🦴✨ Invited speaker Douglas B. Menke joins us at #2026SDB in Las Vegas! 🎰 His lab explores how vertebrate limb morphology evolves through changes in gene regulation 🧬🐭 with current work focused on Tbx4 enhancer elements that shape hindlimb development and evolution across species. 🐾✨ #evodevo

1/ Our new study, led by Jingwen Ding, examines the role of transcription factors during human neurogenesis to identify gene regulatory networks influencing cell fate, maturation, and subtype specification www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

A deep dive into how transcription factors shape radial glia fate and clonal dynamics. Manuel Lessi: this work “combines the strengths of primary cultures and pooled CRISPRi perturbation”. #preprint Jingwen Ding & team @brainevodevo.bsky.social #preLight ⬇️ prelights.biologists.com/highlights/d...

Our new manuscript, led by Emily Corrigan, examines inhibitory neuron diversity across approximately 160 million years of evolutionary divergence, as part of BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) developing brain atlas package: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity! We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have: (1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs) (2) better hand dexterity (3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

I am thrilled to share our latest work: we identified a population of central amygdala neurons that promote the earliest and perhaps most important social behavior: pup suckling!... We also developed new tools for pup neuroscience Work by @Jeff Moore now at USC, a collaboration with @Sam Pfaff lab

“Intraspecific sequence variation and complete genomes refine the identification of rapidly evolved regions in humans” New work on HAQERs, by @rimangan.bsky.social Yanting Luo Craig Lowe @debbysilver.bsky.social @manoliskellis.bsky.social & colleagues 🧪🧬 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We’re excited to host @nkschaefer.bsky.social from the Pollen Lab @brainevodevo.bsky.social, UCSF! He’ll present Cellbouncer, a new bioinformatic tool for pooled single-cell processing that yields insights into hominid evolution 🧬 More about the lab 👉 www.pollenlab.org

"Sources said the administration is specifically considering a full termination of federal grant funding for the University of California and California State University systems." Pure vandalism. This could never happen in a country with functioning checks and balances.

EMBOMtg Paris May 6-9 @aydoganlab.bsky.social @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social @brunetlab.bsky.social @ebisuyamiki.bsky.social @mwdorr.bsky.social @beyerlab.bsky.social @franckp.bsky.social @janereznick.bsky.social @olmedo-lab.bsky.social @perez-carrasco.bsky.social meetings.embo.org/event/25-dev...

Congratulations to Nathan for conceiving and designing this unified demultiplexing toolkit!

We put CellBouncer to the test with a challenging demultiplexing problem of assigning 24 hominid tetraploid composite cell lines generated by Bryan Pavlovic to both individuals-of-origin and identifying the mitochondrial haplotypes present. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Introducing CellBouncer, a unified demultiplexing toolkit built by nkschaefer.bsky.social to check IDs and keep the riff raff out of single cell genomics datasets, including by using genetic variation as an external ground-truth for ambient RNA removal: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excellent preprint by @bhadurilab.bsky.social, offering a metabolic atlas of the early human cortex, & revealing how shifts in metabolic processes regulate cell fate transitions. Very valuable resource to address evolutionary questions 🧪🧠🧫 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Francis Collins, the NIH Director for 12 years, led the Human Genome Project and other NIH efforts for 32 years, resigned today. Key words from his resignation letter www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/u...

By @katherinejwu.com "The NIH... supported 99 percent of the drugs approved in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019. The agency has had a hand in “nearly all of our major medical breakthroughs over the past several decades,” The NIH is in a struggle for its (and our) lives. This is existential to America:

Check out our new preprint describing CiFi - a method that couples 3C and PacBio HiFi sequencing with low input requirements. We apply it to human GM12878 to better characterize chromatin across repetitive regions, as well as single insect samples (a mosquito and a Mediterranean fruit fly).

Pleasure to co-edit this issue of Current Opinion on human genetic origins with @steinlab.bsky.social: www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

A new story about our recent paper came out today in the Science section of Forbes! Check it out! www.forbes.com/sites/grrlsc...

New preprint 📣! Excited to share the result of several years of work, led by @ellylewerissa.bsky.social & @olivieroleonardi.bsky.social, in collaboration with friends @naelnadifkasri-lab.bsky.social & Giuseppe Testa. On CHD2, a chromatin remodeller, its role in evolution & development [🧵] 🧪🧠🧫🧬

First post on this platform 👋. Glad to reconnect with old friends, and also learn from new contacts. Will post about intersecting themes: human evolution, genetics (esp. aDNA), neuroscience & cognition. Currently focusing on brain organoids and early developmental changes that may have had an impact

Happy to be on Bluesky! Our lab is fascinated by how the brain develops, how this goes awry in disease, and this is co-opted in evolution. A major focus is dynamic spatial and temporal #RNA control in the developing brain. Please see our new review on evolution! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

1st preprint recommendation here (proud @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social affiliate): @brainevodevo.bsky.social & his team do great, creative work and I like their phylogeny-in-a-dish approach to examine gene regulatory evolution. Here they focus on dopaminergic neurons www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Check out this awesome paper!

@jenellewallace.bsky.social led a preview of two outstanding papers from the labs of Cecile Charrier, Pierre Vanderhaeghen, and @franckp.bsky.social that connect regulation of the tempo of synaptogenesis by the human-specific gene SRGAP2C to ASD-linked genes: authors.elsevier.com/a/1k3583BtfH...

Building on our recent review, Tyler Fair performed CRISPRi-based genetic screens to assign human-specific deletions to molecular and cellular phenotypes: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I learned so much from writing this review led by @jenellewallace.bsky.social . Protracted neuronal maturation is a hallmark feature of human cortex with unknown origins. We are excited that many groups are now making the mechanisms of species differences in timing experimentally tractable: