Sad news: Jane Goodall has died. She did more than any other human for our understanding and appreciation of our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. That chimpanzees are Endangered tells you everything about our species and about what made her so exceptional. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/o...

🔁 Please share - we remind the SMBE community that the Call for Symposia for SMBE2026 in Copenhagen is open. We invite you to submit a symposium proposal to help shape the scientific content of our annual meeting. 🗓️ Deadline: October 15th More information: smbe2026.org/symposia #SMBE2026

Jane Goodall has died at the age of 91. In 2020, Goodall spoke with Science Editor-in-Chief H. Holden Thorp for a #ScienceEditorial reflecting on the 60th anniversary of her arrival in Gombe to study wild chimpanzees. Read more: https://scim.ag/472Chb8

🔴 ÚLTIMA HORA | Muere la etóloga y primatóloga británica Jane Goodall a los 91 años social.elpais.com/wmfcr4

Fantastic Autumn Symposium and Mixer from the London Centre for Ecology and Evolution (CEE @ceevol.bsky.social) at the LSHTM brilliantly organised by Mojca Kristan @mkristan.bsky.social Lots of great talks on ecology and evolution by members of all CEE’s institutions.

10/ If true, this has the potential to drive or exacerbate micronutrient-linked health disparities across populations - especially when over-farming and climate change continues to decrease soil quality. It is hard to ignore potential public/global health connotations🌎

9/ Why is this important? We suggest dietary micronutrients have shaped the recent evolution of humans and likely contributed to population differentiation in diet-related genes - possibly resulting in average differences in their micronutrient uptake, metabolism or regulation.

8/ In some cases, signatures of positive selection are identified in areas of the world with soil of known deficiencies or toxicities of micronutrients - potentially reflecting genetic adaptation to soil-driven micronutrient levels in the diet. Read our paper to see where 🤓

6/ We used methods informed by extensive simulations to identify signatures of positive selection in ~300 genes associated with 13 essential trace minerals in 40 diverse human populations, considering monogenic, oligogenic and polygenic selection 🧬

5/ We wanted to ask: have all micronutrients acted as selective pressures? Or only a few? And in which populations and timepoints? Is this likely to be driven by differing micronutrient levels in local soils? 🌎

4/ But soils can be extremely variable in their micronutrient content (even amongst really close-by environments!) - and have previously been suggested to drive some isolated examples of local adaptation to dietary micronutrients in human populations 🧬

3/ For much of human evolution, the amount of micronutrients in our diet have depended on the underlying soil content, since micronutrients are taken up by local plants and animals that then make up the human diet 🐔🍎🌽

2/ Micronutrients - including trace minerals and vitamins - are essential components in the human diet, needed in very small and precise quantities. Deficiencies can be super harmful, leading to stunted growth and increased risk of infectious, metabolic or respiratory diseases 🤒

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...

We are proud to present the new logo of Genome Biology and Evolution! 🙌 Our new face reflects our continued commitment to serving the fields of genomics and evolutionary biology as a society journal belonging to @official-smbe.bsky.social #genome #evolution #science #biology #societyjournal

🧪 #Popgen

📣New from @aidaandres.bsky.social & co 📄Global impact of micronutrients in modern human evolution

Our human ancestors from across the globe evolved in response to shortages and surpluses of micronutrients like iron, calcium, and zinc. spkl.io/63323AuOVP @ajhgnews.bsky.social Jasmin Rees, Sergi Castellano, & @aidaandres.bsky.social

Read more about the latest work from @aidaandres.bsky.social & co!

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.

Excited to share our new preprint🙌 It's the first human WGS study in Sudan. We uncover one of the strongest selection signals to date, pointing to post-admixture adaptation to malaria in Copts. Huge thanks to all co-authors. @aidaandres.bsky.social @jgarcia-cal.bsky.social @ebosch1972.bsky.social

The coolest bad-ass wormies made it into Nature 🏹🪱. This is the tale of how genes evolved to give rise to one of the strangest creatures that writhe underwater. Thanks @ferdix.bsky.social for brining it with him from Marseille to Okinawa to London.

After nearly twenty years in the making, our attempt at understanding what makes the chaetognath phylum so unique has finally been published! www.nature.com/articles/s41... with #LauraPiovani @dariagavr.bsky.social @alexdemendoza.bsky.social @chemamd.bsky.social and others /1

Really excited to share the first paper from my PhD - it’s all about assumptions in modelling and the history of early population genetics… 🧵 doi.org/10.1111/ahg....

🚨 New paper klaxon! 🚨 The History of the Panmictic Population Concept and Its Legacy in Contemporary Population Genetics Quite niche admittedly, one for the historians of evolutionary thought, and population geneticists. doi.org/10.1111/ahg....

I am seeking a postdoc for my group at UCLA. We work at the intersection of population genetics x microbiome (garud.eeb.ucla.edu). If interested, please message me!

Thrilled to see this story out today! Such a fascinating topic with lots still to discover 🥳

Thrilled that our study on human gene duplications and brain evolution is out! It was a true labor of love, with special shout-outs to my co-first author @jmuribescr.bsky.social and my PhD mentor @mydennis.bsky.social. Huge thanks as well to @aidaandres.bsky.social for all the popgen wisdom!

Outstanding work by @dcsoto.bsky.social @jmuribescr.bsky.social @mydennis.bsky.social (and other collaborators) that massively advances identification of human gene duplicates, with links to important traits and our evolution. So happy to have contributed a bit to this fantastic paper.

Also, a nice summary from @ucdavis.bsky.social biology.ucdavis.edu/news/finding...

My book 'The Tree of Life' will be available in Spanish translation in October. Other languages coming too. (Uk version here... www.amazon.co.uk/Tree-Life-So...)

And UGI PhD student Cedric Tan presenting in symposium 21 @official-smbe.bsky.social #SMBE2025 on his work "Intrahost dynamics, together with genetic and phenotypic effects predict the success of viral mutations".

New review paper led by @nancybird1.bsky.social which unpacks the complexities of genetic ancestry and examines what genetic data can and cannot tell us 🧬 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

You can catch UGI post-doc @nancybird1.bsky.social presenting at @official-smbe.bsky.social #SMBE next week on her work: "A flexible and efficient new model to infer multiple admixture dates via joint analyses of modern and/or ancient individuals".

World-first large-scale exhibition devoted to wasps launched today @uclgrantmuseum.bsky.social. Brainchild of @tannisdavidson.bsky.social, with her curation team & Project manager Sylvia Kluczewski Art-science extravaganza of #WorldOfWasps. www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-coll... @uclnews.bsky.social

In about a week we (Biological Sciences @ Monash Uni in Melbourne, Australia) will be opening a search for 3 (!!!) permanent academic positions (40% research, 40% teaching, 20% service) at Lecturer/Senior Lecturer. 1 Genomics, 2 Ecology. Please share, email me, DM, follow, send carrier pigeons…

Silly-sounding science is what happens when researchers do exactly what they are supposed to do, which is thinking freely and exploring new ideas with wide-open curiosity. 🧪 www.americanscientist.org/article/%E2%...

🌽 #SMBE2025 Symposium 1: Crop evolution: from Darwin's legacy to genomics of admixture and climate resilience 🔗 smbe2025.scimeeting.cn/en/web/program/25070

#SMBE2025 Symposium 2: Evolution and regulation of sex chromosomes and sex determination 🔗 smbe2025.scimeeting.cn/en/web/program/25070

#SMBE2025 Symposium 3: Experimental evolution: studying evolution in action 🔗 smbe2025.scimeeting.cn/en/web/program/25070

#SMBE2025 Symposium 4: Gene trees and beyond: genealogical methods and their applications in evolutionary genetics 🔗 smbe2025.scimeeting.cn/en/web/program/25070

#SMBE2025 Symposium 5: Human history and past social organisation in the light of palaeogenomes: new methods, new findings (session A) 🔗 smbe2025.scimeeting.cn/en/web/program/25070

1/5 Why do all non-Africans descended from a group that left Africa 50k ago? In @nature.com we model 120k years of human niche dynamics. From 70ka, a big expansion of the human niche in Africa likely equipped later OOA dispersals with a unique ecological flexibilty. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Preprint on "Improving spliced alignment by modeling splice sites with deep learning". It describes minisplice for modeling splice signals. Minimap2 and miniprot now optionally use the predicted scores to improve spliced alignment. arxiv.org/abs/2506.12986

We welcomed @kguschan.bsky.social to @ucl.ac.uk for our UGI Seminar Series. A fantastic talk spanning primate population histories, mito-nuclear interactions, temporal microbiomes, and antimicrobial resistance.

Malaria shaped human spatial organisation for the last 74 thousand years https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.04.657870v1

We are excited to share our new preprint describing the inclusion of selection models to stdpopsim, our community-maintained library with an extensive catalog of population genetic models. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🇬🇧 🇬🇧Today AIR-BORNE comes out in the UK! 🇬🇧 🇬🇧 www.panmacmillan.com/authors/carl...

A pleasure to welcome Kevin Daly @gingerhowley.bsky.social to @ucl.ac.uk for our UCL Genetics Seminar series. Kevin gave a great talk on reconstructing the relationship between animal herding and pathogen evolution using paleogenomic techniques.

New UCL-Crick led paper out this week in @science.org on the evolution of louse-borne relapsing fever led by @poojaswali.bsky.social. See below for her thread explaining the work and it's relevance to when and how this bacteria has adapted to louse-borne human infection. tinyurl.com/76vzy4tn