Social dinner: where science meets fish and chips at Cambridge 🐟🍟🍻😀 Our stay ended- but the real takeaway? Two weeks of #HiC #genomic mapping, now safely packed into our brains 🧬 🧠☺️ … and already in use at home👩🏼‍💻🧑🏻‍💻☺️ @10klepgenomes.bsky.social

We are thrilled to announce the next ECR (and apparently butterfly)-themed session of the Integration of Speciation seminar, featuring @charlottewright.bsky.social and @thymelicus.bsky.social + careers Q&A with Dr Sally Potter. Find the link on the Ios website & mailing list.

Chromosomes are often classified as either monocentric (single centromere per chr) or holocentric (centromeric activity spread across each chr). In reality, there is a continuum in centromere organisation - and cyperids are a fascinating system to explore this in as James shows in this preprint! 🌱

The integration of speciation seminar series is restarting, with the first session coming up on *Tuesday March 3rd @ 5pm CET*, featuring two talks by @naturalselection.bsky.social and @andreaestandia.bsky.social + career Q&A with @markravinet.bsky.social as part of the ECR in Speciation theme.

New pre-print with some updates on ivory:miR193 in a highly polymorphic moth. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We mapped ivory (again!?) this time controlling aspects of camouflage in Anticarsia gemmatalis. Mapping, SVs, Expression and Function. Comments/suggestions welcome!

Now online! In this review, we cover four major topics on butterflies and moths: their evolutionary history and diversification dynamics, genomics, global diversity patterns, and conservation 🦋🌏 (1/8) @natrevbiodiv.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s44...

(1/3) The 2nd Genome Curation Workshop continues! Today, participants explored Merian elements and chromosome evolution in #Lepidoptera in a fantastic talk by @charlottewright.bsky.social More info below 👇🦋

The #fly community aims to achieve a comprehensive genomic study of the Drosophilidae family. @pankajd.bsky.social @bernardkim.bsky.social @petrovadmitri.bsky.social @darrenobbard.bsky.social present a comparative gene annotation for 301 #Drosophilidae species @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4c3pyrI

It was great to start the week off by welcoming the second cohort of budding curators to the Project Psyche Genome Curation Workshop! Over the next two weeks they will become experts in piecing together genomes and will use these skills to curate some Project Psyche genomes! 🔎🧬

🐌Justin Gerlach's blog post traces the remarkable journey of Partula conservation from the near‑total collapse of wild populations in the 1970s, following the introduction of the predatory rosy wolf snail, to successful reintroduction efforts.

Moths move significantly less when exposed to artificial nighttime light, new research from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter, Cornwall shows. Read More: news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-e... @uniexecec.bsky.social #ExeterEcology

Yet another reason why butterflies and moths are so interesting! Unlike other studied organisms that organise their DNA into two forms of chromatin, silkworms have a mysterious third form of chromatin folding..

📣 The 2nd #STSM call of #10kLepGenomes is complete! Eight researchers have been awarded funding for short scientific missions to boost collaboration, training, and knowledge exchange across the network. Congrats to the selected candidates and thanks to everyone who applied! 🦋 www.10klepgenomes.eu

🦋🧬 A milestone for biodiversity genomics. Project Psyche is building chromosome-level genomes for ~11,000 European butterflies & moths — 1,000 sequenced, 3,000+ collected, across 34 countries. 🔗 Read the publication: bit.ly/ProjectPsyche @projectpsyche.bsky.social #BiodiversityGenomics 🧬🌍

Always inspiring to start the year at @popgroup2026.bsky.social ! If you were there and want to learn more about pangenomes, there’s still time to register for our meeting in Edinburgh in June, co-organised with @charlottewright.bsky.social & @joanameier.bsky.social royalsociety.org/science-even...

Join us at #SMBE2026 in Copenhagen this summer! 🔵 With @ergabiodiv.bsky.social & @official-smbe.bsky.social 🟣 Symposium 21 | From genomic graphs to evolutionary insights: standardising #pangenomes for population inference 🟢 smbe2026.org/programme/ #biodiversity #genomics

Genutis et al. used data from an hybrid Drosophila cell line to show that pairing among trans homologous chromosomes was affected by the presence of nearby TEs. Mouse data show a similar pattern, suggesting a highly conserved TE-pairing association. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf222 #genome #evolution

How does population size shape the dynamics of structural variants across the genome? Check out our new paper in @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Are you excited about pangenomics? If so, join us in Edinburgh on 8-9th June to discuss the latest methods & insights from using these approaches across biodiversity! More details here: royalsociety.org/science-even... Organised together with @henrylnorth.bsky.social & @joanameier.bsky.social!

Our paper on ancestral conditions of caddisflies (described in the quoted post) is now out! doi.org/10.3897/zook...

Pre-print and weird repro thread time! I've posted here about scale insects a lot, but ~half of my research is on Lepidoptera. My lab is developing bagworm moths (Psychidae) as models for comparative genomics. You probably know them like you see in the pics below: caterpillars that make cases.

How many types of butterfly can you recognise? 1000 species of butterfly and moth have been genetically sequenced, as part of a project to map the genome of all 11,665 species in Europe, co-led by Darwin Research Fellow Dr Charlotte Wright. www.darwin.cam.ac.uk/news/sequenc...

We all wish peer review to be rapid and professional: doesn’t always go like that. But I am relieved to finally see Helixer by @alisandra-denton.bsky.social and team published in Nature Method. Congratulations! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm very excited that our paper on Project Psyche is now published! 🦋🧬 Over the last two years we've built an incredible community & already made huge progress. Read about this & how @projectpsyche.bsky.social will drive exciting and collaborative science here: www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

We need your help! If you have a few minutes, please fill out a very short survey about your preferences on butterflies and art - all responses are welcome! www.unveiling.eu This is part of a project that aims to understand how the beauty of butterflies influences conservation: Unveiling (1/2)

How do new centromeres evolve while staying compatible with the division machinery? Discover it in our new Nature paper! We show centromeres transition gradually via a mix of drift, selection, and sex, reaching new states that still work with the kinetochore. 👉 doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09779-1

Happy to present TOGA2, developed by Yury Malovichko @ymalovichko.bsky.social, the faster, memory-efficient & more accurate TOGA1 successor (github.com/hillerlab/TO...). And annotations, orthologs & gene loss/dup data generated with 4 references for 883 placental mammal and with 5 refs for 676 ...

Latest work out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social We find the fly development gene bicoid is much older than previously thought (~20 million yrs older!) 🪰🧬 To pinpoint its origins we tackled the Diptera phylogeny, providing some resolution (many open questions remain). 🔗 tinyurl.com/2vyuevpy

Do you use genomic data to study Lepidoptera in Europe? Do you want to visit a lab to learn a new skill or build a new collaboration? If so, you should apply for a short term scientific mission! These are small grants to fund research exchanges as part of our Lep10K COST action. All info below!

It's out, Minos transgenesis in the pantry moth by @donyaniyaz.bsky.social @lucalivraghi.bsky.social High efficient, glowing eye and silk gland markers peerj.com/articles/202... @peerj.bsky.social

What a remarkable discovery! In SW Turkey a new species of Lycaenid was discovered, Rapala suleymani sp.n., of a genus that was only known from the eastern palearctic & indomalayan realms, it's closest relative flies 7000km away! doi.org/10.31184/M00...

A fantastic writeup by Glenn Zorpette from @spectrum.ieee.org. Glenn joined us in Italy where we collectively sampled hundreds of new species for @projectpsyche.bsky.social. Shoutout to Luigi Avantaggiato for the spectacular photos and @costprogramme.bsky.social funding for bringing groups together.

It is so nice to finally see the first paper of my PhD published! It was possible thanks to invaluable contributions of Andrea Chiocchio, @mariaheikkila.bsky.social, @jadrankarota.bsky.social, Lauri Kaila, and @lepphylo.bsky.social.

Claire Merot opens the afternoon session at the #biodiversity25 with a presentation about the structural genetic diversity across the tree of life. Structural variants (SVs) are in order de magnitude higher than SNPs. TEs accounts for many SVs. SVs are different across different lineages.

New preprint! We unexpectedly discovered that some Caenorhabditis species delete parts of their somatic genome early in development, which fragments their chromosomes and eliminates key germline genes. Multiple lines of evidence suggest this bizarre process was present in the ancestors of C. elegans

Programmed DNA elimination was present in the last common ancestor of Caenorhabditis nematodes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.23.681605v1

Really nice paper from @tiff-ki.bsky.social & co. shows no overall decline in butterfly species richness in Sulawesi over 166 yrs, but changing communities with endemics & forest specialists declining. Short-term trends unreliable measures of long term. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... 🌏

The new European Butterfly Red List is published today, with worrying findings. Over 1/4 (28%) of Europe’s 442 species are threatened with extinction or are close to being so. The situation is far worse for our 148 endemic species, 40% are now threatened or nearly so www.bc-europe.eu/webpage.php?...

🚀 Second STSM of 10kLepGenomes! Jakub Tetla (Jagiellonian Univ., Poland) visited @jadrankarota.bsky.social (Lund, Sweden) from 24–26 Sept 2025. The goal was to integrate museum collections with phylogenomics to study West Palearctic tiger moths. #10kLepGenomes #Lepidoptera #Museomics

This week we celebrated reaching 1000 lepidopteran genomes in the Tree of Life (ToL) programme @ the @sangerinstitute.bsky.social with butterfly crafts and cake! Many of these genomes were sequenced by the wonderful ToL teams as part of @projectpsyche.bsky.social & the Darwin Tree of Life project 🦋🧬

Now published! Our paper on: (1) Accurate sequencing of sperm at scale (2) Positive selection of spermatogenesis driver mutations across the exome (3) Offspring disease risks from male reproductive aging [1/n] www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Today´s Guardian has an article about our study on butterfly colors, where we compare butterfly colors in native forest to those in eucalyptus plantations. This is study is a partnership between labs from Denmark, Spain, and Brazil. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Preprint Alert! 🦥 We produced complete genomes for 2 Xenarthra and placed them in a mammalian comparative framework. We found that Xenarthra harbour the largest number of retrocopies in mammals! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Project Psyche is featured in a new article out now on @spectrum.ieee.org! Check it out to get an insight into the efforts of @ebpgenome.bsky.social and the milestones achieved during the fieldtrip of #ProjectPsyche and @10klepgenomes.bsky.social to the Italian Alps 🦋

If you're interested in understanding discordance in phylogenomic analyses, the @evojlinnsoc.bsky.social's special issue 'Phylogenomic Discordance: Patterns, Processes, and Solutions' is for you! tinyurl.com/v2eces3s I'll be sharing a few articles a week until we're through the issue! (1/n)🧪

Exciting news! The next #PopGroup meeting will take place in Lille 🍟, France, 7–9 January 2026 – just 1 hour by train from London, Brussels, and Paris. This year, PopGroup will also host ALPHY, the annual meeting of Evolutionary Genomics. More info: populationgeneticsgroup.org.uk See you there !

k-mer-based diversity scales with population size proxies more than nucleotide diversity in a meta-analysis of 98 plant species. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic...

Funded PhD position available 🎉 Come and work with me in Helsinki to uncover the pathways producing colourful tiger moth wings. Lots of options for genomics, CRISPR, fieldwork, behaviour experiments… Email with questions! jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki...

Hospodářská, @petrnguyen.bsky.social et al. investigated genome size and karyotype in Polyommatus and Lysandra butterflies, rejecting polyploidy to confirm karyotypic diversification via chromosome fragmentation in Polyommatinae butterflies. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf157 #genome #evolution

Join us at #Biodiversity25 ! Interested in Lepidoptera? There will be the session on @projectpsyche.bsky.social with project updates, the highly anticipated re-launch of Lepbase and discussions on the analysis of the first 1,000 lep genomes. Plus there's a keynote by @lepphylo.bsky.social!🦋