New review out! With students in my lab, we explore how population size shapes speciation—from drift in small populations to selection in large ones. Do small or large populations speciate faster? The answer is more nuanced than you might think. esj-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

The first Aguillon Lab paper is officially out in early view at Evolution!! Led by postdoc @devonderaad.bsky.social, we’ve explored the hybrid zone between black-headed and rose-breasted grosbeaks in the Great Plains. #ornithology #hybridization #speciation #evolution doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Just published: Conservation genomics of two endangered buntings reveal genetic diversity before and after severe population declines. doi.org/10.1186/s129... Despite severe population declines, both species retained high genetic diversity but experienced increased inbreeding. #ornithology #birds

We have a new paper out in Molecular Ecology, led by @devinbendixsen.bsky.social ! Reproductive isolation due to divergent ecological selection is accompanied by vast genomic instability in experimentally evolved yeast populations onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Heads up: ignore samtools dot org, similarly minimap2 dot com and likely others. It's owned by a known phishing site and while the binaries they offer look valid currently (but note they may be serving us different binaries to others), that could change. Ie: it's not us (Samtools team)! Be warned

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

Hybridization and introgression are major evolutionary processes. Since the 1940s, the prevailing view has been that they shape plants far more than animals. In our new study (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... ), we find the opposite: animals exchange genes more, and for longer, than plants

The paper for my R package is published! This has been a fun process learning more about hybrid zones and triangle plots. Thanks everyone who has contributed and tested it out already! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Why do speciation rates vary across the tree of life? Some of the best yet most underappreciated places for this investigation are natural hybrid zones. This preprint takes you to the hybrid zones in the origin of species to find a clue. 👉 shorturl.at/N7FXE #Speciation #Evolution #hybridization

New rock dove paper!🕊️ Bit by bit, we are disentangling their evolutionary history and adding evidence to recognise the elusive West African rock doves as a different species *please ignore the little typo in the title, livia should be lowercase @trstngnthr.bsky.social doi.org/10.1002/ece3...

My very first post on here. I am stoked to share lab's latest paper led by @ethantolman.bsky.social. Ethan developed a highly scalable pipeline to differentiate between various gene flow models, including ghost introgression in phylogenomic datasets. Check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

😎👇 Check out my poster here: doi.org/10.13140/RG....

Interested in eukaryotic algal evolution, metagenomics, new plastid diversity, and more? Check out my poster (P175) today at #eseb2025 ! #protistsonsky

If you're at #ESEB2025 drop by my poster today and let's chat about Birds-of-Paradise and their potential ring-like speciation history!

Our genetic kinship estimation tool “DeepKin” is now available! Our neural network models trained on simulated data work effectively on real ancient data from diverse backgrounds and often outperform available tools. @compevohumang.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Thanks a lot @jenteo.bsky.social for discussing our paper on your blog!

For folks interested in hybrid zones / introgression / speciation, this looks interesting: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

*PhD position* 🦉 Would you like to do a PhD with Indo-Pacific birds and evolutionary genomics? Join us in Stockholm: <deadline> 05 September 2025, 23:59 PhD student in Evolution of Indo-Pacific birds recruit.visma.com/spa/public/a...

Very excited to have our study come out looking at multiple plant mosaic hybrid zones and their implications for hybrids to act as "sutures" of species ranges. We use genomic data to project shifts into future climates and discuss impacts on conservation/management. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The molecular evolutionary basis of species formation revisited www.cell.com/trends/genet...

A model-free method for genealogical inference without phasing and its application for topology weighting https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.22.666161v1

🚨 Wanted: PhD student excited about population genomics, Natural History Collections and birds! 📍 Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, Germany 🕒 3 Years, fully funded by the Leibniz Junior Researchgroup program Details and Application portal 👇 jobs.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/jobposting/8...

RAxML-NG v2.0 beta is here github.com/amkozlov/rax... Features 1. Difficulty prediction academic.oup.com/mbe/article/... 2. Adaptive search academic.oup.com/mbe/article/... 3. Early Stop www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 4. Model selection 5. Rapid bootstrapping academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

🧵5 Top Free Alternatives to BioRender for Scientific Illustrations! These five websites offer free scientific illustrations for biologists. Great for presentations, research papers and other research communication needs. Save and share the post!

Very happy to share a new paper open access in Syst Biol. Introgression is commonly reported in phylogenomic studies, but whether these patterns are caused by ancestral or contemporary gene flow is rarely understood. Here we took a stab at this problem using parapatric tinkerbirds as a model (1/10)

happy to see our study on genetic parallelism of reproductive isolation in chickadee hybrid zones out in @evolletters.bsky.social—great work led by Georgy Semenov & Scott Taylor: doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Now published! We examine how female competition shapes movement ecology. We provide the first genetic evidence of female philopatry and male-biased dispersal in a socially polyandrous bird species! doi.org/10.1093/evol... @journal-evo.bsky.social

Remember when you first learned about genetics at school? All those fascinating examples of human traits that are each apparently determined by just a single gene? Time to check in on some of your favourites to see how they’re doing. 🧬🧵🧪 1/n

A complete and dynamic tree of birds - out today in PNAS! Teamwork with @eliotmiller.bsky.social and others at @birdsoftheworld.bsky.social and Open Tree of Life to put together current relationships across all birds. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

More good news this month! 🎉 I'm excited to share my PhD colleague Filip Thörn's fantastic study on hybridisation in lek-mating Birds-of-Paradise, which I had the privilege to be part of. 🐦 doi.org/10.1111/mec.... #museomics #genomics #hybridisation

Can genomic analysis actually estimate past population size? www.cell.com/trends/genet...

Few genetic loci control the green-brown colour polymorphism in the meadow grasshopper Pseudochorthippus parallelus: doi.org/10.1093/jeb/... Varma et al. @gabewinter.bsky.social @ebelingae.bsky.social @opalacios.bsky.social

A little tutorial to make interactive maps with GBIF data for any species, including any metadata you want - pictures too Great work by intern Edgar Signe from Brest University www.montejo-kovacevich-lab.com/projects/

I finally read @s-m-aguillon.bsky.social 's NEE paper on allllll the reproductive barriers in swordtails, and loved it. We bumped our lab meeting discussing it to next week because we all want to take more time on it. Definitely a paper to teach speciation from. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to see my third thesis chapter published! We used #museomics to investigate hybridisation in New Guinean honeyeaters 🐦 and found that two lineages likely fused back into one after initial divergence. 🔎🧬 Huge thanks to all collaborators who made this possible! doi.org/10.1111/mec....

New paper out in Ecology Letters (open access): I and Daniel Matute consider 'species sorting' -- a bias in the outcome of secondary contact following the allopatric stage of speciation -- as a reason for the much-observed pattern of elevated trait differences in sympatric close relatives

With @hybridzones.bsky.social & @jenncoughlan.bsky.social, we have been working on an update to Daven Presgraves' influential 2010 review on hybrid incompatibilities (shorturl.at/cJndf). The preprint is available here (shorturl.at/DTC48) with an updated table of almost 100 incompatibilities!

This needs to be shared and shared.

Not really my announcement to make--I am but a lesser co-author--but IQ-TREE 3 has just been released! (Most credit to Minh Bui and @roblanfear.bsky.social and their labs) ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

🚨 New preprint! We analyzed 39 bird genomes—including 3 Mauritian species that bounced back from the brink of extinction—to explore genomic erosion in a comparative framework. 🧬🦜🧩 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #consgen #popgen @claudiafontsere.bsky.social

For my first-ever bsky post, I’m thrilled to share our latest #ancientDNA research, which I co-led with @jessthorpemas.bsky.social OA: doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf065 We recovered and analysed mitochondrial genomes from many #mammoths spanning the last million years 🦣🧬⌛ Check this 🧵 we wrote ⬇️

How #genome-wide sequence divergence maps to species status www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #biodiversity #genomics

🐦 Do some birds have #PrettyPrivilege? 💫 New paper: doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2024.2846 We show that ~half the variation in research effort on 293 bird species in US+Canada is explained by just 3 factors: 1)visual appeal, 2)range size, & 3)# of universities w/in ranges. What we did & why it matters:🧵

aDNA/aeDNA folks: tired of eyeballing hundreds of damage plots? I am excited to introduce AdDeam—a tool to rapidly generate damage profiles, cluster them, and spot outliers. Great for large sample sets or flagging modern contigs in ancient metagenomics assemblies. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

OK who's ready for some science? Do you like speciation? Genomics? Hybridization? Bioinformatics? Then this is for you: Published today: "The Distribution & Dispersal of Large Haploblocks in a Superspecies" Bonus interest if you like ring species and cute greenish birds: doi.org/10.1111/mec....

We have a 4-year fully funded PhD position available! Research topics include but are not limited to 1) Parallel evolution of climate adaptation in Europe and South America 2) The genetic architecture of temperature adaptation 3) The evolution of pathogenicity su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

Do you want to map the loci underlying selection but you're on a budget? Let me introduce you to the concept of sequencing the living and the dead. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

How do SVs, satellite DNA & gene content shape avian genome evolution? We analyzed 45 HiFi genomes across 3 Scrub-Jay species with distinct population sizes. Grateful to be on this incredible team led by Scott Edwards! "Comparative population pangenomes" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

‼️These #PSMC #peaks are #artifacts‼️ Seen #PSMC results like this🤔? They are caused by ill-set parameters, #very #common, and #easy #to #solve! For details see 🧵& OA paper @currentbiology.bsky.social 🙂🐢🧬🎉! cell.com/current-biol...