One month later and those 30 billion base pairs are crammed into just about 14 chromosomes. HOT DANG! This seemed impossible 4-5 years ago.

I’ve released a tool to sketch and edit phylogenetic trees! yawak.jp/PhyloWeaver/ Load a Newick file and intuitively add/remove/resize branches. Useful for quick conceptual trees, extracting subtrees, or turning ideas into Newick.

Science People: We at NSF are still recovering/catching up/getting our lives together. But the agency posted these FAQs about post-shutdown resumption of operations which might answer a lot of Qs for you: www.nsf.gov/resumption-o...

Lori is, without a doubt, one of the best people.

"Fishman", proposal for a journal cover. Commissioned by MY Dennis' lab @mydennis.bsky.social for a study focused on identifying human-specific gene duplications and their role in brain evolution using genomics and zebrafish as model. @dcsoto.bsky.social #art #digitalart #sciart #fish

Your lab isn't a home until you've hung up your prized Tiktaalik. My Live, Laugh, Love wall decals gotta be in a box somewhere.

I am so proud & happy to see our Potamo genome assembly finally out there in the world! The process ended up being way more challenging than expected, but for some really cool reasons. ❤️🐌🧬 TLDR: Surprise! A VERY recent WGD. academic.oup.com/gbe/article/... Photo: C. Böck, ILIM, Mondsee, Austria)

Now in Evolution: academic.oup.com/evolut/artic... This paper started when @3rdreviewer.bsky.social, Mike, and I had a lunch at which there was a lot of, "What do you mean when you say X?" Fun to spend time thinking about when terms get too muddy, and great work by Drew to pull it all together!

Check out the recent publication in Annual Reviews of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics where the authors explore genomic species delimitation in depth. You'll see a number of #sciart figures I created to help explain some of the concepts! www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

The CAMBIUM NSF NRT is recruiting PhD students @uarizona.bsky.social! Fellowships for interdisciplinary training in biodiversity big data to adapt to & mitigate climate change impacts. Great fit for evolutionary genomics, bioinformatics, plant adaptation, ecology & more. cambium.arizona.edu 🧬🌐🌎

Genomics help: From this FastQC report for our low coverage whole genome sequences, what is the polyA adapter that is showing up? Can I trim them out like I did the TruSeq adapters? I've not seen these show up before.

John K. Samson wrote the two best songs about academia, one about someone who I choose to believe achieved their goals ("Postdoc Blues") and one about someone who probably didn't ("When I Write My Masters Thesis")

Genome assembly fresh of the supercomputer, total size = 29,892,519,935 base pairs 🦎🧬

In response to anti-DEI legislation in the states, universities have started to hire more white male faculty. This increase starts before bills are signed into law. Universities appear to be anticipating anti-DEI legislation and preemptively hiring more white men.

The #PolyploidyWebinar series is back for another season! 🧬 Join us for talks at 9AM Pacific on the second Thursday of each month. Are you working on something exciting in polyploidy? We'd love to have you speak! Sign up for open dates at the link below. Looking forward to the great research ahead!

OUT TODAY: SimHumanity, a SLiM 5 model of the human genome, replete with demography, autosomes, X/Y & mtDNA. A shared starting point for reproducible evolutionary simulations. Huge thanks to coauthors Ben Haller, @mufernando.bsky.social & Philipp Messer. 🔗 www.pivotscipub.com/hpgg/5/4/0006

We will be writing more of these. If you’re a scientist and your science has been disrupted, we want to hear from you: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/c...

Wait what's happening with CIPRES?! www.phylo.org

Now published in Cell! We found that ~15% of SNPs from divergent refs did not liftover as SNPs in the gray fox ref—half mapped to monomorphic sites, half failed to map. Co-authored with Matthew Genchev, @elliecat.bsky.social, and @jazlynmooney.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Jane Goodall challenged what it meant to be a scientist. In this news story we look at three ways she changed science. A loss for science, a loss for the community, a loss for everyone 🧪 #academicSky www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Staff members at the NIH seem to have done the impossible: spend the agency's $48 billion budget. “Everyone has been rallying together to clean up the mess, but it’s a mess that did not need to be made,” an NIH program officer told me. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I was collecting #quail #embryos this morning and found an individual with albinism! Look at the lack of pigment in the retinal epithelium! Reminds me of finding a leopard #gecko embryo with the same condition during my PhD.

Went to a little workshop on universal design yesterday, and someone shared this document that has been super helpful to A) get new ideas and B) map things I already do universal design intentions. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Happy to share that our paper on the #evolution and #genomics of the most common #color polymorphism in #frogs is now out in @pnas.org! My favorite frogs even made the cover of this week’s issue! 🎉🐸🎉 Read the paper here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I've been a biology student/professional for like 20 years. I still regularly see things like this that blow me away. What a life.

SquidSim is the coolest package - it let's you build complex hierarchical data structures and then simulate data from the world you create. The best tool for doing proper power analyses and testing how well your models can uncover the 'truth'. I've been recommending it to everyone!

Our paper (with @sreinales.bsky.social) finally out today in the Evolutionary Journal of the Linnean Society. It feels like a birthday present 🤪 academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...

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

Really excited to share our latest paper led by @simonaube.bsky.social. Fascinating results examining whether regulatory mutations can lead to adaptation as fast as coding mutations do. #mevosky #evobio #evoSky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I have a new office and am delighted to have worked my way up to "has windows" status.

Great story about the Atlantic Coast leopard frog, which I helped identify, name, and describe (I'm used to my work being erased from these stories, it's ok 🥲) www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/n...

In the earliest stages of adaptive introgression, beneficial immigration can drive genome-wide changes. In a new preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... colleagues & I document exceptionally rapid genomic introgression in a lake population of stickleback.

I'm a little bit late, but happy to see this new paper led by @imillercrews.bsky.social and anchored by @rosvall-lab.bsky.social now out on bioRxiv. We analyze comparative songbird RNA-seq data using new features in our software package, CAGEE. Check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

📣Online NOW! 📄Estimation of demography and mutation rates from one million haploid genomes 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 @jgschraiber.bsky.social @jeffspence.github.io @docedge.bsky.social

Small-but-actually-large joys: receiving 1.1 Tb of long-read sequencing 🦎🧬

I've never been more upset at the general trajectory of technology that at this moment, when Outlook offered me suggestions for fixing the tone of my email message.

These kinds of things are still the best

Indiana let's go

NSF staff release their appeal—slightly different format than the declarations of dissent from EPA/NIH/NASA; a more formal petition to Congress to redress attacks on the agency and its employees. 149 signatories (48 named) democrats-science.house.gov/imo/media/do...

🧪 UPDATE: All 63 House appropriators will meet **this Thursday** about science funding levels. They'll deliberate on the proposed multi-billion dollar cut to NSF's budget ($9.0B --> $7.0B). If you think that's bad for our country, here's who to call: appropriations.house.gov/about/member...

"Save The NSF" - a little blogpost I wrote to amplify the #SaveTheNSF mission. The National Science Foundation is one of the world’s premier funders of basic science research; proposed federal cuts would derail how we do science in the U.S. aguidetoacademia.blogspot.com/2025/07/save...

🧪Have a terminated NSF grant? Or been impacted by such a termination? Call your Senators, esp if they're Repub!! An amendment to restore killed NSF grants will later be debated on the *full Senate* floor, after it narrowly failed in committee today. 🧵 Brief thread 1/4

Bill passes 19-10 and is off to the full Senate for consideration. The bill currently keeps NSF's budget flat at $9 billion.

🧪 CRITICAL UPDATE: The House draft version is now out. ✅ Like the Senate's version, there's no cut to NASA's budget. ❌ There's a 23% proposed cut to NSF's budget. 8-page summary: appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su... Draft bill: appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

🚨Preprint🚨 Sex chromosome identification & genome curation from a single individual with SCINKD www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Incredible work led by @drpintothe2nd.bsky.social in collaboration w/ @drsimonegable.bsky.social @stuartvnielsen.bsky.social @tonygamble.bsky.social SE Keating & CH Smith

The Meselson and Stahl experiment demonstrated in 1958 that DNA replicated semi-conservatively. Meaning, each of the two strands of DNA serves as a template for a new copy to made of the complementary strand. Foundational finding, elegant experimental design.

This rules www.theatlantic.com/culture/arch...

Asexual Amazon mollies differ morphologically from their sexual hosts, resembling P. mexicana when coexisting with P. latipinna hosts, and vice versa! royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

I miss Fridays