥁

On the new acting CDC director. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

My lab cannot afford donating at the moment, so I donated privately. Even if you don’t work on flies we all owe so much to FlyBase. Consider donating, and importantly, let’s strive to make the more official funding bodies aware of how much is at stake.

+1 here. Reach us out early enough ! Getting funding and personal timelines aligned rarely happens over night !