Note this is related to, but distinct from, the OMB proposal. It's basically the agency specific implementation of a lot of those OMB changes (no grant money on publication costs, etc) but there's a separate place to provide comments and feedback here.

The formatted paper is now out in MBE - describing OPTICS software to predict color sensitivy based on opsin sequence alone: academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Here's the easier way to access the Tree of Sex survey!

As everyone's winding down on #evol2026 we want to share our survey link with you again. Whether you work in reproductive biology specifically or not, please take a minute to help us understand how the scientific community uses reproductive terms in research! And hope to see you at #SMBE!

Remember X-Labs? Without transparency, and in defiance of Congress, a new memo to NSF directs “program managers to stop seeking funding for any proposals, even those that received the highest marks from outside reviewers and program staff, “until we are able to provide more details.”

"Right now, in some underfunded lab, a scientist is chasing a question that sounds pointless.... No one can say if they will succeed. But a century of experience says that funding people to do this work is a good bet. If we stop making that bet, we will pay for it in cures no one will know to miss."

Reminder that the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) is asking members to sign letters regarding the OMB rule (by 6/15) and to submit individual responses (by 7/13!!). We have >250 signatories right now, GREAT!, but we have ~4k members, give or take, so pls get those signatures in!

The full Mongue lab will be at #evol2026! Say hi or come see our work. All three of us have talks (pic related). Check this thread for some more specifics and we hope to see you there! 1/5

New: NSF is tightening its conflict of interest rules in what could be a headache for the understaffed agency. Starting in August, reviewers will no longer be able to participate in a panel with any proposals from their own institution. My reporting for @science.org:

Glad to see rigorous discussion of how to present pop gen results. Even in standard pipelines, version info matters! Shout out the time GATK collapsed the representation of missing data with homozygous reference for "efficiency" for a couple versions: gatk.broadinstitute.org/hc/en-us/art...

A female and male Bird of Paradise fly (Callipappus sp), showing the extreme sexual dimorphism exhibited by these scale insects. Seen today in the Perth Hills, WA #ausinverts #wildoz #inaturalist #bugsky

Our new paper doi.org/10.1098/rspb... on long-term genetic threats to small populations finds that "mutational meltdown" (bad mutations fixing) is less of a problem than "mutational drought" (too few good new mutations) @wmawass.bsky.social @uliseshmc.bsky.social @jeremyjberg.bsky.social 1/5

The June 2026 cover of GBE features our newest Perspective by Brault et al., who propose guidelines and best practices for calculating population genetics summary statistics. 🔗 academic.oup.com/gbe/issue/18/6 #genome #evolution #societyjournal

Pervasive convergent #evolution of sperm conjugation across the Arthropoda tree of life @natcomms.nature.com

A state Dem pushing back the other way. Finally. www.wuft.org/education/20...

Can confirm, we've used this method to preserve and sequence DNA from critters caught in the Costa Rican cloud forest. Chromosome level insect genomes from tissue kept at room temperature for ~5 days before we could get it back to the lab!

“We demonstrate perfect concordance with minimap2, enabling its backwards compatibility as a drop-in replacement for minimap2-based workflows.” ‼️

Lots of folks are posting about these proposed changes. Good. Next step is to write to your representatives. Talk to your scientific society about what it can do.

Everyone has called out political review of grants but goddamn: “Publication costs (including page charges, article processing charges (APCs), or similar fees such as open access fees for professional journal publications and other peer-reviewed publications) are unallowable under Federal awards.”

Why do sex chromosomes stop recombining? New models show even weak sexual antagonism can strongly drive recombination suppression, with mating systems shaping the outcome. By @ewanflintham.bsky.social and @charlesmullon.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Breathtakingly corrupt and indefensible theft of taxpayer money. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

“The U.S. National Science Foundation X-Labs (NSF X-Labs) initiative is designed to launch and scale a new generation of organizations focused on independent research, development and innovation.” We have those, thanks, they’re called universities and national laboratories.

Virginia's Supreme Court overturns Virginia's gerrymander Meanwhile... Florida's lap dog Supreme Court has already refused to enforce the state's explicit ban on partisan gerrymandering regarding the current map and We'll see if Louisiana's Supreme Court allows the governor to cancel elections

I'm looking to hire a postdoc. Please share if you can!

'The NSF has only committed $500 million of the $8 billion it was appropriated for the fiscal year, which began on Oct. 1. The NSF will lose the billions of remaining funding if it does not spend it by Sept. 30.' thehill.com/homenews/adm...

Still accepting applicants for a postdoc! Here's the evoldir link if you're interested: evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/evoldi... Please reach out! Share with a friend!

Orbán's electoral crushing is a far greater achievement than most people outside Hungary realise. He systemically consolidated power for 16 years, fixed the electoral map, abused govt power for political purposes & censored media. The hurdles that Hungarians overcame for this moment were immense.

The Mongue lab and Kawahara lab @dr-akito.bsky.social are hiring postdocs!! If you're interested in the genomics of extreme sexual dimorphism and/or silk production, come work on bagworms with us! See below for details: sicb.org/jobs-and-fel...

📉 FY2026 is worse. NIH has made 10,195 awards so far. NSF has made 613. Six hundred thirteen. Congress appropriated the money. The agencies are not spending it. Grant freezes. NOFO collapse. Staff RIFs. Review cancellations. You can win the budget fight and still lose the funding war.

This is very very big. Like a big deal and massive cuts. These can’t even be seen as budgetary since you don’t get much savings in the context of trillions budget. They want the US out of R&D out of science research.

"Accidentally" is an odd word choice here. Like they wouldn't have used word phenology, but the effort to document seasonal biological phenomena is clearly intentional!

🚀 New lab preprint on #SexChromosomeTurnover is out on @arxiv.bsky.social Huge congrats to lab thesis student for submitting his PhD @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social fellowship: big milestone and fingers crossed 🤞 and to all students for the submissions🤞🤞 More to come soon… 🐸🧬 arxiv.org/abs/2602.23624

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers. The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).

#paperalert #fishes Two closely related minnow ( #Phoxinus ) species share the same rivers — and sometimes even hybridise. But new research shows they've evolved completely different ways of determining sex. 🐟🧬 Lead author PhD student @thetemi.bsky.social @leibnizlib.bsky.social

The push to make everything on Canvas accessible to screen readers also makes everything machine readable. Enabling this monstrosity. Which is why I put so little on Canvas anymore. companion.ai/einstein

I'm back with another weird scale insect repro study. Previously I've talked about the simultaneous hermaphrodite cottony cushion scales and (functional) haplodiploidy paternal genome elimination in mealybugs. But how did these systems evolve? The Mongue lab has some answers! 1/n #genomics

The US government lost more than 10,000 STEM PhDs last year, according to an analysis by Science of newly released OPM data, with 11 departures for every hire. And many OPM calls "voluntary" separations were probably pushed. www.science.org/content/arti...

ICE agents killed a man and are disappearing the witnesses.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Molecular lab representation: Congratulations to One Battle After Another for all the Golden Globe wins, making it the highest profile movie in which people anxiously wait for the results of a gel electrophoresis run (...even if they skipped the PCR amplification).

This story is absolutely wild. Did you know that avocados change sex over the course of a day? And that it's controlled by a single ancient balanced polymorphism? This is flat our crazy

Love some good Caligidae!There's plenty of genomic data from salmon lice that let us do a sex chromosome evolution analysis without having to sequence a single thing. Salmon lice are in the Z chromosome club with birds and butterflies! doi.org/10.1093/evol...

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.

Talk about a life list critter, I've finally found a male cottony cushion scale insect (pic 1)!! Male scale insects are rare in general but this species is composed almost entirely of simultaneous hermaphrodites (pic 2)! Rare pure males can occur, but we don't fully know under what conditions.

The now traditional Mongue lab and alums photo from #EntSoc25. Crazy how much the lab has grown in two years!

I'll be heading to @sacnas.bsky.social #NDiSTEM later this week to shamelessly plug my soon-to-open lab (Fall 2026). If any students are interested in studying the plant-insect interactions of the Sonoran Desert, please get in touch!

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

Lab milestone: My first (now graduated) student's first genome assembly is now publicly available! Well done, @tliesenfelt.bsky.social !! You can read the companion article below!