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Erich and Marie travelled to Barcelona for #ESEB2025. Erich gave two talks: one exploring de novo and random proteins, and another discussing gene family losses in slave-maker ants. Marie presented her work on neORF emergence in Drosophila at Symposium 29, organised by @gevol.bsky.social. 🧬🪰🐜

Our EIC David Liberles kicks off the meeting with a reminder of our journal's storied history - some of the many seminal papers published here. #JME2025 My personal favorite: Felsenstein 1981: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Part two of our Spanish tour begins today, with the kickoff of our 2025 European meeting in Madrid! Follow here for coverage. #JME2025

Final words of the last #ESEB2025 plenary by @jmappes.bsky.social: "Science moves forward when we keep both our curiosity and our humility"

Great to see @vargaschavezc.bsky.social give a talk on this in person. Stunning findings on the origin of non-marine annelids, whose genomes are utterly scrambled: a statistically random distribution of ancestral linkage groups around the genome. #eseb2025

Common theme this year is structural genome rearrangements coinciding with ecological or lifestyle changes. @NGuiglielmoni contributes high rates of rearrangements in cryptobiotic nematodes, in extreme environments, compared to close non-crytobiotic outgroups. #eseb2025

Great symposium on Craniofacial Evolution in Vertebrates at #ESEB2025 kicked off with fantastic talk by ‪@grumpydrfabre.bsky.social on the metamorphic blueprint,how life cycle type shapes salamander skulls. Is there an advantage of complex life cycle to create novel morphologies? @r3rt0.bsky.social

Mind-boggling talk from Lee Henry on facultative endosymbiosis. Pitches as essentially a form of HGT - a source of adaptives genes that populations can pass around to deal as needed w/ common environmental challenges. Just another organism instead of only DNA. #ESEB2025

#eseb2025 Hanne Griem-Krey finds accessory chromosome (AC) in a fungal insect pathogen that increases infectivity and can be horizontally transferred to other strains - solo, without the rest of the genome.

#ESEB2025 Several talks on mysterious germline-restricted chromosomes, which are eliminated from somatic tissue during development. In fungus gnats, @chodson.bsky.social finds that they look like they're derived from a hybridization event.

#ESEB2025 Exquisite talk on the mechanisms used by fungi that parasitize ants into 'zombies,' controlling their behavior to make them move to a location optimal for spore dispersal, from Charissa de Bekker.

Third day's plenary by @lovedalen.bsky.social on “deep time” ancient DNA: >100k years old! First, an explanation of why aDNA is hard: very short fragments (even so much that amplification is hard), often with a majority of contaminated sequence. #eseb2025

Talk from @aleksandra-marconi.bsky.social on sensory evolution in cichlids. Finds a LINE2 insertion in the intron of a critical brain patterning gene that in zebrafish reporter drives expression in key sensory regions. #ESEB2025

Nice talk from @timothyfuqua.bsky.social on the capacity of bacterial genomes to evolve promoters 'de novo'. One impt number: what % of genomic sequence is, or is mutationally close to, being a promoter? Another, more overlooked: how does this compare to the # in random sequence? #ESEB2025

Talk from @jfennbio.bsky.social at #ESEB2025 on this work. I didn't catch the actual predictive accuracy in the talk - from the paper, I glean that it's >90%!

@rmwaterhouse.bsky.social kicked off the afternoon session of 'the genomic basis of evolutionary innovations' with a talk rich in data and with metascientific reach (rare!). #ESEB2025

#ESEB2025 Laia Marin-Gual on 3D genome organization in diverse vertebrate genome architectures. Nice comparative design: picked animals with different karyotype features: macro vs micro-chromosomes, meta- vs acrocentric. (Can't tweet the unpublished results! Suspense!)

#ESEB2025 coverage will stop here until Bluesky corrects its flagging of this account as spam. 😓 Check us out on X at JMolEvo.

@clairemerot.bsky.social Claire Mérot on a zoo of chromosomal inversions, which suppress recombination to enable "discrete and complex" (well-put!) phenotypes. My favorite case study: seaweed flies, where the two alleles show very similar clines in Europe and the US. #ESEB2025

Marta Ferré on waterbucks (a species of antelope): multiple instances of subspecies with different karyotypes due to polymorphic Robertsonian translocation. #ESEB2025

Neat talk from Heli Monttinen pointing out that template switching causes inverted repeats, which can be functional as miRNAs! That's handy. #eseb2025

Thoughtful talk from Nathan Bailey on a species of Hawaiian cricket w/ two wing forms. The larger makes song that attracts mates more effectively, but also attracts predators. Surprisingly, also finds that the small wing type has more eggs and larger testes! #ESEB2025

Harris Lewen on the Earth BioGenome project @ebpgenome.bsky.social , which aims to sequence all ~2M known eukaryote species - a hefty price tag, but argues that this is the Webb or LHC of our field. I might be biased, but this seems right. #ESEB2025

#ESEB2025 Second plenary by Dieter Ebert was a tour of Daphnia and its red queen battle with bacterial pathogen Pasturia. (But opened with an ode to "learned societies" like ESEB. True and poetically put!)

#ESEB2025 Day 2 begins with a rich talk from Beatriz Vicoso. Most of the talk about sex chromosome evolution, beginning with exposition of why they evolve. First, a sex-determining gene appears on an autosome.

I'm also posting over on X (I know, I know); posts here will be delayed a little. Semi-live tweeting is hard work! #ESEB2025

#ESEB2025 @emilylbehrman.bsky.social on a great cuticular hydrocarbon-based mate preference system in Drosophila: a single molecule secreted by melanogaster females is sufficient to induce melanogaster males to mate simulans females, and to put simulans males off simulans females. Cool.

#ESEB2025 @posnienlab.bsky.social with a talk showing evidence that the 15% difference in ommatidia (and therefore eye, given same number) size between Drosophila simulans and mauritiana is caused by a simple shift in the expression of a homeobox gene.

#ESEB2025 Lots of talks from Stephen Montgomery's group on adaptations involved in the adaption of some Heliconius butterflies to pollen eating. Seems that this lifestyle involves visiting many physically distant flowers and remembering their location, i.e. more visual memory.

Fantastic talk from @k4tj4.bsky.social at @eseb2025.bsky.social on this work. Finds that the pattern into which the cortex folds is better predicted by just brain size than the folding patterns of evolutionary neighbors!

@eseb2025.bsky.social Short talk from Lily Fogg on adaptations to ocean life in low light. In deep sea fish, the ancestral condition is thought to be young are born closer to the surface, with more light, and then descend as they become adults.

First, a great talk from Isabel Cabrero on the evolution of the turbanate eye, a huge secondary pair of eyes that achieve higher sensitivity by spatial light integration found in male mayflies (photo from Nikon Small World):

Off with a bang with a very fast-paced Michael Lynch keynote. Still time for moments of humor. Says of "Hershey heaven," Alfred Hershey's idea of happiness, which is "to have an experiment that works, and to do it over and over again": "that sounds terrible."

Kicked off @eseb2025.bsky.social with a great and warm welcome from @tonigabaldon.bsky.social . Seems like a really thoughtfully organized conference so far.

Hello, Bluesky! It's an action packed couple weeks for JME. We're in Spain for @eseb2025.bsky.social and our very own Journal of Molecular Evolution Advances meeting #JME2025, happening a few days afterward in Madrid. We'll be tweeting highlights from both meetings. Follow us to stay updated!