The special issue Functional and Adaptive Effects of Genomic Structural Variation is now out in Heredity. Many thanks to all contributors for their submissions, to the editorial team at @heredityjournal.bsky.social and to @ellenleffler.bsky.social, @mydennis.bsky.social & @gokcumenlab.bsky.social!

Diedre Reitz ( @diedrereitz.bsky.social ), PhD, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at UC Davis, will be giving a seminar on Monday, March 23rd at 4:00pm in Kollros Auditorium. We hope to see you there!

Everyone could use a little purple cat in their life - happy Thursday from my 5yo 🐾

Whoa! Looking forward to checking this one out

I had a blast working on this paper! This was the first mammalian assembly paper using the new CiFi tech, and we combined multiple lines of evidence to verify a prairie-vole-specific duplication of Avpr1a. All methods will be open source and reproducible, enabling the community to build on them.

Excited so share our newest study using a single-library HiFi-CiFi approach to generate chromosome-scale diploid assemblies of two vole genomes, identifying putative drivers of divergent pair-bonding behavior, namely a prairie-vole-specific duplication of Avpr1a gene, led by @mabuelanin.bsky.social

BenchDrop-seq: a microfluidics-free platform for benchtop single-cell long-read RNA sequencing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.12.706999v1

parents in davis this morning waiting for summer camp registration to open

GENETICS: @mydennis.bsky.social from University of California Davis discussed the querying complex genomic regions important in human disease and evolution at the 2026 AGBT General Meeting. #AGBTGM26

JAX Long-Read Sequencing Workshop Keynotes by @aphillippy.bsky.social & @mydennis.bsky.social Co-organized by @olgaanczukow.bsky.social, @christinebeck.bsky.social & Mark Adams ✈️ Trainee travel awards 📝 Abstracts due March 3 🥼 Optional wet-lab training session 🔗 www.jax.org/education-an...

Please check out these amazing women! They are fantastic scientists, committed mentors, supportive friends and honestly super stars! 🤩@bradylabs.bsky.social @mydennis.bsky.social @ucdavis.bsky.social www.ucdavis.edu/news/podcast...

Anyone in the U.S. got an ERK biosensor zebrafish line they'd be willing to share/ship to VA? vascular specific would be preferred, but I'll take global too. @zebrafishrock.bsky.social

Recently learned that I will be promoted to FULL PROFESSOR(!) this coming summer. So happy and thankful for those that have supported me along the way, including collaborators, mentors, colleagues, friends, family, trainees, and letter writers. #bighugs #youdabest #firstgen

Please repost and share widely - winter break is a perfect time to assemble application materials 😅

Did you know the last common ancestor of #zebrafish and humans was ~450 million years ago? A whole genome duplication event (3R) occurred early in the teleost fish phylogeny. Despite this event, zebrafish and humans have about the same number of chromosomes. #ZebrafishFunFacts 🧪

Absolutely thrilled to share the latest work from my lab focused on the variation and evolution of human centromeres among global populations! We assembled 2,110 human centromeres, identifying 226 new major haplotypes and 1,870 α-satellite HOR variants. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

CiFi: accurate long-read chromosome conformation capture with low-input requirements. #HiFi #LongRead #Sequencing @natcomms.nature.com 🧪🧬 🖥️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Consider applying for the Robert E. Chason Endowed Chair in Translational Research at the UC Davis MIND Institute! Join a vibrant community of colleagues studying neurodevelopment conditions like autism. UC Davis is an excellent place to work and live. Find more details here: lnkd.in/gZRyViNa

Excited to share our final accepted version of the CiFi method out today: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Lab ice skating and winter party ❄️⛄️

Very happy to share that I’ve been awarded a K99 Career Development Award from NIGMS for my work on MSH2-MSH6 and its role in recombination-mediated rearrangements. Big thanks to my mentor, Wolf Heyer, co-mentor, Megan Dennis, letter writers, and colleagues. mmg.ucdavis.edu/news/two-mmg...

Join us at this exciting Workshop on #LongReads with keynotes from @aphillippy.bsky.social @mydennis.bsky.social co-organized by @christinebeck.bsky.social and Mark Adams @jacksonlab.bsky.social Register www.jax.org/longread #RNA #genomics #bioinformatics #cancer #medicine #evolution #neuroscience

The lab is coming out strong with their "fishman" pumpkin-contest submission this year for the Halloween Symposium today @ucdgenomecenter.bsky.social ! Pumpkin credit: @nicholashaghani.bsky.social 👻🎃

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Excellent review from @silparacchini.bsky.social’s lab with a nice bluetorial

Happy to share a new @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social from the lab, led by talented postdoctoral fellow #MinhooKim: "Single-cell exploration of ovarian aging across vertebrate models", a meta-analysis study of public ovarian aging sc/snRNA-seq data! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A 🧵, 1/5 🧬🖥️🧪 #GeroSky

We are thrilled to share our new preprint entitled “The origin and molecular evolution of the mammalian liver cell architecture” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happy to share work spearheaded by former grad student Colin Shew testing shared duplicated cis regulatory elements (CREs) using an MPRA. While we find some high effect CREs, collectively paralog differences represent modest effects accounting for observed gene expression divergence.

🔁 Please share - we remind the SMBE community that the Call for Symposia for SMBE2026 in Copenhagen is open. We invite you to submit a symposium proposal to help shape the scientific content of our annual meeting. 🗓️ Deadline: October 15th More information: smbe2026.org/symposia #SMBE2026

Really cool, conceptually simple approach here: cross-referencing grant proposal scores with literature citations and explicit acknowledgments in drug patents to identify patents linked to projects that wouldn't have been funded given a smaller budget

While I'm sad our cover submission wasn't selected for our recent human duplication paper, check out the super cool illustration created with @lazaroillustration.bsky.social ! Certainly, you will be seeing Dennis lab members running around with "fishman" t-shirts at future meetings, inspired by Ohno

Lab outing 😍

Excited to share our recent study on human-specific features of the cerebellum and the unexpected, novel role of zona pellucida protein 2 (ZP2) in synapse development. Grateful to the Sestan lab and all our collaborators for their outstanding contributions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint alert! The uterus expands ~500-fold in pregnancy, yet we know little about how pressures are sensed. Led by @yunxiao-dr.bsky.social, we show PIEZOs are required for contractions and birth in mice, with dual roles of PIEZO1 in muscle and PIEZO2 in neurons www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Jasmin Rees PhD chapter as a paper just out at the AJHG @ajhgnews.bsky.social, with Sergi Castellano, who first envisioned the study. Jas investigated signatures of human local genetic adaptation in hundreds of micronutrient-associated genes.

Privileged to have had the opportunity to advocate for biomedical research funding in #Congress yesterday! It was an honor to represent the @geneticssociety.bsky.social alongside my amazing colleagues @gregorylab.bskyverified.social and #JillFahrner! 🔬 🧠🧬 #ASHG #Genetics #ResearchMatters

A recent paper reveals a surprising insight. The length of the cell cycle in a particular tissue determines the oncogenic transformation capacity of particular oncogenes, with tissues with shorter cell cycles most susceptible 3/n

Happy Birthday, Rosalind Franklin. She captured an X-ray diffraction image of DNA and stated that a helical structure was probable. Watson and Crick then created a detailed model based on her results. They initially received credit for the discovery and were awarded the Nobel Prize after her death.🧪

In work led by @lalli.bsky.social, we present recombination maps and a diverse haplotype reference panel (1000 Genomes Project) for the T2T-CHM13 human reference genome. These resources improve the accuracy of phasing and imputation, especially around common CNVs. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Evolutionary molecular biology paying dividends again - this time in finding new modulators of innate immunity - www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

So excited to see this paper out in Cell from the group of my good friend @mydennis.bsky.social It's been so exciting to see this story progress progress. www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

Thrilled that our study on human gene duplications and brain evolution is out! It was a true labor of love, with special shout-outs to my co-first author @jmuribescr.bsky.social and my PhD mentor @mydennis.bsky.social. Huge thanks as well to @aidaandres.bsky.social for all the popgen wisdom!

Thrilled to see this story out today! Such a fascinating topic with lots still to discover 🥳

Check out our latest work co-led by @dcsoto.bsky.social and @jmuribescr.bsky.social identifying hundreds of human duplicated gene families using the new T2T-CHM13 assembly, with a focus on those potentially contributing to brain evolution 🧪: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lTQtL7PXu...

Omg I’ve never laughed so hard in my life. Tonight my husband set out a fly trap in our backyard. The kind that smells like dead animal and poop to attract flies. Shortly after, we get these emails on our neighborhood listserv. Coincidentally, we had put out a fly trap a couple weeks ago too 👀

"Writers have been using me long before the advent of AI. I am the punctuation equivalent of a cardigan—beloved by MFA grads, used by editors when it’s actually cold, and worn year-round by screenwriters. I am not new here."

How bats developed their wings? 🦇 Turns out they reutilize existing gene programs 🔧 Find out more in our paper @natecoevo.nature.com in collaboration with @fany-real.bsky.social and @stemundi.bsky.social labs www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#Zebrafish folks, don’t leave #IZFC2025 just yet! The most fun session is still to come… Excited to present with @param-p-singh.bsky.social, @mydennis.bsky.social, Hannah Grunwald, Yansong Lu, and Ji-Feng Fei. See you there! @izfs.bsky.social #EndlessFishMostBeautiful