In these dark times, it comes as a rare pleasure to highlight @natanaels.bsky.social ‬ & @marcdemanuel.bsky.social's work on germline and somatic mutations in humans. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Out after peer review, collaborative study from Nordborg & Weigel labs with help from many others. Not the largest collection of new Arabidopsis thaliana genomes, but we hopefully put forward some good ideas for how to think about pangenomes and their analysis! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How can England possibly be running out of water? | Water | The Guardian share.google/M8qhPxIx3zIg...

1/ How do animals develop immunity against a newly encountered transposable element from scratch? Our study reveals that the mobility of TEs is their Achilles heel, allowing hosts to develop a powerful small RNA-mediated silencing response. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Just out in Science: we demonstrate a micro-evolutionary shift in a single generation, involving thousands of genomic loci, giving younger ash trees more resistance to ash dieback, on average, than their parents www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp2990

1/7 I am very excited to announce our🌹NEW PAPER OUT IN 𝑁𝐴𝑇𝑈𝑅𝐸!🌹 𝐃𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐒𝐔𝐑𝐕𝐈𝐕𝐄: Bimodal centromeres in pentaploid dogroses shed light on their unique meiosis With the Ritz and Kovařík labs we show a potential role for centromeres on 𝘙𝘰𝘴𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘢 bizarre reproduction! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thrilled to share our new paper in @science.org describing our discovery that bacteria can switch from competitors to bonafide predators when resources run dry—arming nanoscale “spears” (T6SS) to stab & consume neighbours. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #MicroSKy #Microbiology

Life-history trade-offs explain local adaptation in Arabidopsis thaliana https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.18.654693v1

Excited to share our work on using pathway-specific polygenic scores to discover gene-environment interactions www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

. @pnas.org just published the final version of our manuscript on how generation time and effective population size interact to shape vertebrate germline mutation rates, led by Luke Zhu and Annabel Beichman: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New research by @egonzalezduran.bsky.social shows that DSB repair suppresses gene transfer from chloroplasts to nucleus. With DSB repair impaired, transfer rates jump 20× — revealing how plants protect genome stability, with lessons beyond plant biology. Read: nature.com/articles/s41477-025-02005-w

I'm so very excited to see this out - a single cell and spatial transcriptomic analysis in the rice root reveals mechanisms by which roots can respond to different below-ground growth conditions - including compaction. Congratulations to everyone for persisting in difficult times. rdcu.be/ej8Ui

Awesome new paper by @lucalivraghi.bsky.social et al. doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... in @currentbiology.bsky.social on the evo-devo of a butterfly color variation enjoy the show!

It’s 🌿International Plant Appreciation Day🌿, so here’s a Corydalis melanochlora from the Hengduan Mountains. I can’t stop praising my favorite alpine flora 🥰 #LetsGoPlants #IamaBotanist

hungry hungry rhinos

Our new paper on the rapid evolution of centromeres in Drosophila is out! 🚀 Discover how transposable elements and satellite DNAs shape centromere dynamics and drive karyotype evolution over short timescales. @amlarracuente.bsky.social 🌟 Check it out here: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Nature research paper: Haploid facultative parthenogenesis in sunflower sexual reproduction https://go.nature.com/4hYpSY3

Our paper on ancient human population structure is now published. We find that the ancestors of modern humans lived in multiple populations during the period when Homo sapiens evolved in Africa. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/ Transposable elements are often called "jumping genes" because they mobilize within genomes. 🧬 But did you know they can also jump 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 cells? 🤯 Our new study reveals how retrotransposons invade the germline directly from somatic cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A short thread 🧵👇

We have a funded PhD position available in Exeter @exeter.ac.uk Gene Regulation in Brain Development and Disease 🧬 Please share / repost www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...

Excited to share a couple of new items (links below): 1. Our work on gene-environment interactions in the UKBiobank is up at the American Journal of Human Genetics 2. Our work on modeling ancient human population size history is up at Molecular Biology and Evolution

Botany valentine. Another from years past. New one on Monday!

Very excited to share this new preprint from the lab (shorturl.at/l7lNq)! @hendersi.bsky.social si.bsky.social @camplantsci.bsky.social

The consequences of polyploidy are... well, complicated. A deep dive into polyploidy in a massively successful tribe of grasses. A masterpiece led by Michelle Stitzer, representing the work of a lot of folks on the PanAnd project over last 7 years. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The outer ear is a mammalian innovation but where did it come from? In our study in Nature, Mathi Thiruppathy and colleagues find that the outer ear arose from modification of an ancestral gill program first originating in marine invertebrates. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/n

Natural variation modifies centromere proximal meiotic crossover frequency and segregation distortion in Arabidopsis thaliana biorxiv.org/content/10.1... new work from us on centromere inheritance and organisation @matt-naish.bsky.social @plantevolution.bsky.social @genomeevolution.bsky.social

Congrats to @jeffgroh.bsky.social et al on publication of "Ancient structural variants control sex-specific flowering time morphs in walnuts and hickories" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Centrophilic retrotransposon integration via CENH3 chromatin in Arabidopsis from Tetsuji Kakutani & colleagues - beautiful insights into control of transposon insertion into the centromeres www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Research into wind-forest dynamics after an extreme typhoon shows natural rainforests in East Asia are surprisingly resilient to storms. Aland Chan discusses work inspired by his passion for forest restoration in mountains around his home in Hong Kong. tinyurl.com/mpuw96cb

Delighted to share our new preprint on the cell biology and genome of Stentor pyriformis, a giant ciliate that maintains Chlorella endosymbionts in surface-associated microtubule baskets. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

There's a super fun story about these spurless Columbines! Pollinators mainly visit flowers for nectar, but these nectarless populations were very stable, and this study found both molecular & biological basis for these supposedly disadvantageous forms. 🧪 Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Happy to share our preprint on our favourite polyploid hybrid, Arabidopsis suecica. We examine the evolutionary cycle of polyploidy in this young allotetraploid, focusing on three key parts of the cycle: origin, meiotic adaptation and rediploidization