Excited to share our latest work on the factors that determine what genes we find (and don't find!) in GWAS and burden tests. We describe a critical concept that we call *specificity*. Led by Jeff Spence and Hakhamanesh Mostafavi:

My first preprint of my PhD! Thanks to @ekerdoncuff.bsky.social and @moorjanipriya.bsky.social for their guidance and mentorship in this project!

Paul Nurse describing the main job of a PI (From ‘The Thinking Game’, 2024)

I want to comment on a piece of research that came to my attention yesterday that I think is a reflection of endemic problems in our field. The study was published in a top-tier journal and was covered by the national press. It had a very large sample (N>30,000) and several yearly time points.

Are you obsessed with archaeological or historical questions and easily get into coding? Or a computational scientist that want to understand biology and disease evolution, and curious about the ancient past? If you have these or other burning questions that fits into our programme, apply below!

One week left to apply!

Very happy to see our pre-print on ancient Irish goat genetics on bioRxiv #aDNA #spiergorm I want to acknowledge this was only possible through the work of the late Dr. Judith Findlater, along with Prof. Eileen Murphy at @qubelfastofficial.bsky.social.

What's that? The story of East Asian pig domestication as told through ancient DNA? Yes please! Congrats to everyone on such a fantastic and overdue story! Pigs are so great. doi.org/10.1093/molb...

Application deadline in less than a week! Apply to join the Uppsala Human Evolution team!

I have funding for a 2-year dry-lab postdoc to join our team @humanevouu.bsky.social 🧪 (Deadline Oct 21st) The project will utilize modern and #aDNA data from humans and sheep to study environmental adaptation (including method development and simulations). Please share! www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

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...

PhD Studentship alert! I'm looking for a motivated student to work here in Vienna @vdsee-univie.bsky.social on my ERC grant "DISPERSE". It's a fulltime scholarship (working in 14C and #archsci in Palaeolithic archaeology in Eurasia. Details in the link below! jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Universi...

Announcing SimHumanity, a baseline SLiM 5.0 model of the full human genome, replete with demographic history, autosomes, X/Y, and mtDNA. A shared starting point for reproducible evolutionary simulations. We’d love your feedback! #SLiM #evolution #genomics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I will be recruiting two PhDs for my ERC Project HERDPATH - let's discover out how livestock and pathogens evolved together using #aDNA. Projects will be animal or pathogen focused but will be in dialogue. Details at my quaint website below. Deadline 3rd October. kevingdaly.github.io

Excited to say we’re hiring 😊. We’re looking for a post-doc in ancient pathogen genomics to join our friendly supportive team in London at @ugiatucl.bsky.social. Start date January 2026. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

I wrote about gene-gene interactions (epistasis) and the implications for heritability, trait definitions, natural selection, and therapeutic interventions. Biology is clearly full of causal interactions, so why don't we see them in the data? A 🧵:

Are you interested in doing a PhD in Copenhagen? Interested in studying Neanderthals and Denisovans which live on in our genomes? Than you are more than welcome to apply to join my group starting Jan 2026 :) candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI... Please reach out if you have any questions!

Shameless promotion from #isba11 - I'll be hiring PhDs to start early 2026 (plus postdocs starting later), using #adna to study livestock and pathogen coevolution, particularly looking at inbreeding and immune gene evolution! Contact me at kevin[at]palaeome.org, full ad to come. Please share!

I'm often asked how human genetic data can be used to validate drug targets. In our new ‪@natcardiovascres.nature.com‬ paper, we provide an end-to-end framework for genetically validating IL-6 inhibition for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease outcomes 🧵

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/...

1. The philosophy of science sometimes gets an unearned reputation as a purely academic exercise that offers little by way of concrete tools for advancing research. This is wrong. And today, as we grapple with how AI is changing the nature of scientific activity, it's desperately wrong.

It's out! 😀 THE MAP: EXPANSION OF FARMING IN WESTERN EURASIA, 9600-4000 BCE 2025.1 Regional updates, particularly 🇺🇦. Colour and greyscale resolutions, and much asked for colour code and legend. @barbarahorejs.bsky.social @leizarchaeology.bsky.social @oeai.bsky.social zenodo.org/records/1688...

Will's detailed thread about using Claude Code as a coding assistant parallels my experience using ChatGPT o.3 and o.4 as a proof assistant.

The @scilifelab.se ancient DNA unit is looking for an bioinformatician placed at Uppsala University. This is a great way to be part of diverse #aDNA research projects as a staff scientist with permanent (!!) employment: www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

I wrote about how genetic risk works in the context of embryo selection and how people often think about it all wrong. A short 🧵:

🧬🖥️ I am strongly of the opinion that bioinformatics needs to move away entirely from text-based and "loosely" structured file formats for essentially any type of data. File formats should be binary-first, and designed for *correct* and *efficient* machine parsing 1/3

#MetagenomicsMonday Analysis of aDNA from 1313 ancient human remains spanning 37k years revealed that the rise of infectious diseases coincided with animal domestication around 65k years ago, with disease spread intensifying during pastoralist migrations. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Results of our (extremely long-term) side project with @amygoldberg.bsky.social and @jgschraiber.bsky.social out now in G3: doi.org/10.1093/g3jo... We benchmarked methods for estimating ancestry proportions under mapping bias and present an adjusted GenotypeLikelihood to mitigate its impact (1/2)

New postdoc opening in our lab: crick.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job... Don't hesitate to send in your details or contact me if interested!

PSA: Just trotting out the aphorism that “all models are wrong, but some are useful” doesn’t mean *your* model is among the latter…

Are you kept awake at night, wondering whence your bags of archaeological bone fragments? Is your child ZooMS curious? Check out this mMass-ively cool AMA where we address your pressing proteomic problems. youtu.be/loAgeUuK08g?...

Nature research paper: The spatiotemporal distribution of human pathogens in ancient Eurasia go.nature.com/4lh97tr

Get excited for ISBA11! The conference program is now online! www.isba11.com/programme #ISBA11 #biomoleculararchaeology #Archaeology #Archaeology #archaeologist @isbarchaeology.bsky.social @archaeobiomics.bsky.social

Happy to share our new study from my PhD on the spread of farming across Anatolia and into the Aegean and then into Europe. @compevohumang.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 👇🏽

Postdoc position in my group in Tokyo! Please get in touch if you are interested. And happy to discuss projects - these would range from developing new methods to analysis of new genomes that we are now sequencing in the lab. Job Ad: www.riken.jp/en/careers/r... Lab page: speidellab.github.io

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...

A 4-year postdoc position in population genomics is available in my group at the University of East Anglia, to work on a project sequencing a thousand fox genomes across rural and urban environments in the UK. vacancies.uea.ac.uk/vacancies/15...

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take. thebullshitmachines.com

📣 Latest from the lab: Performance of deep-learning-based approaches to improve polygenic scores www.nature.com/articles/s41... Its thought deep learning will substantially improve PGS but the reality is MANY have tried but no/little gain has been seen so far. Here we report our negative results.

Cancer Research UK today published a report which highlights changes in cancer survival rates over the last 50 years. Many headlines (like this one from the Guardian) have chosen to report the ‘doubling of cancer survival rates’ since the 1970s. But that's misleading... 1/18

Hello, Our paper on enamel proteins from Paranthropus robustus has finally been peer reviewed, please have a read here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Paranthropus robustus has been puzzling scientists since its discovery in 1938 in South Africa, where a high number of fossils have been found.

🆕 The "Machine learning of spatial data" section is now live on the CRAN Spatial Task View! 🌍 Check it out at https://cran.r-project.org/view=Spatial Have suggestions or improvements? Contributions are welcome!💡 #rstats #rspatial #machinelearning #gischat

The human pangenome continues to grow and improve! Release 2 is here! Click through for the details, but this is a pretty amazing dataset including not just the phased assemblies, but PacBio HiFi, ONT Ultralong, Dovetail/Illumina Hi-C, PacBio Kinnex, and Illumina WGS for all samples

devastated to discover Cheddar Man was lactose intolerant

Celtic languages are now limited to NW Europe, but they were once far more widespread. How did they spread? I'm excited to have contributed to this new ancient DNA study led by @hmcccoll exploring exactly that. 🧬 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A common sentiment is “I can’t share my code because it’s messy and there might be errors” But if it’s that untrustworthy, why are you publishing the results it generates?

Delighted to see our paper on the evolutionary history of the CCR5Δ32 deletion published this week in @cellpress.bsky.social. Work led by @ravnkirstine.bsky.social, Leonardo Cobuccio and Rasa Muktupavela, and co-supervised by me and @simorasmu.bsky.social. See 🧵 for main findings...

Super excited to share my latest preprint with @klohmueller.bsky.social! Here we leverage the unique signature that recessive deleterious variants can lead to an increase in archaic ancestry to tackle a classic question - the dominance distribution on the human genome www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

11/ Here’s the wild part: A mutation that damages an immune gene sounds bad. But in the context of evolving human societies, it might’ve been a life-saving adaptation.

23/ In summary: ✅ CCR5delta32 arose once, >6,700 years ago ✅ It spread via Bronze Age demographic expansions ✅ Underwent strong positive selection ✅ Is now a globally relevant variant in medicine All from an ancient immunogenetic adaptation.