How do GWAS and rare variant burden tests rank gene signals? In new work @nature.com with @hakha.bsky.social, @jkpritch.bsky.social, and our wonderful coauthors we find that the key factors are what we call Specificity, Length, and Luck! 🧬🧪🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Johri Lab has an open postdoc position. Please send me an email, if interested. Start date is flexible. Please do share! Thank you in advance.

One of the most exciting works of my career, years in the making. We used high-throughput precision genome editing to test the fitness effects of thousands of natural variants. Our findings challenge the long-held assumption that common variants are inconsequential. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Agouti doing what it does best: making color patterns and jumping between species 🖤🤍 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Transposable elements drive much of naturally occurring genetic lethality in Drosophila melanogaster https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.16.682755v1

I'm recruiting a postdoc for my group (based in beautiful Eugene, OR). Please get in touch if you're interested, esp if you'd like to chat at #ASHG25!

We're excited to be recruiting an NIH funded postdoc to work in the Coop lab at UC Davis. We're specifically interested in candidates who are want to work at the intersection of human genetics, GWAS, and population genetics modeling. Please RT

my latest investigation for @consumerreports.org is based on months of reporting and 60+ lab tests of leading protein supplements we found that most protein powders and shakes have more lead in one serving than our experts say is safe to have in a day (🧵) www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein...

Just an absolutely horrific self own, depleting the US of amazing students from all over the world who contributed to what used to make America great: its diversity, its openness, and its leadership in education.

This may be the most important paper ever published about NIH funded research. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I just had to hop through 5 papers to find the original methods (2025 -> 2018 -> 2014 -> 2013 -> 2005). what is your highest score? 🤯

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]

We are excited to share GPN-Star, a cost-effective, biologically grounded genomic language modeling framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of variant effect prediction tasks relevant to human genetics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/n)

Our paper Genomic diversity of the African malaria vector Anopheles funestus was published in Science today! It features inversions, selection in action, museum specimens and putative new ecotypes. doi.org/10.1126/scie...

evergreen

It's 2025, so I feel like it's a stretch to slice the analyses of the same handful of genomes into three or more papers...

this keeps me up at night. I can’t imagine monkeys surviving the 2800km trip from Africa to South America…

Save the date! #PEQG26 June 9-12 2026 in Asilomar, CA. Happens only every 2yrs, but is my favorite conference. Full website coming soon, and registration and abstract submission opens November 14, but I'm allowed to tease that keynotes will be @jnovembre.bsky.social @jennytung.bsky.social and me!

Announcing SimHumanity, a baseline SLiM 5.0 model of the full human genome, replete with demographic history, autosomes, X/Y, and mtDNA. A shared starting point for reproducible evolutionary simulations. We’d love your feedback! #SLiM #evolution #genomics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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/...

Why do males and females often differ in traits? The expected answer: selection. But our new paper in GENETICS shows that genetic drift alone can generate sexual dimorphism — even when male & female optima are the same

#NIH is hanging by a thread. The #CDC has been decimated. #RFK Jr. and Russell #Vought are psychopaths--I don't say this frivolously--they are cold, calculating, inflicting violence on millions through public policy. It is where we are right now. These men are not normal. 1/

Genomics hivemind: I want to genotype a bunch of diverse, heterozygous diploids with a messy genome (🌽 -- who'd have guessed?) but I care about phase. Computational phasing doesn't really cut it, so wondering what the cheapest alternatives are -- nanopore to 10-20X? Linked shortreads?

Excited to share our new preprint for the tskit_arg_visualizer Python package! ARGs can sometimes feel like a black box, so @yanwong.bsky.social and I have been developing a method to programmatically drawing these graphs. 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2508.03958 1/6

1. The philosophy of science sometimes gets an unearned reputation as a purely academic exercise that offers little by way of concrete tools for advancing research. This is wrong. And today, as we grapple with how AI is changing the nature of scientific activity, it's desperately wrong.

The Sudmant lab at UC Berkeley is seeking a postdoc to work on a fully funded NIH project to understand differences in DNA repair and somatic mutation across the primate tree of life. Please spread widely to those who may be interested aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05052

Incredibly proud of this work where we developed a method for understanding the information contained in millions of genomes. Another example of NIH funded research.

Hello bluesky community! I'm hiring a postdoc to do machine learning in population genetics. Starting to build up a lab at Indiana University Bloomington where I just started a faculty position. Apply with the below link: indiana.peopleadmin.com/postings/30325

If you're new to demographic history inference from population genomics, try this webapp I created to illustrate how dadi fits bottleneck models to site frequency spectra: ryangutenkunst-dadi-two-epoch.hf.space . It even outputs files for submitting to the GHIST competition! ghi.st

Postdoc position in my group in Tokyo! Please get in touch if you are interested. And happy to discuss projects - these would range from developing new methods to analysis of new genomes that we are now sequencing in the lab. Job Ad: www.riken.jp/en/careers/r... Lab page: speidellab.github.io

New preprint: we advertise DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly eco-evo-archaeo journals. 1/6 #AcademicPublishing #ecoevo #archaeology #EthicalPublishing #SocietyJournals #DiamondOpenAccess doi.org/10.32942/X24...

GenDivRange: A global dataset of geo-referenced population genetic diversity across species ranges #popgen #consgen www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited for our publication on how the geographic scale of a sample affects the discovery of rare, deleterious variants to be out this week. With a mix of theory, simulation, and data analysis, we show when samples are narrow vs broad, the number of variants discovered and their frequencies change

Reminder that SSE members in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, India, and 152 low-income countries around the world can still get FREE registration for the virtual Evolution meeting! Please share with your colleagues: www.evolutionsociety.org/index.php?mo...

New paper from the lab: Our teeth arose as sensory organs on the outside of the body of ancient jawless fish.!! Congrats to Yara Haridy and the team! Background and video: phys.org/news/2025-05... Open Access Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... News and Views: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Our latest preprint about the effects of rescaling forward-in-time simulations in population genetics - www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 Our new paper is out in Science! We analyzed 2,723 high-coverage whole genomes from Brazilians to explore how five centuries of colonization, forced migration, and admixture have shaped genetic diversity and impacted health. 📄 science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵👇

If you’ve ever wondered about the statistical significance of differences among mutational signature profiles, check out our new Aggregate Mutation Spectrum Distance (AMSD) preprint co-led by Sam Hart and @alisonfeder.bsky.social with @nalcala.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

I’m old enough to remember when HHMI ran a competition for the best ideas they’d fund for the next 15 years. Some of us put huge efforts into that and went multiple rounds of review only to have the competition cancelled. Then our ideas started showing up in HHMI funded labs…

What happens to science under autocracy? The rise of the National Socialist Party in 1930s Germany provides an (admittedly extreme) example. Prior to the early 1930s, scientists at German institutions won a third of Nobels. 10 years later, that number was 5%, and has never recovered.

The PopSim Consortium wants you! Please join us on zoom on May 27 at noon Eastern Time (1600 UTC) to tell us you would like to see in the next version of stdpopsim! DM me for meeting link, or just sign up for our email list: lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/list... (1/3)

how can a program create a root owned file if my user does not have sudo privileges??? 🤨

I wonder how many species we could save from extinction with $435 million dollars...

Ah yes, the morphological species concept, so snakes are lampreys are hagfish! www.newscientist.com/article/2475...

Excited to see the final version of this paper with @samurscicop.bsky.social and Daniel Matute out in @genomebiolevol.bsky.social! We took a dive into the complicated demographic history of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes and its impact on the distribution of genetic diversity doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...

Grundler et al propose a new method to infer the geographic position of all our genetic ancestors www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... building on a method by Wohns et al www.science.org/doi/10.1126/.... My thoughts on the approach: www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.....

stdpopsim v0.3.0 is out! You can now mix and match your simulations of different demographic histories with published distributions of fitness effects along with gene annotations, and you can even throw in sweeps for good measure. Check out the new manuscript for more info: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

The collaborative paper on adding selection to stdpopsim is out! Learn about how to easily simulate realistic population genomic data with background selection and sweeps, plus some benchmarking of methods for demographic history, DFE, and sweep inference. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Accessible, realistic genome simulation with selection using stdpopsim https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.23.644823v1