📄 StringTie3 improves total RNA-seq assembly by resolving nascent and mature transcripts 🧬🖥️ ⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📄 Beyond formic acid: Peptides in carpenter ant venoms aid in disease protection 🐜🧪 ⬇️ www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Countless ecologists, evolutionary biologists and conservation biologists will have been inspired to follow their careers by David Attenborough (including all of us here at NEE) Here's wishing him a very happy 100th Birthday 🥳 www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

How Sir David Attenborough changed the world in 100 years www.channel4.com/news/how-sir...

#ProcB’s Darwin Reviews are invited articles from leading researchers, highlighting major advances in #BiologicalScience with broad relevance. This year’s #DarwinReview is “Population-scale long-read DNA sequencing: peering under the hood of the new evolutionary genomics.” buff.ly/CiepDls

Pleased to share with you our latest article "Ten common mistakes that could ruin your enrichment analysis", featuring Anusuiya Bora, Matthew McKenzie. This article condenses what we've learned about best practices in pathway enrichment analysis over the past 15 years. We hope you find it […]

TxPert: using multiple knowledge graphs for prediction of transcriptomic perturbation effects - @alisandra-denton.bsky.social @valenceai.bsky.social @recursionpharma.bsky.social go.nature.com/3QZW9WQ

60 Minutes goes in search of rare birds in a former war zone. Sunday.

Once in a while, 60 Minutes travels so far off the beaten track that there’s hardly a track at all. That was the case when Anderson Cooper went to the mountains of western Colombia in search of birds you can find nowhere else on Earth. Sunday.

Our memory gets worse as we age, but this isn't true for common wasps. Annaline Mattens &co show that as they age, the parts of a wasp's brain involved in memory make up more of their brain size. This is handy in their new role finding food for the nest journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

The fitness costs of reproductive specialization scale inversely with organismal size @PNAS.org

10 years after the first FAMSA paper, its successor is now published in Nat Biotech! We believe that FAMSA2 can enable analyses of large protein collections that were previously unattainable. Thank you, Andrzej and Cedric, for great collaboration www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Species descriptions should not be confined to "summary" PDFs only providing access to a fraction of the data underlying the conclusions. We here argue for "digitally native species" built around structured, specimen-linked, machine-actionable evidence from day one. rdcu.be/fcbwh

A U.S. blockade of oil deliveries to Cuba has contributed to power blackouts that have plunged the island nation’s science and health care communities into darkness. https://scim.ag/4vg2EVk

Introducing RustQC: 60x faster RNA-Seq quality control! We used AI to reimplement 15 RNA-Seq QC tools (dupRadar, Qualimap, RSeQC, Preseq, samtools, featureCounts) into a single tool, written in @rust-lang.org: ✅ 15 h analyses → 15 min ✅ Identical outputs ✅ Drastically reduced I/O

Tens of thousands of papers published in 2025 contain fake/hallucinated citations, an analysis by Nature and Grounded AI suggests By @miryamnaddaf.bsky.social and Beth Quill | @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Major conference catches illicit AI use — and rejects hundreds of papers. The papers’ watermarks allowed organizers to detect use of large language models in peer review. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

LongcallR for competitive SNP calling and haplotype phasing, and simplified allele-specific analysis with long RNA-seq reads. Found ~100 junctions affected by SNPs per sample with most junctions novel. Developed by Neng Huang. Published in @natmethods.nature.com. Read at rdcu.be/faKhL

How much protein diversity can Life on Earth actually generate? With DIAMOND DeepClust, we show how billions of proteins across the tree of life can be clustered at low-identity for downstream analytics tasks. 📚Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 💻Code: github.com/bbuchfink/di...

🎉 ggauto is now on CRAN 🎉 An #RStats package that selects better chart types, and provides more accessible styling for #ggplot2 plots 📊 Blog post explaining why I made it and how it works: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/introdu... #DataViz

If you use GitHub (especially if you pay for it!!) consider doing this *immediately* Settings -> Privacy -> Disallow GitHub to train their models on your code. GitHub opted *everyone* into training. No matter if you pay for the service (like I do). WTH github.com/settings/cop...

Entomologists and particle accelerator physicists have collaborated to produce a new 3D atlas of what makes up an ant, including muscles, nerves, digestive tracts, and exoskeletons. The images are free to access. spectrum.ieee.org/3d-scanning-...

🔴 The historic city center of Lviv, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is under attack by russian drones. Mayor Andryi Sadovy shared this picture, other channels show several fires across the city. In daytime, Russia unleashed dozens of drones over Ukraine.

The russians have just violently bombed Lviv city center, there's fire in at least two residential apartments, one of them is right next to the St.Andriy's church. Two people are severely injured. The city is still under attack.

I wrote a short Nature Methods News & Views piece on deep learning based gene finders such as ANNEVO. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

ANNEVO uses a deep learning approach to advance accurate and scalable ab initio gene annotation of evolutionarily diverse genomes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A decade of research in review For Nature Biotechnology’s 30th anniversary, our editors look back at a few of their favorite papers published in the past decade go.nature.com/4sWhZs1

Ants are experts at telling nestmates from foreigners via subtle differences in odor profiles. In this new paper, we explore the conditions under which ants develop and maintain tolerance to foreigners. Turns out the ant recognition system is surprisingly plastic. www.cell.com/current-biol...

kuva v0.1.4 released - 4 new plots (Polar, Ternary, Ridgeline, Density) - A completely reworked legend system - SVG rendering 50-70% faster, and Manhattan plots 22× faster at 1M SNPs - Many bug fixes and extra features github.com/Psy-Fer/kuva crates.io/crates/kuva #rust #bioinformatics #dataviz

The 2026 National Science Foundation budget is $8.75 Billion.

NEW: for @nytimes.com, I wrote about a new study showing that queen bumblebees can breathe underwater, surviving submerged for a week the “remarkable” study stems from a lab snafu, when a co-author thought she accidentally drowned several bees—but later found that they were alive 🧪 gift link 🎁

Butterflies and moths are key indicators of functioning and healthy ecosystems. A Review in Nature Reviews Biodiversity describes the evolutionary history of the order Lepidoptera and tracks shifts in researchers’ understanding of the clade in the genomic era. go.nature.com/4r0kbgS 🌍 🧪

New Review 👇 The molecular evolution of vertebrate organs: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Margarida Cardoso-Moreira discusses rates of evolution of organs and cell types, molecular mechanisms of organ evolution and how complex traits contributed to the diversification of vertebrates.

Thanks to micro-CT and www.antscan.info, you can now explore high resolution, 3D ant images from anywhere in the world. Fantastic work from Julian Katzke, Francisco Hita Garcia, @economo.bsky.social, Thomas van de Kamp and colleagues just dropped: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

On sabotage of our young scientists, by @holdenthorp.bsky.social @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

📄 A sterility-associated long noncoding RNA involved in honey bee caste determination and adult queen and worker fertility 🐝 ⬇️ www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Phylogenetic and functional analyses across 34 Lepidoptera and 183 plant species show that hexenal isomerases found in Lepidoptera exhibit functional convergence with those found in plants despite having evolved independently from unrelated enzyme families 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Recently we're working with SNPs from whole genome assemblies to estimate ARGs. It's a pain to go from alignment files to vcf, keeping track of masked and invariant sites. So we wrote a snakemake/SLURM pipeline. Hope it's useful to others, and don't hesitate to post issues if there are problems!

A new documentary "Secrets of The Bees" will air on National Geographic on 31 March and land on Disney+ on 1 April and our bees are in it! See here for the trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mej2...

📄 Repeated evolution of supergenes on an ancient social chromosome 🐜🧬 ⬇️ www.cell.com/current-biol...

If we are making lists of non-ignorable "complexity" in biology, how about the interaction of selection and development? Many biologists find it boring (unnecessary complexity) or threatening (old naive adaptationism called into question). @mauriciogforero.bsky.social does good work in this area!

📄 A parasitic, parthenogenetic ant with only queens and without workers or males 🐜 ⬇️ www.cell.com/current-biol...

🔴 Over 212,000 Russian war crimes documented in Ukraine since 2022.

It is four years ago today that the Russians launched their full scale invasion of Ukraine. Many in the west wrote Ukraine off and prophesied a “shock and awe” Russian victory. Instead Ukraine defied its attacker and their fight for freedom became decisive for the future of European freedom.

Four years have passed since Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia was supposed to win in three days. Instead, Ukraine reinvented modern warfare, built a drone industry, and can destroy a thousand Russian soldiers in a day. Ukraine can win.

📄 Topological approaches in animal comparative genomics 🧬 ⬇️ www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

New online! Annotating genomes at increased scale and resolution

📄 Increasing applied pesticide toxicity trends counteract the global reduction target to safeguard biodiversity 🐝🧪 ⬇️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Here’s one lobster that you might not want with a side of butter: the lobster moth! Named for its lobster-like larval form, this wide-ranging insect inhabits parts of Europe & Asia. While it resembles a crustacean, it can also mimic ants as a way to deter potential predators.

New Article! Tutorial: annotation of animal genomes