My first paper as a PI is now out on PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

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

I heard in the elevator a graduate student joking about destroying their lab and starting over, and I was just thinking that the lab I did my PhD. in was actually completely destroyed this week.

Jennifer Blanc and @jeremyjberg.bsky.social use theory and simulations to study the process of testing for an association between polygenic scores and axes of ancestry variation when confounding factors are present. Learn more about their findings in #GENETICS: buff.ly/EmKpXyP

Out today in @pnas.org! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

What is epistasis? New preprint Blue-torial! (Work by the wonderful postdocs Maryn Carlson and Bryan Andrews) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My most recent preprint, currently working on revising (some review suggestions were very helpful!). This comes from my NSF PRFB postdoc project in Annalise Paaby’s lab, on C. elegans regulatory rules from doing the first (we think) ASE study in this system. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Smart study to test whether lower prediction accuracy in non-Europeans is due to between-population differences in population structure, genetic nurture, or assortative mating.

New work by Andy Dahl and Michal Sadowski on using GxE to study genetics of drug response now out in Cell Genomics www.cell.com/cell-genomic...

Excited to share a new preprint with @jnovembre.bsky.social ! We use a combination of population genetic theory, simulation, and data analysis to ask: how does study design in genetic studies (including biobanks) impact the discovery of rare, deleterious variants?

Very interesting work by Tade Souaiaia et al on the non-polygenic architecture of the extremes of complex traits. For many traits, polygenic scores show "regression to the mean" around the tails, as extreme traits are mostly due to rare alleles. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We are accepting applications for the 2025 Evolution Seminar Series Early Career Award here at UW-Madison. Deadline November 30. evolution.wisc.edu/seminars/ear... Please share with grad students and postdocs working in evolutionary biology!

Supplemental Figure 3. The demographic model

Optimist: The cup is half full. Pessimist: The cup is half empty. Population geneticist: The cup is either a quarter full or overflowing and I can never remember whether there's a factor of two for haploids or diploids. bsky.app/profile/hutc...

A reminder for new folks. BlueSky does not have an algorithm to raise posts of interest. It is incumbent upon you to do so via reposting. Liking things only provides feedback to the poster but does not promote the post. The signal to noise ratio is taking a brief beating, so great to help curate.

Going Blue feels like taking a fresh breath after a long nasty cold... Happy to have a place to read, share, and talk about science. Welcome home!