Cross-species insights into placental evolution and diseases at the single-cell resolution https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.26.696571v1

Excited to share the final version of our study on Nematostella cell type regulatory programs. Part of our @erc.europa.eu StG project, this was a challenging 5-year effort extraodinarily led by @aelek.bsky.social and @martaig.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧬👁️ Our Science Advances paper is published! snATAC-seq analysis across lamprey to human retina uncovers deeply conserved cis-regulatory codes in all six retinal cell types — even with extensive enhancer turnover. Immensely grateful to my coauthors and collaborators. 🙏 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New paper alert!!...🤩 Led by @blogeman.bsky.social, we identify how cell type-specific hormonal responses in the hypothalamus tunes parenting behavior in males and females 🐭🧠🍼. Highlights in thread 👇 1/6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

GWAS has been an incredible discovery tool for human genetics: it regularly identifies *causal* links from 1000s of SNPs to any given trait. But mechanistic interpretation is usually difficult. Our latest work on causal models for this is out yesterday: www.nature.com/articles/s41... A short🧵:

After a huge amount of work w/ @alex-stark.bsky.social's group, a new version of our Ledidi preprint is now out! In an era of AI-designed proteins, the next leap will be controlling when, where, and how much of these proteins are expressed in living cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thank you Alex! Excited to see our paper published in @nature.com ! Huge thanks to @jeffspence.github.io , @tkyzeng.bsky.social , @emmamarydann.bsky.social, @nikhilmilind.dev, @marsonlab.bsky.social, @jkpritch.bsky.social, and all the members of the Pritchard and Marson labs for your enormous help!

New preprint from our lab, spearheaded by @maelledaunesse.bsky.social and in collaboration with Diego Villar! In which we ask, can we detect joint signatures suggestive of positive selection on transcriptomes and epigenomes?

Happy to present TOGA2, developed by Yury Malovichko @ymalovichko.bsky.social, the faster, memory-efficient & more accurate TOGA1 successor (github.com/hillerlab/TO...). And annotations, orthologs & gene loss/dup data generated with 4 references for 883 placental mammal and with 5 refs for 676 ...

NEW pub in @science.org 🥳 Is it sponges (panels A & B) or comb jellies (C & D) that root the animal tree of life? For over 15 years, #phylogenomic studies have been divided. We provide new evidence suggesting that... 🔗: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Excited to share Nona: a unifying multimodal masking framework for functional genomics. Models for DNA have evolved along separate paths: sequence-to-function (AlphaGenome), language models (Evo2), and generative models (DDSM). Can these be unified under a single paradigm? 1/15

Are you using any of our factor models, such as MOFA? 🛵 You might’ve found it challenging to tailor them to your specific use cases - not anymore! Introducing MOFA-FLEX: a flexible, modular factor analysis framework designed for customizable modeling across diverse multi-omics data scenarios. 1/n

Our latest paper has just been published in Cell! doi.org/10.1016/j.ce... We developed a new method called MCC ultra, which allows 3D chromatin structure to be visualised with a 1 base pair pixel size.

🚀Excited to share our new preprint: “Programming human cell type-specific gene expression via an atlas of AI-designed enhancers” We built the largest repository of AI-designed enhancers, validated across 10 human cell lines + mouse retina. 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #AI #Genomics #SynBio

New preprint led by the brilliant @aleksandra-marconi.bsky.social on cichlid brain diversification, fgf8a signalling and regulatory divergence with TEs on the mix! All part of a wonderful collaboration with @ebablab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... @camzoology.bsky.social

🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity! We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have: (1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs) (2) better hand dexterity (3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

So excited to see this out on bioRxiv! Huge thanks to @kaessmannlab.bsky.social and the amazing cerebellum team (@marisepp.bsky.social and @ioansarr.bsky.social) for all the support and insightful discussions that made this work possible!!

Excited to share the preprint from my main postdoc project! It’s been a long journey—huge thanks to everyone who made it possible, especially @leticiarm1618.bsky.social for being the best collaborator one could ask for, and the amazing @kaessmannlab.bsky.social lab for the invaluable support!

🧠 The Lipid #Brain Atlas is out now! If you think #lipids are boring and membranes are all the same, prepare to be surprised. Led by @lucafusarbassini.bsky.social with Giovanni D'Angelo's lab, we mapped membrane lipids in the mouse brain at high resolution. www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

We are thrilled to share our new preprint entitled “The origin and molecular evolution of the mammalian liver cell architecture” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Which mutations rewire function of regulatory DNA? Excited to share SEAM: Systematic Explanation of Attribtuion-based Mechanisms. SEAM is an explainable AI method that dissects cis-regulatory mechanisms learned by seq2fun genomic deep learning models. Led by @EESetiz 1/N 🧵👇

Now published! Our paper on: (1) Accurate sequencing of sperm at scale (2) Positive selection of spermatogenesis driver mutations across the exome (3) Offspring disease risks from male reproductive aging [1/n] www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint from the lab! We discovered a transient fluidization in the basal region of human forebrains by tracking microdroplets in cerebral organoids.This “basal fluidization”, absent in gorilla and mouse, may contribute to greater surface expansion in human forebrains 1/ doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Happy to share work spearheaded by former grad student Colin Shew testing shared duplicated cis regulatory elements (CREs) using an MPRA. While we find some high effect CREs, collectively paralog differences represent modest effects accounting for observed gene expression divergence.

Today in @nature.com, we present our work leveraging functional genomics and human blastoids to uncover a human-specific mechanism in preimplantation development driven by the endogenous retrovirus HERVK. Special thanks to the reviewers whose comments improved our manuscript a lot! rdcu.be/eI3tD

New paper from my lab and @jshendure.bsky.social lab! Led by the brilliant @zukailiu.bsky.social and @cxqiu.bsky.social. We tackled how anterior and posterior progenitor cells cooperate to self-organize into an embryonic structure (termed AP-gastruloid). (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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)

New preprint from our lab! What can we learn about the properties of gene regulatory elements by CRISPR’ing a random set of accessible sites in human cells? Find out here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 👇 1/

Ever wondered how robust cellular identity is to external perturbations? Here we disrupt cellular environmnent in vivo and in vitro, and find cell population specific sensitivities. Environment sculpts development yes, but not all cells are made of the same wood. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New from the lab: Fatty Acid Metabolism Sets the Species-specific Tempo of Cortical Development through Protein Acetylation Dynamics. Led by amazing trio: @ryo2iwata.bsky.social , Isabel Gallego, @emirerkol.bsky.social, together with @steinaerts.bsky.social , @fendtlab.bsky.social

🧠🦈Excited to present our latest work🧠🦈Interested in brain evolution? And shark embryos? Then read on… Our work sheds light on the deep origins of our brain’s most complex regions.

Now published @natecoevo.nature.com with @annika-nichols.bsky.social, our latest on the evolution of 𝘴𝘭𝘦𝘦𝘱 across 𝟲𝟬 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀 of cichlid fishes! doi.org/10.1038/s415... with members of the @schierlab.bsky.social and Salzburger labs, as well as the burgeoning Shafer lab @uoftcellsysbiol.bsky.social

1) I am delighted to present this terrific tour de force research conducted by my post-doc Dr. Gayani Senevirathne @gayani.bsky.social and published today in Nature - www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In the genomics community, we have focused pretty heavily on achieving state-of-the-art predictive performance. While undoubtedly important, how we *use* these models after training is potentially even more important. tangermeme v1.0.0 is out now. Hope you find it useful!

Excited to share our latest work on brain evolution, where we dive into the evolution of Cajal-Retzius cells! If you are interested in cell type evolution and cerebral cortex evo-devo, please read on… www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 1/7

Activity of most genes is controlled by multiple enhancers, but is there activation coordinated? We leveraged Nanopore to identify a specific set of elements that are simultaneously accessible on the same DNA molecules and are coordinated in their activation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Please RP. We are thrilled to announce that our lab’s first preprint is out! ”Whole-genome single-cell multimodal history tracing to reveal cell identity transition” We report HisTrac-seq, a multiomic single-cell molecular recording platform. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hiding in plain sight - how close are we to mapping ALL 🧬enhancers🧬 in the genome? Our new paper by Mannion et al. takes a systematic look at "hidden enhancers" and why they remain so hard to find. With @mosterwalder.bsky.social, @jlopezrios.bsky.social & many more www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to see this published with additional data following our preprint a while back. Cool combination (in our biased view) of controlled TF expression and machine learning to decode chromatin sensitivity. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti....

🧬🧬🧬 New review from the lab: Evolution of comparative transcriptomics: biological scales, phylogenetic spans, and modeling frameworks authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S... By @mattezambon.bsky.social & @fedemantica.bsky.social, together with @jonnyfrazer.bsky.social & Mafalda Dias.

Our paper benchmarking foundation models for perturbation effect prediction is finally published 🎉🥳🎉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... We show that none of the available* models outperform simple linear baselines. Since the original preprint, we added more methods, metrics, and prettier figures! 🧵

You link #phenotype 🦜 to #genotype 🧬 with #comparative #genomics 💻? This #review is for you 📜: authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S... We review new #methods, remaining #challenges and #future directions and highlight recent key studies. Thanks @hillermich.bsky.social! Please share! 🙂

Under which circumstances do genomic neural networks learn motifs and their interactions?https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.25.666754v1

Thrilled to share that our latest work on marsupial heterochrony is now online at @cp-devcell.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social @lab-turner.bsky.social @crick.ac.uk We used scRNAseq to understand the asynchronous progression of developmental programmes in marsupials www.cell.com/developmenta...

Diet/microbes place the gut epithelium as a nexus for evolutionary change. With Jason Spence and Craig Lowe labs we use #organoids to explore how evolution prepared the developing human intestine for exposure to the environment. @science.org #evodevo www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 1/11

I'm excited to share work on a research direction my team has been advancing: connecting machine learning derived genetic variant embeddings to downstream tasks in human genetics. This work was led by the amazing Divyanshi Srivastava! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Is the annotation of viruses in the human genome accurate? We think not. Take a look at our new paper and let us know if you agree! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Check out our latest work co-led by @dcsoto.bsky.social and @jmuribescr.bsky.social identifying hundreds of human duplicated gene families using the new T2T-CHM13 assembly, with a focus on those potentially contributing to brain evolution 🧪: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lTQtL7PXu...

Thrilled to see our revised preprint now published in Nature Ecology & Evolution! If you’re curious about how to build a bat wing by re-using existing gene programs, check out the link or the tutorial below. Big congratulations to all co-authors!! Thanks to reviewers! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our study on a male-essential microRNA and the evolution of other dosage compensation mechanisms in birds is now out in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41...