An empirical approach to evaluating the prevalence of long-lived balancing selection in humans--and important limitations. Work by @hannahmm.bsky.social

Excited to share some new work led by grad student Sophie Walton (w/ @petrovadmitri.bsky.social). We used in vitro gut communities to study how natural selection acts on strains of the same species as they compete within larger communities. Check out Sophie's thread below for details!

Really cool paper that changed the way I think about what GWAS and Burden tests are doing, and also basically made me pleiotropy-pilled

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:

Bay Area Pop Gen conference Dec 6! One of my favorite conferences. Registration is free! Only controversy is how to pronounce BAPG (bap-guh is the right answer). docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Everything Jeff said except since we're hosting at Stanford it's pronounced BAP-G bsky.app/profile/jros...

Proud of the latest edition of my free intro biostats book. gitrepo: github.com/ybrandvain/b... book: ybrandvain.github.io/biostats/ Not complete but at a good point to take a break, and I think its quite usable dm me with comments , ideas etc

For population genetics and evolutionary biology folks in the Bay Area: the next BAPG will be hosted by Stanford CEHG and the Petrov lab at Stanford on 12/6. Registration is free but required. The deadline for talk submission is Nov. 16. Hope to see you soon! Pls RT! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I'm recruiting a postdoc for my group (based in beautiful Eugene, OR). Please get in touch if you're interested, esp if you'd like to chat at #ASHG25!

I’ll be attending #ASHG25! I’m currently hiring for (i) a Senior Research Scientist or (ii) a Postdoc position in my lab. If you’re interested, please reach out to arrange a time to meet and discuss.

Save the date for a new conference exploring genomics for linking polygenic signals to mechanistic insights! Biology at Scale: From Variants to Cellular Programs & Functions is opening soon for registrations. #BiologyAtScale26 📍 Wellcome Genome Campus, UK 📅 29 June -1 July 2026 👉 bit.ly/4mYud02

Genetic architectures of #ComplexTraits vary widely. @yuvalsim.bsky.social @jkpritch.bsky.social @gs2747.bsky.social &co show these diffs arise from mutational target size & heritability per site; when controlled for, all tested traits have similar architectures @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/47mZXqT

Blog post: Ancestry and Education Indirect, direct, confounded and quasi-causal. I write about a preprint by Wang et al, in which they look for associations with genetic ancestry in an admixed Mexican population. They found genetic effects for height and Type-II diabetes, but not for education.

I want to try something again at #ASHG25 this year: I'll block some time on Thursday and Friday afternoons to meet with trainees who would be interested to chat on any topic. I did this last year and it was great to meet a whole bunch of new people, at all career stages!

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/...

🎉scverse conference 2025 Call for Abstracts DEADLINE EXTENDED! 🎉 We're excited to announce that the deadline to submit abstracts for the scverse Conference 2025 has been extended to September 15, 2025! 🧵 #scverse #scverse2025 #SingleCell #Conference

Delighted to share some wonderful work by our recent grad Matthew Aguirre on theoretical models of GRNs, and what eQTL data can teach us about these!

Excited to share our new preprint for the tskit_arg_visualizer Python package! ARGs can sometimes feel like a black box, so @yanwong.bsky.social and I have been developing a method to programmatically drawing these graphs. 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2508.03958 1/6

🧠 Meet the keynote speakers for the 2025 scverse conference! Panos Roussos, Professor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai 🧵 @panosroussos.bsky.social #scverse #scverse2025 #SingleCell #SpatialTranscriptomics #Conference #Keynote

Grateful for this terrific commentary by @tomonroe.bsky.social in @jclinical-invest.bsky.social on our paper that is out in final print format today: www.jci.org/articles/vie... Please check it out: www.jci.org/articles/vie...

"The molecular evolutionary basis of species formation revisited" by Molly Schumer (@mollyschumer.bsky.social) & colleagues "The origin of species has long fascinated biologists, but determining the genes [involved] has only recently become possible in non-model organisms." shorturl.at/wG0B5

Incredibly proud of this work where we developed a method for understanding the information contained in millions of genomes. Another example of NIH funded research.

Cool paper, and -- as expected by how similar the titles are -- dovetails nicely with our work (led by Margaret Antonio, Clemens Weiß, Ziyue Gao, and Susanna Sawyer): elifesciences.org/articles/79714

Bittersweet to be leaving @docedge.bsky.social after a wonderful postdoc, but excited to share that I'm joining @uoregon.bsky.social next month as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Data Science.

I think this quote is both unsustainable and unsupported by the analysis in the piece. First and foremost, it portrays fraud as *consuming* science rather than merely growing alongside it. Much of the “fraud” in the paper is just metric gaming whackamole that doesn’t get read, cited or used.

Critics of de-extinction research hit by mystery smear campaign www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

Using google ngrams I found a book that has a Manhattan plot from 1994 (not related to genetics): www.google.com/books/editio...

Last week was the first #ReNUhopeConference It was an enormous privilege to meet many ReNU warriors (they give the best hugs!) and their families, and scientists and clinicians working on ReNU. ReNU Syndrome United have achieved so much in only a single year, building an incredible community 💙

Does anyone know who first used the term "Manhattan Plot"? Wikipedia links to a 2010 paper by Greg Gibson. I haven't yet found an earlier use, but Greg's phrasing suggests that he did not invent the term. doi.org/10.1038/ng07...

The 2026 Probabilistic Modeling in Genomics (ProbGen) meeting will be held at UC Berkeley, March 25-28, 2026. We have an amazing list of keynote speakers and session chairs: probgen2026.github.io Please help spread the news.

Thank you @sinamajidian.bsky.social Followup, does anyone know who made the original version so that I can credit them?

Can anyone point me to full resolution versions of these classic images from NHGRI that show the growth of GWAS from ~2006--2015? I'm looking for the timelapse versions. (I know many of you are waiting for the GWAS chapters of my free online textbook on human genetics--they are coming, but slowly!)

I'm thrilled that my lab at NYU is now supported by an NIH MIRA grant! I'm looking to hire 1-2 senior lab members (outstanding postdoc candidates or experienced staff scientists) with expertise in computational or statistical methods in human genetics or genomics. Please share!

The field of neuroscience views the goal of human genetics as "finding genes". This is an outdated view. In whole genome studies of rare variants, finding genes is the easy part. The more interesting and important goal is to map out the causal pathway from genes to brain function to cognitive traits

📣New today! 📄Haplotype analysis reveals pleiotropic disease associations in the HLA region 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 @jkpritch.bsky.social @finngen.bsky.social & colleagues

This postdoc position is still open! Apply if you want to come work with us on asymmetric cell divisions in spiralian embryos! postdocs.stanford.edu/prospective/...

Staff scientist position (computational): I am looking for a computational scientist to join my genomics lab at Stanford. They should have an outstanding skillset in ML/statistical methods for genomic applications, postdoc experience and a strong publication record. #sciencejobs

One thing that really bothers me with the new "virtual cell" terminology is that it is currently largely focused on a very narrow definition of models that can predict effects of trans perturbations (gene dosage, drugs etc) on gene expression. 1/

Last week the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research met and approved a new initiative: ancient DNA for Modern Genomics (aDMG). You can watch the presentation and discussion here at the 1:54:00 mark. videocast.nih.gov/watch=56826

Won't someone think of the children! @ColossalBio dire bullshit continues.

Seems a good time to invite Sen Britt to watch an NIH review panel (aka study section) analyze piles of grants over several days to identify the <10% that win funding. Applications that scientists spent months preparing, whose peers spent weeks poring through in advance of review mtg at NIH.

Also empirical estimates don't agree with the simulation.... pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24068246/

The university of California is a powerhouse of innovation, healthcare, and social mobility for California and the US.

📣 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.

🚨 New Preprint 🚨 A continuous landscape of signaling encodes a corresponding landscape of CAR T cell phenotype How can we tune JAK/STAT signaling to create better immune cell therapies? doi.org/10.1101/2025.0…

Flybase lost all of the NIH support overnight - it is a disaster for the community. Please consider donating. I just did! www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

Out today in @pnas.org! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Talked to @KateZernike at @nytimes about my journey and the current moment for scientists in the U.S. “Ardem Patapoutian’s story is not just the American dream, it is the dream of American science.” Read the article here. No subscription required: www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/u...

Congratulations Jeff! It's been really wonderful to have you in the lab! I cannot wait to see all the fantastic work that will come out of your future lab. ...and trainees, Jeff is an amazing scientist and mentor! If you ever have a chance to work with him you should seize it with both hands!

Get the word out far and wide. New opportunity from the Simons Foundation in the Eco-Evo space. 2026 Simons Graduate Fellowship in Ecology and Evolution Awards, due July 31, 2025, only for incoming PhD students who plan to start their PhDs in Fall 2026. www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons...