🚀 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!

Shout out to the weird biology of mealybugs and the folks who study it!

Trump admin planning to change student visas from lasting for duration of academic program to fixed 4-yr term, and then much harder to renew Could destroy US ability to attract global talent, particularly those seeking advanced degrees in STEM. The median time to complete a PhD is 5.7 yrs per NSF.

Wish I could be there with the rest of the crew!

Just in time for her #eseb2025 poster on Thursday, @squarehare.bsky.social 's paper on the Poecilia bifurca sex chromosomes was published today academic.oup.com/g3journal/ad...

Nate Silver: "journalists have much better bullshit detectors [than academic reviewers]" Me, an academic reviewer: that's a bold claim that sounds like the author's opinion. It needs either supporting citations or removal from the manuscript. Revise and resubmit.

Another paper on polyommatine blue butterflies just published in @genomebiolevol.bsky.social. Blues have high chromosome numbers associated with increased diversification and their karyotypes reveal strategies to maintain genomic integrity amidst profound karyotypic changes doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...

A truly great group of folks to work with!

A very cool bug! Genome coming soon from my lab!

Every reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.

This is what I've been calling the 3rd (4th?) Genomic Revolution. When I was in grad school the model was to use a few species' genomes to make generalized inferences about whole groups. Now if you want to do a genomic study of a group you just...look at the whole group, no generalizing assumption!

Excited to share our new paper in #MolEcol on sex chromosome evolution in African killifish! 🐟 A great collaboration with @alexandrsember.bsky.social . We uncovered ≥4 sex chromosome turnovers across Nothobranchius spp. using cytogenetics & genomics. 👉 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Such a fun and productive trip! Be on the lookout for more on evolutionary genomics and systematics of bagworms from my lab and @dr-akito.bsky.social 's lab soon!

Good to see some of our US-based ToS members at #Evol2025! If you're at the meeting and interested or just curious about the project, say hi to @ajmongue.bsky.social @nicolevalenzuela.bsky.social @ideaspermatheca.bsky.social @emistasis.bsky.social, Mike White or Louise Heitzmann!

Getting ready for #Evol2025. If you see me say hi! I'll be doing a very preliminary talk on bagworm moth evolutionary genetics on Sunday at 11:45 as well!

Well if that's the game of the game...here's a shot of Fulgora lanternaria from a recent trip to Costa Rica.

It's finally out! This paper took quite a while but I'm so excited to share now! For anyone who studies sex chromosomes, take note: we found a rare "slower X"! (dN/dS_X < dN/dS_Autos) 👀

Re-upping this thread on PGE in mealybugs because the results are finally published in Molecular Ecology: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

In full sincerity, now is the moment to emphasize that undoing the changes implemented by DOGE is good for America, and increasing investment into NASA, NSF, NIH and other agencies will keep Elon from profiting off taxpayers.

How do you differentiate species when the most visible lifestage is a featureless brown rugby ball? You sequence it and place it with phylogenomics! Read all about this and the evolutionary genetics of a moth-infecting apicomplexan #parasite in our pre-print here: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Proposed cut to NSF Biology budget is 70%. 70%. Seventy. Call your senators & reps nonstop. Give them numbers on NSF impact for state/district. tableau.external.nsf.gov/views/NSFbyN... explain this will decimate the economy if their districts, especially if it has a major research univ. 🧪

Some more mantidfly mania for #WorldBiodiversityDay These two were photographed in Costa Rica, where my lab is currently doing fieldwork (more on that soon)!

Officially (re-)annoucing the Tree of Sex! Read all about it in JEB below!

This is far from the most salient problem with the new "dire wolves," but while we're all dogpiling this story...they couldn't even name the female pup Arya or Sansa? They went with the title (not even name) of the war crimes dragon lady...absolute hacks

Excited to be part of this project! Follow the starter pack for more great repro evo researchers!

The National Science Foundation benefits communities in every state.

Roche's SBX sequencing by expansion - preprint out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Time to update my sequencing technologies lecture!

I am thrilled to share our new review on holocentric chromosomes. It was a lot of fun to write it together with Ines Drinnenberg! Same but different: Centromere regulations in holocentric insects and plants doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

Excited to announce another genome preprint! This one is first-authored by my first master's student, Tracy! We generated a chromosome level genome for the invasive hibiscus mealybug, a citrus crop pest. Thanks to coauthors @lmdiepenbrock.bsky.social @kkbugtime.bsky.social tinyurl.com/5n8h42r6

People need to grasp that these chaotic funding cuts aren't coming from a desire to reign in federal spending or balance budgets. They are coming from religious extremists who see science- and other forms of honest, evidence-based epistemology- as a direct threat to their political power.

If all extant cephalopods have a single origin Z chromosome, then did ammonites use that sex determination system as well? Why do all Z chromosome systems seem to date back to the Mesozoic?😮

It's finally out! The long-awaited Ross lab B chromosome paper! Check it out for more weird genetics: a selfish chromosome found in only some populations of mealybugs and in variable copy number! My old labmate Kamil has a good breakdown below!