The @smbe-idea.bsky.social symposium at #SMBE2026 was packed with inspiring talks and thought-provoking discussion. Thank you for the opportunity to share how @projectpsyche.bsky.social & @10klepgenomes.bsky.social is making biodiversity genomics more inclusive!

Our paper is out! 📣 we find that molecular measures of genetic variation do not predict heritable genetic variation across species - important implications for the application of genomic data for conservation! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Stewart, @paulbfrandsen.bsky.social @gjijonn.bsky.social et al. demonstrate the rapid evolution of the caddisfly H-fibroin gene and the wide range of H-fibroin structural polymorphism tolerated in functional capture net silk. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag132 🖌️ Ralph Holzenthal #evobio #molbio

Busy days, we keep collecting, identifying & dissecting #butterflies and #moths for #referencegenome sequencing. No 🦋 is safe during the @10klepgenomes.bsky.social field workshop in Vlahi 🇧🇬 @projectpsyche.bsky.social @charlottewright.bsky.social @alenasuchackova.bsky.social @lepphylo.bsky.social

A labour of love. Identifying #lepidoptera species, especially micromoths, requires time & patience but we gathered the best experts from across Europe. Nothing less would do: during the @10klepgenomes.bsky.social field workshop in Vlahi 🇧🇬, we collected ~300 species! 💪💪 @projectpsyche.bsky.social

🧬🦋 New preprint out! 🦋🧬 What mechanisms underlie large-scale chromosomal rearrangements? Why do rearrangement rates vary so massively across taxa? We explored these questions in Erebia butterflies, a genus with extraordinary chromosome number diversity, from 7 to 52! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Kicking off @10klepgenomes.bsky.social field workshop in Vlahi 🇧🇬 Butterfly & moth afficinados from all over Europe start deploying their beautiful light traps to capture undersampled #biodiversityhotspots for #referencegenome sequencing. Stay tuned for more! @projectpsyche.bsky.social

A big preprint from my group! Muller Elements are considered to be conserved in flies. We tested it by reconstructing the ancestral dipteran karyotype using 340 chromosomal genomes and suprise suprise, they're not... Led by @juliagries.bsky.social and Sam Ebdon. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵👇

An excellent two day @royalsociety.org meeting packed with discussion about how pangenomics is revolutionising evolutionary biology. Thank you to all the amazing speakers and attendees who contributed to the rich discussions and @henrylnorth.bsky.social & @joanameier.bsky.social for co-organising!

Very excited to be part of this important symposium later this month!

As we prepare for a 2nd get-together, the report of the 1st in-person workshop of LepEU, a consortium to study population genomics of European Lepidoptera, is just out. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Thanks to COST Action @10klepgenomes.bsky.social for funding for these workshops.

Excited that the first genome assembly of a Lonomia spp. moth has been published @genetics-gsa.bsky.social by first authors @diler.bsky.social + @samridhi.bsky.social w/our wonderful colleagues at Universidad de los Andes led by Dr. Camila Gonzalez (thanks @cdanielcadena for introducing us!). 1

A study of South American butterflies and moths shows they reused the same genetic cheat sheet for 120 million years. 📝 Learn more about this collaborative work via the link below ⤵️ https://www.sanger.ac.uk/news_item/evolution-has-reused-the-same-genes-for-120-million-years/ 📸 Arif Maulana

That's a wrap! Thank you to everyone that came and exchanged ideas and experience and for @petermulhair.bsky.social for superbly hosting this meeting. Great things happen when >50 researchers come together to plan and do analysis for a week! Exciting times for @projectpsyche.bsky.social 🦋🦋🦋

Day 3 of the @projectpsyche.bsky.social spring meeting at @liverpooluni.bsky.social. Summary sessions brought together the ideas we’ve developed so far, followed by a visit to the entomological collection 🧬🦋 #10kLepGenomes #Lepidoptera #Genomics

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