Sperm banks should be much more strictly regulated. (particularly, only accepting donations from registered donors). The banks don't seem to make the slightest effort to avoid these cases. www.bbc.com/news/article...

A lot has been written about AI in academia. But I think there's one overlooked problem. Say AI makes it easier to write grants (probably correct). However, grants are zero-sum games. If you can write more grants, everyone can. In the end, you do more work, but gain nothing.

Job AD. Research Directions: 1. Selection in early development; Pop gen methods applied to new technologies, i.e. scDNA-seq with D. Shao 2. Study of hypermutability and selection using population cohorts with E. Koch 3. Evolution of Mutagenesis with M. Penenell & @jgschraiber.bsky.social

Polygenic embryo screening is being marketed commercially – but how do IVF clinicians view it? • General approval is low (12%) For specific uses: • 59% approved of health-related embryo selection • 6% approved of trait-based selection 🧵 Survey findings in NPJ Genomic Medicine

Interested in pleiotropy dissection but not sure where to start, which methods are useful, which studies offer illustrative examples, or how to robustly validate your results? Look no further 👀 rdcu.be/eSfAZ

The last work of my PhD is finally out: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...! This work is about accurately estimating branch length in the Ancestral Recombination Graph (ARG), which is achieved by a really simple framework with minimal assumptions. (1/n)

The 2026 EMBL symposium 'Reconstructing the human past using ancient and modern genomics' is live with a fantastic invited speaker lineup! Abstract deadline 9 June. If work is ongoing, plan for Heidelberg in September😉. Organised by Maanasa Raghavan, @matejahajdi.bsky.social, Choongwon Jeong & me.

This comment made me wonder: what kinds of cases or research goals/questions would geneticists generally consider scientifically useful/interesting/valid when it comes to looking at the genomes of long-dead famous people?

More details emerge on this affair. 1. A paper has been submitted to a "high profile" journal. I think no editor in their right mind should take it, but I have no hope. 2. Details on the psychiatric PRS analysis were reported by the investigator. edition.cnn.com/2025/11/13/s...

One of my core principles is to defend the freedom of sequencing the DNA of everyone for every purpose. This should not mean it is always a good (or responsible) idea. And at least post a preprint before going on TV (reminding me of the Columbus fiasco). www.independent.co.uk/news/science...

Straight onto the reading list: Forensic genetics in the omics era www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exciting new study led by @ekerdoncuff.bsky.social and @meaghanmarohn.bsky.social on the evolution of Lactase Persistence in South Asia. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A meta-analysis of the impact of polygenic risk score disclosures on health outcomes. 27 RCTs, max follow up 12 months. For 22 outcomes tested in >=2 trials, "Meta-analysis revealed no statistically significant effects on any measured outcome" www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Interesting story in this preprint. A male infant was diagnosed with Fanconi anemia due to an X-linked frameshift mutation. Three years later, his hematopoiesis became normal (without intervention). How? www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to help host the 54th European Mathematical Genetics Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, next spring! Speakers include @timfrayling.bsky.social, @marylynritchie.bsky.social, Dr. Joelle Mbatchou and Dr. Eleonora Porcu Travel grants available - register here: emgm2026.sciencesconf.org?lang=en

New from FinnGen!! 🚀🚀🚀 FinnGen just released GWAS summary statistics for 383 lab measurements (OMOPIDs) - each based on ≥1,000 participants!! All results are open for browsing & download: 👉 labvalues.finngen.fi. 🧬🧬🧬 Have fun!! 🏄🏄‍♀️🏄‍♂️

Oh no www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Online now! 📄Maternal age and genome-wide failure of meiotic recombination are associated with triploid conceptions in humans 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 @shaicarmi.bsky.social @eva-hoffmann.bsky.social & co

FLARE2: local ancestry inference with poorly-matched reference panels https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.13.681993v1

Hebrew University graduate wins Economics Nobel prize. Not bad for one day :) www.nobelprize.org/prizes/econo... www.nobelprize.org/events/nobel...

Celebrating the release of the hostages in my neighborhood and all over Israel. After two years, we can breathe again. Let's hope this day follows with peace and prosperity to the whole region.

Big day ahead, can't sleep :) * Hostages return from Gaza after two years * War ends * Trump in Jerusalem

Excited to preprint our latest work (w/ Drew DeHaas, Zhibai Jia, Leo Speidel) on using ARGs for demographic inference. w/ applications using data from 1000 Genomes Project. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What will be achieved first: in-vitro gametogenesis, or peace in the Middle East?

Please repost: we are recruiting a postdoc for a project in my lab on genes and environment in autism

There is a lot of hype around this new paper. It's a great advance, but it will never result in the birth of a healthy baby. The reason is that in this method, chrs that end up in the egg are a random sample of the 46 somatic chrs, 1/2 www.bbc.com/news/article...

Hi hive mind - would appreciate feedback on the following. I have ~3k whole-genomes, each called individually with GATK. I have 3k GVCFs. I don't have enough resources for joint calling. Should I use bcftools to merge into a multi-sample VCF? Or joint call in batches (say, 100) and then merge?

The final thesis chapter is published OA at @ajhgnews.bsky.social! In short, we determine a valid significance level for a "selection" scan and apply it to 3 ancestry groups in 2 biobanks. 🧵 for updates from the helpful peer review. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨 New preprint out! We reconstructed parental haplotypes in >440k individuals (UK & Estonian biobanks) to estimate assortative mating directly in the parental generation. This reveals intensified assortment in recent generations. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Comparing Neanderthal introgression maps reveals core agreement but substantial heterogeneity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.23.678138v1

To analyze millions of genetic variants, we need tools that are fast and memory efficient. Some of the most efficient tools have problems with numerical instability on dense sets of snps. Bercovich et al. figured out how to overcome a common source of instability: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

To predict genetic risk for an individual, which score should you use? The one learned from a cohort that best matches by ancestry? Or by sex, or age, or environment? Shadi Zabad proposes to combine scores taking all these into account. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Some days it feels as if Netanyahu and Trump are competing who can destroy their country faster or while inflicting the most pain

Excited to share our preprint on PGI portability across ancestries—now on bioRxiv. With co-authors @aysuo.bsky.social, @paturley.bsky.social, @alextisyoung.bsky.social, and @Dan_J_Benjamin. Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025... Thread below for details.

Interesting work. "we analyzed viral load of 31 DNA viruses in human blood and saliva using whole-genome sequencing from UK Biobank (n=490k), SPARK (n=13k), and All of Us (n=415k)... genetic variation at dozens of loci associated with load of seven viruses" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Brilliant paper by Visscher et al. Populations differ in traits/disease burden. Are these differences due to genetics? Comparing single variants or polygenic scores between populations is biased due to environmental confounders correlated with the variants. 1/3 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to present our new tool "PEStimate", an online app for predicting risk reductions after Polygenic Embryo Screening (PES). Find the app here: polygenicembryo.shinyapps.io/pestimate/ Preprint: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is fantastic, I agree with everything. That journals have negative value for science and society is obvious. I don't understand the resistance from so many. p.s. The exact same holds for the way grants are reviewed. A total waste of time and money. Just transition to uniform/random.

This was neat work by @nmancuso.bsky.social et al developing and benchmarking a new multi-ancestry fine-mapping method (“SuShiE”). I learned something about the performance of pooled v stratified analyses but still have some Qs. 1/n

Very generous fellowships for a post-doc in Israel (for international candidates). If anyone is interested, please contact me by DM/email. See the Azrieli website also for a program for visiting PhD students. azrielifoundation.org/fellows/inte...

Happy to introduce an ancestry estimation submodule in the hapla framework. If you have phased genotype data, unsupervised ancestry estimation has never been faster or more accurate! 🦾 Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Code: github.com/Rosemeis/hapla

Excited to share our latest manuscript, "Exposure accumulation drives age-dependent disease architectures and polygenic risk scores," led by Xilin Jiang: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... I am attempting an explainer thread for the first time here: (I am usually too exhausted to post one)

Nice review of polygenic prediction of traits based on ancient DNA, by @mathiesoniain.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A Transparent and Generalizable Deep Learning Framework for Genomic Ancestry Prediction https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.26.672448v1

Interesting that the same researchers also found ~450 same-sex couples in the UK Biobank. One finding is that "Female-male pairs showed more positive assortment than did MM or FF pairs for year of birth and number of children". www.nature.com/articles/s41...

KANN: estimation of genetic ancestry profiles by nearest neighbor regression https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.27.671485v1

VDB: The Arab Variation and Disease Burden Database https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.24.671996v1

Fault-tolerant pedigree reconstruction from pairwise kinship relations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.21.671608v1

Criteria for detection of married or cohabiting couples in the UK Biobank "The geographically-derived variables identified 92,510 putative couples .... the additional pairs identified in our geographic sample were likely valid pairs" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The AADR Visualizer: An ArcGIS Online Visualizer for ancient human DNA from the Allen Ancient DNA Resource academic.oup.com/bioinformati...