Big thanks to @ece2026tours.bsky.social for letting me present my PhD work this week. It was truly the best conference organization ever! Plus I learned so much about the coolest insects, biodiversity, agriculture and science communication & made new friends as well ♥️🪲

Looking forward to 5 days of insect science #ECE2026Tours ! Join my talk tomorrow in the insects & society AI session at 18h15 on what genomics and Deep Learning can teach us about fly development 🧬

A new Science study shows that bumble bees can position a ball underneath a fake “flower” to reach a reward, suggesting they can exhibit spontaneous problem-solving and challenging the notion that such advanced cognitive abilities are exclusive to large-brained vertebrates. https://scim.ag/4vs08dC

I will be presenting this work at #eshg2026 on Monday during "From Population to Pertubation" session (C31, room F1-F3 @ 10:30)!

Happy to see my paper re-posted by the VSC! Without their high-performance computing resources, this research would not have been possible.

The @steinaerts.bsky.social lab is looking for a postdoctoral researcher to develop next-generation sequence-to-function models for glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive brain cancers. More info & how to apply 👉 https://vib.ai/en/opportunities#/job-description/130090

We are thrilled to share our new pre-print: “System-wide extraction of cis-regulatory rules from sequence-to-function models in human neural development”. S2F-deeplearning models can accurately encode enhancers, yet decoding these models into human-interpretable rules remains a major challenge.

Paper alert! 💻 How many cells do you need to train reliable deep learning models in regulatory genomics? We asked how data quality, sequencing depth, and dataset size affect training of sequence-to-function models from scATAC-seq. Out now www.nature.com/articles/s41... (details below)

🚀 Proudly introducing the VIB-KU Leuven Center For Neuroscience, a merger of the two former VIB research centers VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research and Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders (NERF)! Our new motto: Bold Science, Real Impact. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhaq...

Happy to share the Biodiversity Cell Atlas white paper, out today in @nature.com. We look at the possibilities, challenges, and potential impacts of molecularly mapping cells across the tree of life. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ending my two weeks conference marathon: last week Single Cell Spatial Omics #SCSO 600 year #KULeuven edition & now #SCG2025 - learned so much & am now already searching for the next one! Any recommendations for biodiversity, non-model organisms & genetics in 2026? 🪰🦋🐛🐌

The FlyBase situation has made the national news www.nbcnews.com/science/scie...

1/ First preprint from @jdemeul.bsky.social lab 🥳! We present our new multi-modal single-cell long-read method SPLONGGET (Single-cell Profiling of LONG-read Genome, Epigenome, and Transcriptome)! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Very proud of two new preprints from the lab: 1) CREsted: to train sequence-to-function deep learning models on scATAC-seq atlases, and use them to decipher enhancer logic and design synthetic enhancers. This has been a wonderful lab-wide collaborative effort. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Make sure to also check out the preprint on the new CREsted package: many more sequence-to-function models across different species! … and it works with HyDrop v2 data as well. Congrats to @niklaskemp.bsky.social & @seppedewinter.bsky.social & all the others working on this super cool project!

Our new preprint is out! We optimized our open-source platform, HyDrop (v2), for scATAC sequencing and generated new atlases for the mouse cortex and Drosophila embryo with 607k cells. Now, we can train sequence-to-function models on data generated with HyDrop v2! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...