Really incredible work from the Tcheandjieu Lab that finally helps us to decipher what is going on at the 9p21 locus and its association with coronary disease on different ancestral backgrounds. www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltex...

We are very excited to share our latest. We thought that soft sweeps would be the only type of sweep spreading across human gut microbiomes. Turns out many are hard! Reach @peterlaurin.bsky.social 's thread on why! And tomorrow at #SMBE2026 I will share this work and more!

Just in time for #SMBE2026! Here's DEEP for detecting ghost/superarchaic introgression: scalable, robust, and no ARG! We find ~0.5% genome with superarchaic ancestry in East Asians and Oceanians, plus a notable signal at HLA Come find our poster tonight (#241)! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Terrific resource, now on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social: The Vertebrate Genomes Project Phase I: A global reference genome resource 🧪🧬 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Ancient human DNA from the cave walls! 🤯 Wonderful new paper led by Alba Bossoms Mesa and a great team of people that made this work possible.

(1/n) Very excited to share tri-lab collab (Mirny & Zechner) led by Harvey, Henrik & Jack: Q: How do enhancers & promoters interact in space (contact vs. action-at-a-distance) and time (stable vs. transient)? A: Transient E-P contact (~25-42 nm lasting ~10-20 sec): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Gift link

Cool Sankey diagram of the ranked choice voting results of Maine’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. Think how transformative this could be if more states adopted it.

New review out in Current Biology with colleagues in the Plant Cell Atlas (@plantcellatlas.bsky.social)! We discuss how single-cell genomics is reshaping our understanding of plant cell-type identity and evolution across the Green Lineage. bit.ly/4eAip2Q

The secret's out – thrilled to share I’ve been selected as a member of the inaugural class of @sciam.bsky.social's Young American Scientists! It's been so fun to learn about the work of the other 27 awardees from around the country. www.scientificamerican.com/issue/sa/202...

Awesome work led by Serena Tucci showing how ong-­ term isolation and archaic introgression shape functional genetic variation in Near Oceania @science.org 🧪🧬💀 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I'm excited to share that our work studying gene dosage response curves (GDRCs) is now out in Cell Genomics (@cellpress.bsky.social). www.cell.com/cell-genomic... [1/n]

"(...) plasmids are chromatinized in an organized, sequence-dependent manner and adopt a heterogeneous and incomplete chromatin architecture relative to nuclear-encoded chromatin fibers" www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

This is awful to hear, describing how Sean Eddy (HMMER, infernal, pfam, rfam) has been defunded. The letter said his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," www.npr.org/2026/05/21/n...

@johanduchene.bsky.social @sholtodavid.bsky.social Spent the last hour looking, found ten more apparently manipulated Western blots in Thermo Fisher's antibody verification data (across eight different catalogued products). Thread below. www.thermofisher.com/antibody/pro...

Beautiful new study from @elphegenoralab.bsky.social and Leonid Mirny's lab: Cohesin-bridged encounters mediate enhancer-promoter communication, predicting how enhancer effect scales with genomic distance and - for the first time - how CTCF sites modulate enhancer-promoter communciation! 🧵 below

Why can't we explain enhancer action despite 2 decades of chromosome conformation technologies? 😬 Our new study spearheaded by Leonid Mirny's group points to a flaw in our assumptions, and to a solution from physical principles By @timothyfoldes.bsky.social 💻& @karissalhansen.bsky.social 🧪 🧵👇

Single-cell proteomics illuminated new mechanisms of mammalian development. We found that spatially polarized protein distributions and intracellular protein gradients emerge during the earliest stages of mammalian embryogenesis and bias subsequent cell fate decisions. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

New pre-print 📣 “Undruggable” cancer mutations remain very hard to target with current modalities. What if we could instead sense mutant transcripts and convert that recognition into selective cell killing? Check out this work led by postdoc Jingkun Zeng: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We invented “triplet tumbling microscopy” (TTM) to track protein-protein interactions in living cells! Tag your protein with GFP and see it interact with *untagged* binding partners www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Although cohesin-sensitive, long-range enhancer activation is equivalent in nature to proximal activation. Cooperativity can arise from different levels of activation inputs operating on a non-linear response function. @eliasfriman.bsky.social @uoe-igc.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Spoiler

I don’t know how to feel about grant rejections anymore. When you get a score that would have been funded at any other point in history, except right now, how bad can you feel? I see scores from friends and colleagues (and my own) and it just breaks my heart more than anything.

We now have genome browsers on our UCSC mirror at genome.senckenberg.de for the 1033 mammal and 866 bird assemblies, showing spliceAi, reference-based and ref-integrated TOGA2 tracks. Tables with links to all browsers are genome.senckenberg.de/TOGA2Mammali... & genome.senckenberg.de/TOGA2Aves.html

Don’t reach for ChatGPT Images or Nano Banana as your first option when creating scientific images There are multiple free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations. #plantscience @stephenturner.us blog.stephenturner.us/p/free-open-...

New preprint alert! Together with Tetsuya Yamamoto at Hokkaido University, we propose a “polymer micelle” model of transcriptional bursting. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This a very important, and extremely well-executed study from Ralph Grand’s group @uniheidelberg.bsky.social. Congrats to all the authors! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A clear/significant finding derived from the single cell (sc) analysis of biological systems has been the realization that phenotypically homogeneous populations are heterogeneous at the level of gene expression (GE). www.cell.com/fulltext/S00... 🧵

1/ Excited to share our new paper in Science @science.org: “Toward life with a 19-amino acid alphabet through generative artificial intelligence design.” A great collab w/ Sergey's group @sokrypton.org at MIT @columbiasysbio.bsky.social science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🦠🧬🛠️🖥️💥

Yours truly is a proper scientist now! TL;DR: we used AI to redesign parts of essential cell machinery with only 19 canonical amino acids instead of 20. Why? Great thread by @harriswang.bsky.social provides more context and details. Let me talk a bit about the AI design part of this. 1/

We are holding our annual Rising Stars in Genetics and Genomics Postdoc Symposium on September 24-25, 2026! Please nominate postdocs who are conducting cutting edge, creative work, and are likely to be a leader in their field. Please nominate by April 30, 2026: forms.gle/85NZaxFezUk8... (1/2)

Excited to share our discovery of a new programmable RNA-guided DNA-targeting system hiding inside bacteriophages that predates CRISPR. We call it VIPR (Viral Interference Programmable Repeat), and it uses an entirely new logic to find its targets. Thread + link below.

This work was co-led by myself and Peter Yoon. Structure was led by Peter, @terryzzy.bsky.social , and Trevor Docter. Many thanks to our intrepid collaborators and special thanks to Jennifer for supporting us through this project. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🚨 Check out our new paper in Nature! In our new study, we sequenced 128 high-coverage genomes from Indigenous peoples across Latin America and uncovered their unique genetic diversity and history. 👇🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We introduce ConforNets, a mechanism for conformational control in AlphaFold3 models - SoTA at producing diverse conformations on every multistate benchmark (N=104) - Novel capability: transfer state from one protein to another Outperforms BioEmu, ConforMix and AFsample3 🧵1/8

A new study shows how different regulatory genetic elements coordinate the activity of a key developmental gene. The findings could explain subtle differences seen in patients with congenital limb malformations, for which the underlying disease mechanisms often remain unknown. Read more: ⬇️

some data on the shrinkage

"We identify at least three waves of "back-to-Africa" migrations starting ~14,000 years ago. Applying GhostBuster to deeper timescales..." V interesting new paper on human history

WAT www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

You know how bakers make croissants? This is like if croissants made bakers

How did eukaryotic cells get their Golgi, endosomes, lysosomes and other endomembrane compartments? We show that endomembrane evolution depends on long periods of neutral molecular exploration, punctuated by sudden leaps. New preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Cool new work from my @gladstoneinst.bsky.social and @ucsanfrancisco.bsky.social on haplosufficient genes pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41929339/

Inferring hominin history with recurrent gene flow from single unphased genomes and a two-locus statistic https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.11.717825v1

Super excited that our two companion papers on saturation genome editing (SGE) of RNU4-2 and discovery of a novel recessive neurodevelopmental disorder (NDD) were published yesterday 🥳 SGE experiment: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Recessive NDD characterisation: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

Why do schizophrenia GWAS signals look so flat across the genome? In our recent preprint, we explored why psychiatric disorders — and, more broadly, brain-related traits involving the central nervous system — appear to have unusual genetic architectures. 🧵1/n

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... thoughtful new local ancestry method by Rita Geleta, @alexgioannidis.bsky.social & others. Really looking forward to using it! 🧬

“Human ancestors interbred with two distinct populations of distant relatives” nice new preprint by @alanrogers.bsky.social @colinmbrand.bsky.social @timwebster.bsky.social showing that “archaics” & “moderns” interbred with two distinct “superarchaic” populations 🧪🧬💀

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...