Just over a month left to apply for scholarships on this project. We will run internal pre-selection interviews end of November, so if you consider applying, please reach out now. I can guarantee amazing scientific and intellectual environment at the Institute for Eco Evo @edinburghup.bsky.social

Elevated mutation near crossovers inhibits the evolution of recombination https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.01.685904v1

A dream postdoc on an incredible population, building on over three decades of field research, and with a brilliant and supportive PI.

This is a bloody awful situation. If anyone has experience of how to deal with this please reach out to Kim

A young PI here in Mainz has a fabulous PhD position that will be filled soon! By you? Keywords: Social insects, ageing, gene expression. www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb10-evoluti...

A great opportunity to work with great colleagues (Marie Louis and Outi Tervo) on the beautiful Faroes on an ambitious eDNA study of marine mammals.

New paper out in Heredity: 'Evidence of long-term purging of mutation burden in killer whale genomes'. Time calibration of purging was through inclusion of an ancient (7.5Kyr) genome which was close to directly ancestral to the present-day population with signature of purging. rdcu.be/eM25j

Join us tomorrow either at the @smnstuttgart.bsky.social or online to learn what 20,000 years old bones of crows 🐦‍⬛ can tell us about the evolution of color pattern! @kombiota.bsky.social

MSc by Res opportunity - developing behavioural indicators to inform killer whale conservation with @exeter.ac.uk @whaleresearch.bsky.social @seadocsociety.bsky.social People from underrepresented groups in marine science encouraged to apply. Deadline 19Dec www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...

1/9 New in @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado8005 How does genetic architecture constrain evolutionary trajectories? To address this question, we inferred the genetic architecture of convergent plumage coloration and its evolutionary history in wheatears.

Article alert: Maurstad, Hoff; Cerca et al. Reference genome bias in light of species-specific chromosomal reorganization and translocations. Now out in Genome Biol. Congrats to Sissel and the team😀 doi.org/10.1186/s130...

PhD OPPORTUNITY! 🔬🔖 Still one more day to apply for our fully-funded PhD position in Norway! Please share widely 🙏

Oof, one of my heroes.

🦴🧬🦴🧬🦴 Abstract submission is now open for the 1st International Conference on Palaeogenomics! June 23–26 2026, in Stockholm. Join researchers from across the field for 4 days and >100 talks (+ poster sessions)! Submit abstracts here 👉 icp2026.palaeogenomics.org/abstracts/ Deadline: Nov 30th

Exciting news! The next #PopGroup meeting will take place in Lille 🍟, France, 7–9 January 2026 – just 1 hour by train from London, Brussels, and Paris. This year, PopGroup will also host ALPHY, the annual meeting of Evolutionary Genomics. More info: populationgeneticsgroup.org.uk See you there !

I am pleased to share our new review paper detailing killer whale interactions with commercial fisheries in Frontiers in Marine Science! www.frontiersin.org/journals/mar...

This only happens to you once

We are hiring (Post number 2) - join us as a graduate research assistant to support killer whale research. Collaboration with @samellisq.bsky.social @drwhale.bsky.social Prof Dan Franks (York) start 1st Nov (or ASAP) end 31st Oct 2028. Apps close on 19th Oct. jobs.exeter.ac.uk/hrpr_webrecr...

This is a rare opportunity to work with an incredible dataset building on over five decades of field studies on the Southern Resident killer whale population, and led by an amazing team.

A killer whale PostDoc! 🤯😍

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)

Strong but diffuse genetic divergence underlies differentiation in an incipient species of marine stickleback https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.19.677379v1

A while back (maybe 3-4 years?) there was a paper on common misconceptions of the genetics of various traits. One of them was eye colour in humans. I have lost this reference and can't find it anywhere. Does anyone recognise what I mean?

We have a new paper out in Molecular Ecology, led by @devinbendixsen.bsky.social ! Reproductive isolation due to divergent ecological selection is accompanied by vast genomic instability in experimentally evolved yeast populations onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

SINGER, our ARG inference method, is finally published and freely available online: doi.org/10.1038/s415... It was a long journey – 16 months from initial submission to acceptance. Is it just me, or has peer review gotten more arduous lately? 4+ rounds of review isn't so unusual these days...

This substack post by @erichhoyt.bsky.social reflects on the 1975 National Whale Symposium, describing the synthesis emerging around photo-id at that time: substack.com/home/post/p-... It's a wonderful read

Still possible to apply to this #post-doc position at CESAB #Montpellier. Application closing date: September 15th 2025 (12:00 PM CET) How taking intraspecific diversity and evolutionary processes into account in translocation-based programs. Please share widely #PopGen #NbS #Biodiversity

First pop gen paper from our lab! We find repeated evolutionary turn over of sex chromosomes in darters contributes to reproductive isolation. Turnover may be an escape hatch to resolve mitonuclear conflict & neo sex chromosomes evolved via a rare recessive mutation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

So excited that @corriemoreau.bsky.social will be giving a tangled banks seminar at NHMO today!! www.nhm.uio.no/english/rese... join us (also on zoom!)

Hi marine biologist folks #MarBiol 🦪🐙🪸🐟🦈🦀🦐🌱🦭🌊 Please give us 5 minutes of your time to fill this online survey on marine connectivity policy - The marine connectivity science and tools we need for the ocean we want #MarCo #MarEvol docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

If you are in Oslo join us tomorrow!

Are you interested in doing a PhD in Copenhagen? Interested in studying Neanderthals and Denisovans which live on in our genomes? Than you are more than welcome to apply to join my group starting Jan 2026 :) candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI... Please reach out if you have any questions!

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

Shameless promotion from #isba11 - I'll be hiring PhDs to start early 2026 (plus postdocs starting later), using #adna to study livestock and pathogen coevolution, particularly looking at inbreeding and immune gene evolution! Contact me at kevin[at]palaeome.org, full ad to come. Please share!

With #eseb2025 coming to a close, it is time to start making plans for 2026. Interested in the interface of evolution 🧬 and ecology 🌳? Come to our #ExE conference hosted by @uniexecec.bsky.social in beautiful #Cornwall. Leave your email address at tinyurl.com/EvolxEcol to join our mailing list!

New paper out in #ES&T where we show that killifish exposure to crude oil has impacts (on embryo/larval development and transcriptome) that propagate to their offspring and to their grand-offspring. pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.... @acs.org

I'm looking to recruit a PhD student to study patterns of local adaptation and introgression across the spruce hybrid zone in the Rockies near Calgary. Projects can include field work, bioinformatics, pop gen theory, or comparison to plant/ conifer species yeamanlab.weebly.com/uploads/5/7/...

Jana Nickel will be talking about hitchhiking mutation load in threespine stickleback population Iin the Evolution of Small Populations Symposium at #ESEB2025 today 15:15-15:30. Read the preprint here: doi: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

🎤 Symposium: Evolution in Small Populations I’ll be speaking on Evolutionary legacies of population collapse 🗓 Thursday, 11:00–13:15, Room 115 Looking forward to this #ESEB2025 week! @hologenomics.bsky.social

When populations evolve different strategies to defend against a recently acquired parasite (e.g., tolerance, resistance), what sets of gene expression responses are conserved, or diverge? Using a vaccination experiment with #stickleback @laurenfuess.bsky.social reports some fun results...

On my way to #ESEB2025 ! I’ll share some new results showing bi-directional introgression of structural variants, which cause resistance to different insecticides, between native and invasive agricultural pests 🐛 Monday 10:30am, S05 rooms 120-121

Also, I'm talking at #eseb2025 on the evolutionary history of a commensal species at 2 pm on Monday in S51-02. Come along to hear about how cool house sparrows are and all the exciting work from the sparrow team @melissahrowe.bsky.social @eriksroeed.bsky.social @ruthfawthrop.bsky.social

'Ancient stickleback genomes reveal the early stages of parallel adaptation' - now published online in Evolution @journal-evo.bsky.social‬

"The molecular evolutionary basis of species formation revisited" by Molly Schumer (@mollyschumer.bsky.social) & colleagues "The origin of species has long fascinated biologists, but determining the genes [involved] has only recently become possible in non-model organisms." shorturl.at/wG0B5

my new idea is to look at runs of homozygosity (ROH) only for mutations that are restricted to heterozygous state in other pops, suggesting they are low freq. and enriched for deleterious stuff. a good measure of inbreeding. I call my new statistic

Complex patterns of hitchhiking mutation load among stickleback populations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.24.666323v1

New lab preprint led by Jana Nickel (not on BS): doi.org/10.1101/2025... Investigating hitchhiking mutation load in threespine sticklebacks. I'll be presenting this work in a few hours at #Stickleback2025 here in beautiful Bamfield

#PopGen New preprint of the team on the discovery of a very high rate of polymorphic duplication in a marine bivalve. Imagine looking at the distribution of the allelic coverage fraction at heterozygous calls in an indivdual and getting this distribution 👇 😱😱😱