#FossilFriday Cousins in life, companions in death. Belemnite guard by chance preserved in the body chamber of the ammonite Parkinsonia from the Jurassic.

Happy to hare that the preprint I was advertising below has been published by the Journal of Evolutionary Biology: academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-... Thanks @jevbio.bsky.social for supporting responsible publishing!

I can't overrecommend this incredible paper about water skaters (genus Halobates). No one knows how they evolved. No one knows what they eat. They are superhydrophobic, which means water LITERALLY CANNOT WET THEM. Perhaps we should call them anti-water skaters? 🌊🧪 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Fantastic time going to and presenting at Lille Popgroup. Many new and familiar faces! Always here to talk about plants and mitochondria. Until next year! #popgroup59 #ppg59 #pgg59

TE dynamics across high-quality #genome assemblies of 75 bee species to quantify their diversity in an evolutionary context link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Exciting PhD project with me and @vorontsovams.bsky.social RBG Kew on Grass Diversity, developing a phylogeny using morphology and genomics for the tropical forage grass genus Urochloa. Applications at centa.ac.uk/students... but contacts Bat or me to discuss

Lightbulb beer in Cambridge. Sheffield did it better @popgroup2026.bsky.social right? @cfcollins.bsky.social @luketdunning.bsky.social 😍

Genomic divergence across the tree of life 🧪🌐https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2319389122

How many chromosomes can an animal have? In our paper out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social we show that the Atlas blue butterfly has 229 chromosome pairs- the highest in diploid Metazoa! These arose by rapid autosome fragmentation while sex chromosomes stayed intact. www.cell.com/current-biol...

The original circos plot? From the 1947-1948 Carnegie Yearbook, the page prior to McClintock's Mutable Loci in Maize paper.

Headed to #ESEB2025, anyone else headed there? Excited to see all the talks and sessions!

Euphrasia marshallii, Fair Isle, 2018. What a beaut!

The appearance of large language models caused a drastic shift in the vocabulary of academic writing, according to an analysis in #ScienceAdvances of more than 15 million biomedical abstracts published from 2010 to 2024. scim.ag/3IhpoQF

Short-read metagenomic sequencing cannot recover genomes from many abundant marine prokaryotes due to high strain heterogeneity and platform-inherent GC bias (likely viruses, too), but Nanopore long reads can address this. A results thread on our recent preprint 🧵.

It’s a crime that ‘cargo dist’ has run out of funding 😭 github.com/axodotdev/ca...

Potential Euphrasia vigursii, the Cornish Eyebright from fieldwork with Edinburgh University evolutionary biology PhD students. The Euphrasia work continues!

Big Orobanche out in the verges. And bright yellow! What a beauty :)

#MolluscMonday Non-marine bivalves pack a spectacular stone panel in a 16th century fireplace at Hardwick Hall (NT), Derbyshire. This ‘cockleshell marble’ is associated with the Tupton coal seam of Late Carboniferous age.

A three year postdoctoral position is available in my group, investigating plant centromere structure, function and evolution @camplantsci.bsky.social www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/51488/

We have a unique opportunity for a junior researcher, PhD student or postdoc, to use a revolutionary technique for mineral nutrient imaging and tracing in plants. Please re-post! Interested candidates should apply through the portal at the link below: career5.successfactors.eu/career?compa...

There's a press release for our new @natplants.nature.com article! Plants use fast DNA repair to guard against risky gene transfers from their own organelles—the lessons might go beyond plant biology Release tinyurl.com/prnpegrb by @mpi-mp-potsdam.bsky.social Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My PhD dissertation is now available here: dx.doi.org/10.25673/118... In the thesis, I showed that trait expression, intraspecific and intraindividual trait variability depend on forest composition and species diversity. Further, they are components that matter for measuring functional diversity

Not really my announcement to make--I am but a lesser co-author--but IQ-TREE 3 has just been released! (Most credit to Minh Bui and @roblanfear.bsky.social and their labs) ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

We are excited to announce the 'official' start of our BBSRC funded sLoLa project, where we aim to uncover the role of rediploidisation in shaping evolution after genome duplication events across the tree of life! Find out more: www.rediploidisation.org vet.ed.ac.uk/roslin/news-... #WGDip #BBSRC

We are mid Daffodil (Narcissus) season in the UK. Go out and see what you can find, these daffs are across 3 divisions but there are 12 to find :)

My and Derek Setter's work on gene flow is now published in the latest issue of Genetics. We show that it is possible to detect past gene flow between two populations by summarising the asymmetry in pop-specific external branch lengths. 1/2 tinyurl.com/5ff8ch9e

We would love feedback on a new NCBI-BLAST service we are launching today: sky-blast.com Under the hood it's the same BLAST executable and databases provided by NCBI, with a replica of the NIH's interface - providing an alternative to the US gov service that's less congested, faster & more reliable

We did it! We caught Starship #transposons moving between #fungal species in the lab, including between species separated by ~100my. We think Starships are a mediator of HGT in fungi, akin to conjugative elements in bacteria. Check out the preprint. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Looking for a PhD? Come work with us on Horizontal Gene Transfer in crops! Deadline 14th March www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

The plant, formally known as Ovicula biradiata, is especially notable for being the simultaneous discovery of a new species and genus. It was found with help from the community science app iNaturalist. By @jamesdoubek.bsky.social

I'll be talking about my #ProcB isopod phylogenomics paper in the Royal Society Publishing Ecology & Evolution Online Seminar Series, live (with Q&A) next Weds 26th Feb 2pm (UK). Please reshare to reach all the lovers of #isopods (& #phylogenomics), who might be interested in their #evolution! 🧪

A curious, modest man with an encyclopaedic knowledge. No ego but a quiet self-confidence that inspired many. No doubt many publications in the coming years will report innovative ideas that he thought of decades ago….

With @katiejenike.bsky.social and a bunch more of our fellow k-mer enthusiasts, we put together a manuscript on k-mers in biodiversity genomics. A guide if you will, that covers k-mers from basics to some really funky stuff... genome.cshlp.org/content/35/2...

The telomere identification toolkit now has a publication: academic.oup.com/bioinformati... We used simple algorithms and fast tooling. The telomere database comes with ~500spp too!

Some spent Epipactis from Glasgow Necropolis a few weeks ago :)

The first pan-plastome study with collaborators at Bielefeld University / CeBiTec and TU Dresden: doi.org/10.1186/s128... @bpucker.bsky.social @toheitka.bsky.social #Genomics #Evolution 2/🧵

New lab website up at euphrasiologist.github.io It’s bare bones as it’s just starting really!

Interesting opportunity for early career plant scientists!

Protein Sequence Assessment Using a Reference ORF Network - PSAURON assigns a score to coding DNA or protein sequence that reflects the likelihood that the sequence is a genuine protein-coding region. academic.oup.com/nargab/artic... #genome #gene annotation