Paying peer reviewers works. Expanded Fast & Fair experiment @biologyopen.bsky.social: • 5.5 vs 37.7 working days to decision with reviews • ~3 vs ~9 reviewer invitations per manuscript • no reduction in editor-assessed review quality • similar acceptance rates www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Very happy to announce a big new paper from the lab, led by grad students @smishra677.bsky.social and Laia Pomar-Pallarès (in collaboration with @roblanfear.bsky.social). We introduce a new way to study introgression, with accompanying software (DAFT) 1/n 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Researchers have identified superparamagnetic macrophages in the livers of rock pigeons to be crucial for magnetic sensing. The finding uncovers an unexpected role for immune cells in sensory perception and may fundamentally change our understanding of animal navigation. https://scim.ag/4nTQ3nq

The people who believe that generative AI development & adoption everywhere is the ultimate goal & the first order predictor of success are insufferable. So are the people who think that AI can't ever produce anything useful and that everything they do produce is "slop". I miss reasoned arguments.

introducing barfbow, a little tool that aims to encourage the use of variable brightness to improve effective com, accessibility and scientific accuracy in figures. github.com/evolvwing/ba... If you need palettes with colors that are easy to distinguish on a plot or map, pls check it out!

Can anyone point me towards companies that are actively trying to reduce DNA library prep cost? Like, is there a business out there trying for sub-$1 libraries yet?

Hey look we got a cool new paper out in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social all about the MOTHBOX! Hubert put together a really nice paper with our team including Bernat Fortet, Daisy H. Dent, @wellreadpanda.bsky.social and @briannaljohns.bsky.social besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Excited to see this out!

🚨Job claxon🚨 4-year #Postdoc available in our lab in @camzoology.bsky.social developing molecular and anatomical approaches to mapping evolutionary changes in the brain, using #Heliconiini butterflies. Come join us, we are nice. 🧪 www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

It takes two to tango but gastrulation is a contra dance Cells move through changing partners and signals, and many Wnts act together to keep the choreography coordinated in space and time. That’s the core idea behind our new paper on gut formation in #seaurchins 🧵

I've just had a jaw-to-the-floor moment with this new paper from the Hines lab. They describe a yellow-white switch in bees, which maps to the same TF as the yellow-white switch in Colias butterflies, previously described by the @chriswheat.bsky.social lab. journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...

What do you mean I have to publish another paper after I am done with this one. That doesn't sound right. That sounds like a pyramid scheme

Species-specific spectral tuning of motion vision in butterflies: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

🦋✂️🧬 🧪 New preprint! Led by @donyaniyaz.bsky.social CRISPR‑Cas9 knockouts of ABCG transporters across butterflies & moths reveal how pigment pathways shape color during development. #CRISPR #Lepidoptera #pigmentation Feedback welcome 👩‍🔬 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New preprint form me and the McMillan lab at STRI and Martin lab at GWU, digging into scale cell type specification and differentiation in Heliconius wings, with some insights on the lncRNA gene ivory. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Comments/suggestions welcome!

Amazing peppered moth story from Saccheri lab - same locus, but different structural variants, underly parallel evolution of industrial melanism in the UK and across continental Europe.

Can't wait to release a 10-year-old birthday version for SeqKit! - 10 years - 2 papers, 3500 citations - 20 contributors - 40 subcommands - 880 commits - 500 issues - 685.5K Bioconda total downloads Thank you all, dear contributors and users! I'll keep maintaining it. github.com/shenwei356/s...

Something I’ve learned - the best research environments aren't sterile. They're alive with creativity and warmth, with huge fish murals and dogs who have no idea what a p-value is but show up to lab meeting anyway. Science is a human endeavour and humans need to be inspired by their surroundings.

Super excited about these results and new system. Mapping, Expression, Loss-of-Function I'm floored by how this locus seem to integrate all the spatial info to sketch the minute details of the phenotype, and how this is prone to evol tweaks Large hyperdiverged haplotype without an inversion.

New pre-print with some updates on ivory:miR193 in a highly polymorphic moth. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We mapped ivory (again!?) this time controlling aspects of camouflage in Anticarsia gemmatalis. Mapping, SVs, Expression and Function. Comments/suggestions welcome!

Me when trying to submit sequences to SRA

We’ve been working on this paper longer than it took adaptive alleles to cross the species barrier (in both directions) and make two pests ever more resistant to the things we throw at them. New preprint out 🧬🌱🐛

Here are just a few of the many fish I painted this year (not to scale). It's fun to stick a bunch of them together into a collage and see some of the incredible diversity of body shape and color patterns. Merry Fishmas! 🐡🐟🐠

We are thrilled to announce the first official release (v0.1.8) of #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗿, the successor to one of our flagship tool, #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀! Based on ideas we conceived of long ago (!), this was achieved thanks to the dedication of Brent Pedersen. 1/n

🚨RA/PhD position available in evolutionary neurobiology 🚨 Working on a deep dive into circuit changes during mushroom body expansion in Heliconius butterflies @camzoology.bsky.social - employment benefits - 4 years funding - 1000% fun Deadline: 14/1/2026 Details: www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

🚨New paper! 🚨 @jasminealqassar.bsky.social led this work on the silk glands of the pantry moth. These two long tubes inside the caterpillar continuously make a ton of silk How does this special organ work? www.cell.com/iscience/ful... @cp-iscience.bsky.social 🧵THREAD🧵

Beautiful work, as always

Hey Lep researchers! "Given the risks of transgene remobilization and instability associated with piggyBac transposases of lepidopteran origin, we urge researchers interested in developing transgenesis in moths or butterflies to consider using Minos-based tools."

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Interested in doing a PhD in how extinction processes can inform conservation? Do you see yourself working at the intersection of genomics, museums, conservation and butterfly biology. If so consider applying for the ILESLA PhD programme at Oxford Brookes: www.brookes.ac.uk/courses/rese...

Check out the recent publication in Annual Reviews of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics where the authors explore genomic species delimitation in depth. You'll see a number of #sciart figures I created to help explain some of the concepts! www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

🧠🌟🐭 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🧵

Really like this paper, led by @ficusorganensis.bsky.social, the supplementary videos aren’t up yet but will post them when I’m back in the office!

Latest work out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social We find the fly development gene bicoid is much older than previously thought (~20 million yrs older!) 🪰🧬 To pinpoint its origins we tackled the Diptera phylogeny, providing some resolution (many open questions remain). 🔗 tinyurl.com/2vyuevpy

Evolutionary geneticists: I need your help! Can you think of examples of recurrent introgression of different alleles at the same locus into a single recipient population/species? ie Allele A is introduced to taxon 1 from taxon 2, then allele A’ is introduced to taxon 1 from taxon 2

I'm recruiting graduate students! If you're interested in the genetics and physiology of seasonal plasticity in butterflies and moths, feel free to reach out! I'm looking for one or two students for the fall of 2026. Also check out my website: www.vanderburglab.com

This only happens to you once

🌍🦋 Across 6 continents, 21 sites & 15,000 paper moths, we joined a worldwide experiment led by @wlallen.bsky.social & Iliana Medina, showing how ecological context shapes the evolution of animal colouration. Proud to be part of this global team effort: doi.org/10.1126/scie...

up-to-date Youtube link here youtu.be/Kunvn2GDq8o?...

Only single cell sequencing of the all these post docs will reveal why

Hey ecologists and evolutionary biologists! Is this you? ➡️ "This concept is way too complicated to show in a way reviewers and readers will understand" Ask for help! Life Science Studios is here to create engaging figures that clearly explain your research. 🧪 #academicsky #evolutionarybiology

I'm looking for PhD students to join the lab starting August 2026. We study the evolution of insect chemical signals so if you're interested in evolutionary biology, chemical ecology, molecular biology, behavior, or genetics, this could be a good fit for you! More info here: tinyurl.com/mrxchwfm

Our paper on central complex evolution in Heliconiini butterflies is now available as reviewed preprint at @elife.bsky.social 🎉🎉. Please check out the helpful and constructive reviews which we are going to address in the next weeks 🤗 elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... @ebablab.bsky.social

miRNA biology folks, this is about the craziest endeavor to assign the phenotypically critical targets of a miRNA (13-way mutant). while it only gets you part of the way, this is truly a heroic genetic experiment. and also scary, no way i can see us doing it ... kudos to @lcochella.bsky.social lab!

Excited to advertise a shared PhD position at KU Leuven (Belgium) and Mondsee (Austria) with @markusmoest.bsky.social on the genetic basis, plasticity and evolution of melanization in Daphnia from alpine lakes. Apply here: www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

So very excited for the magnum opus of my #PhD to finally be out in @pnas.org. 🎉🎉 We demosntrate that mutualistic co-mimicking tropical butterflies not only converge in light microhabitat but, as a consequence, have also converged in visual system morphology! 1/n😀 www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Preprint alert from the lab @jasminealqassar.bsky.social led this elegant study of gene expression in the silk glands of our favorite alternative "silk worm", the pantry moth. Mega-polyploid cells with thousands of genome copies just to express a handful of proteins doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Transgenic Plodia larvae expressing the very bright mBaoJin (mStayGold variant) in its silk glands. Also some gorgeous 3xP3:mCherry staining of larval ocelli and glia. (see revised preprint) by pantry moth wizards @donyaniyaz.bsky.social & @lucalivraghi.bsky.social doi.org/10.1101/2025...

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...

🚨 Super exited to see our paper on the inheritance and genetic basis of guppy color variation come out in @natecoevo.nature.com‬ rdcu.be/eugWV Guppy males have enormous variation in color patterns, with many combinations of ornamental spots and stripes. But where does all this variation come from?