We are excited to share GPN-Star, a cost-effective, biologically grounded genomic language modeling framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of variant effect prediction tasks relevant to human genetics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/n)

Love RNA biology? Join us to explore the piRNA pathway with structural and genetic approaches (see 👇👇). PhD student/postdoc position co-supervised by Clemens Plaschka & myself. DM or email us if you’d like to know more! @vbcscitraining.bsky.social @imbavienna.bsky.social @impvienna.bsky.social

Just throwing this out there as a significant conceptual advance in the field www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

PIWI clade Argonautes are essential for transposon silencing. Without them, animals are sterile due to massive transposon activity. But how does piRNA-guided target interaction translate into silencing? PhD student Júlia Portell Montserrat has an intriguing answer www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

www.cell.com/cell/abstrac... A host organelle (in sea slugs) integrates stolen chloroplasts for animal photosynthesis

How do populations maintain an evolutionary memory? I am happy to share that our work with Dmitri Petrov @petrovadmitri.bsky.social, Paul Schmidt, and colleagues on dominance reversal and stabilization of insecticide resistance in changing environments over time is now published at Nature EE.

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...

Delighted to see this paper with @anaignatieva.bsky.social now published in Genetics! academic.oup.com/genetics/adv... We tackle a thorny issue arising in statistical tests for genetic interactions (epistasis) using ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs)... 🧵

SINGER, our ARG inference method, is finally published and freely available online: doi.org/10.1038/s415... It was a long journey – 16 months from initial submission to acceptance. Is it just me, or has peer review gotten more arduous lately? 4+ rounds of review isn't so unusual these days...

A balanced inversion polymorphism exhibits a dominance reversal at the gene expression level that depends on developmental context academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Really excited to share our latest paper led by @simonaube.bsky.social. Fascinating results examining whether regulatory mutations can lead to adaptation as fast as coding mutations do. #mevosky #evobio #evoSky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thrilled to share our latest work on meiotic recombination, where we mapped rates and distributions by sequencing thousands of individual sperm. This study was led by Stevan Novakovic and @caitlinharris.bsky.social , in collaboration with @davisjmcc.bsky.social and Cynthia Liu.

More on the ancient foundation of animal development. Coyle & King illustrate how core regulatory modules were present in our pre-animal ancestors. The key was not invention, but recycling & new protein interactions. #CellBiology #multicellularity #protistsOnSky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🔖Last review from the lab👇 'Male meiosis at the helm: shaping genomes and sex chromosomes in emerging vertebrate models' academic.oup.com/biolreprod/a...

Excited to share our latest manuscript, "Exposure accumulation drives age-dependent disease architectures and polygenic risk scores," led by Xilin Jiang: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... I am attempting an explainer thread for the first time here: (I am usually too exhausted to post one)

Size matters—but maybe not how we thought. Most chromosomal inversions are just a few hundred bp. Ignoring these “small players” could mean we’ve misunderstood how genomes evolve -out in TREE authors.elsevier.com/a/1ljL1cZ3X3...

My first post on bsky to share our latest research in @nature.com: “DNA2 enables growth by restricting recombination-restarted replication” - defines DNA2’s essential function & elucidates links with primordial dwarfism and cancer. Thanks to the lab, collaborators & @ukri.org @acmedsci.bsky.social

In these dark times, it comes as a rare pleasure to highlight @natanaels.bsky.social ‬ & @marcdemanuel.bsky.social's work on germline and somatic mutations in humans. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Deleting a 600kb region in a genome? Not that crazy of an idea anymore! Papikian et al show that plants have an incredible ability to compensate for large genomic deletions. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Why do males and females often differ in traits? The expected answer: selection. But our new paper in GENETICS shows that genetic drift alone can generate sexual dimorphism — even when male & female optima are the same

Want to make recombination maps from sperm/pollen/gametes? There is an easy way, based on Hi-C sequencing. Full details in the Hi-reComb paper now in Genetics: doi.org/10.1093/gene... Thanks to Richard Durbin and Ed Green and a great group of co-authors for contributions.

Copy number variation in Solanum chilense affects (A)biotic stress-response and flowering-time genes. We find divergent CNV patterns between populations from divergent habitats, linked to climatic variables. academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

New paper with @spit-lab.bsky.social @genomebiolevol.bsky.social - Bottom-line: genes that encode secreted saliva genes evolve pretty fast and gene duplications/deletions are mostly the culprit. academic.oup.com/gbe/advance-...

New paper from our lab! We found that LINE-1 transposons contribute to early human brain development. Funded by @asapresearch.parkinsonsroadmap.org www.cell.com/cell-genomic...

Lou Guyot: Long term balancing selection can favour the evolution of recombination suppression by linked selection on deleterious recessive alleles. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (From the posters. A preprint QR code is really the best part of a poster.) #eseb2025

Cryogenic electron microscopy has been used to determine the detailed structure of an intermediate state called a “D-loop” that forms when strands of DNA are exchanged during homologous recombination. buff.ly/ofD02RD

#ESEB2025 SATURDAY AUGUST 16 Breaking Bread: Exploring the evolution of amylase in humans with Charikleia Karageorgiou, @evobioclio.bsky.social @ubuffalo.bsky.social

Our paper on the evolution of MUC19 in humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans is finally out today in Science! This has been a six-year effort by 13 authors to weave together 3 separate but related evolutionary stories around this one gene (more on thread 🧵). www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Out after peer review, collaborative study from Nordborg & Weigel labs with help from many others. Not the largest collection of new Arabidopsis thaliana genomes, but we hopefully put forward some good ideas for how to think about pangenomes and their analysis! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thank you Alexa! Don't miss Alexa's talk "Genomic and developmental foundations of adaptive tooth shape evolution" on Thursday, symposium S09 at 3.30pm.

Really excited to share my first PhD paper about fitness effects of chromosomal inversions! Using an experimental approach we explored if inversions involved in ecotype divergence in threespine stickleback affect fitness-proxies 1/🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41... @heredityjournal.bsky.social

This is really near to start! #ESEB2025 Meet me in poster session 3 on Thursday if you are interested in adaptive introgression in modern humans! #popgen

New review about DNA double-strand break resection during meiosis, with @alhajijoker.bsky.social and Soonjoung Kim. Please check it out: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Starting in 30 minutes at Carrer de Perill 44! If you’re in Barcelona for #ESEB, join us for Breaking Bread, our outreach event on how mutation, recombination and selection shape the amylase locus and human evolution. Come curious (and hungry, there’s bread!)

Our latest preprint explores the evolution of the primate amylase locus, uncovering structural innovations, regulatory shifts and molecular convergence. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our latest preprint on the evolution of the primate amylase locus is now on biorxiv! I hope to share a brief thread soon about our main findings.

1/ How do animals develop immunity against a newly encountered transposable element from scratch? Our study reveals that the mobility of TEs is their Achilles heel, allowing hosts to develop a powerful small RNA-mediated silencing response. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happy to be able to finally share our NLR pangenome paper, out now in CHM. "Pangenomic context reveals the extent of intraspecific plant NLR evolution" www.cell.com/cell-host-mi... #plantscience #plantimmunity #pangenomes #science #nlr

📣Online NOW! 📄Estimation of demography and mutation rates from one million haploid genomes 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 @jgschraiber.bsky.social @jeffspence.github.io @docedge.bsky.social

Regulatory network topology and the genetic architecture of gene expression https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.12.669924v1

Ancient Yersinia pestis genome discovered in 4,000-year-old sheep tooth sheds new light on a mysterious infectious disease that plagued prehistoric Eurasia. New research by @keyfm.bsky.social and @i-light-maka.bsky.social now published in @cellpress.bsky.social: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Our paper showing that variation in transcription factor binding sites underlies the majority of additive genetic variance for phenotypic variation in maize is finally out! Sadly they didn't use our suggested cover image below (made by the inimitable Andi Kur). www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Wonderful (and humble) essay on mentorship by Brandon Gaut, on occasion of Brandon receiving the inaugural Mentorship Award of @genetics-gsa.bsky.social. I hope this will be widely read! academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

Check out our @pnas.org paper that was published last week: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/.... An amazing work by @gabrielesgarlata.bsky.social 🔥!! With contributions from me, Tiago de Zoeten, Jordi Salmona, Rita Rasteiro, and @louneschikhi.bsky.social. Very happy to see this work published! (1/2)

Finally reading this paper from @gs2747.bsky.social 's lab for journal club this week and it's helping me understand lots of results that previously seemed paradoxical to me. Highly recommend! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This preprint from Helen Sakharova is one of the coolest things to come out of my lab: “Protein language models reveal evolutionary constraints on synonymous codon choice.” Codon choice is a big puzzle in how information is encoded in genomes, and we have a new angle. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

In another milestone for human genetics, the world's largest set of whole-genome DNA sequences now encompasses data from nearly half a million people, described in this new @nature.com paper from @ukbiobank.bsky.social: 🧪👇

🚨 Our parent-of-origin study is out in Nature! 🧬 Maternal and paternal alleles can have distinct — even opposite — effects on human traits, revealing a hidden layer of genetic architecture that standard GWAS miss. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Highlights below!