📢🪳 New paper alert! Former group members Alina and Mark contributed to a new study just published in Nature Communications. The team generated 47 new high-quality genomes from termites and cockroaches, filling a major gap in available data. Check out the paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The IEB turned 20!🎉 We celebrated with an anniversary symposium with talks from many alumni, including several alumni from our group: @january3.github.io , Mark Harrison, @ahuylmans.bsky.social , Bertrand Fouks, and @sgrath.bsky.social . It was great to reconnect with many familiar faces. (1/2)😊

Berndjan and Alina both successfully defended their PhDs this week. Berndjan worked on “Probing the evolvability of ancestral and extant sulfatases using fluorescence-activated droplet sorting (FADS)”. Alina looked at the “Genomic basis of sociality in order Blattodea”. Big congrats!🥳🎓🧫🪳

Last week, we wrapped up our Volkswagen Foundation–funded project with a wonderful final meeting in Uppsala, hosted by Ylva Ivarsson’s group. The photo shows members of our lab together with colleagues from the groups of @ivarssonlab.bsky.social , @hlouchova-lab.bsky.social and Florian Hollfelder.

Erich traveled to Berlin for the Schering Prize award ceremony, where he delivered the laudatio for Agnes Toth-Petroczy, this year’s recipient of the Schering Young Investigator Award. Warm congratulations to her! Photo credits: Schering Stiftung/Michael Setzpfandt

Postdoctoral Research Associates are sought for the GEvol project on evolutionary genomics. Candidates should have programming and data analysis skills. More info: https://g-evol.uni-muenster.de/open-positions/ #postdoc

📢 Job alert: Post-Doc Position in the project "Functional annotation of genomic🧬 innovations in a densely populated clade🪰 with deep learning 💻" Join the GEvol community in a collaborative project between @bornberglab.bsky.social and @katharinahoff.bsky.social lab. 👉 bornberglab.org/post-doc-pos...

🧩 Thrilled to share our new paper in @genomebiolevol.bsky.social ! We present a comprehensive review of de novo gene emergence — providing a classification of current detection methods and a roadmap for addressing major challenges in the field of gene birth from non-genic sequences.

🚀We’re excited to share our new paper in Bioinformatics! We introduce a user-friendly toolkit that implements our novel DeNoFo file-format for standardised annotation of de novo gene detection workflows — enabling reproducible methodology descriptions and easier dataset comparison across studies.

🎉We are happy to announce that our wonderful GEvol SPP will be funded by @dfg.de for another 3 years. Included are 17 great projects all over Germany with amazing people. You want to be part of this fantastic community? Soon you can find new PhD/Post-Doc positions here & on our website. Stay tuned🎉

The DeNoFo format & toolkit for annotating, assessing and comparing the tools and tresholds used in studies of de novo evolved genes is out now in Bioinformatics! Great effort led by @drdomain.bsky.social and Anna Grandchamp! academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

📢 Check out our GEvol inspired Special Issue in JEZ-B: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15525015... 🚨

We are in Bluesky and we are happy to share our two last consortium publications: the DrosEU expanded DEST dataset and a Continent-wide study of phenotypic differentiation among European #Drosophila melanogaster populations (1/7)

The next Protein Structure Evolution Seminar will be given by Stephen Fried (JHU): Title: “Who Cares About Protein Refolding Anyway?: Why Some Microbes Do and Others Don’t” Date: October 14th, 5 pm CET Registration link: tinyurl.com/prose-seminar2

New Paper Alert! Our group member Matthew Merski published a paper about new potential therapeutic leads against the parasite Trypanosoma brucei, causing the African Sleeping sickness. They used molecular docking on known, approved (FDA) drugs to find (1/2) journals.plos.org/plosntds/art...

We had a great time at the Long Night of Insects at the LWL Museum of Natural History in Münster! From watching a cockroach race to exploring and ant farm and info booths there was much to discover. Marie even joined the science slam. What a great way to wrap up our @gevol.bsky.social meeting!🐜✨🪰🪳

Many thanks to all GEvol members for a truly wonderful annual meeting. It was really great to catch up with you all again.

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. 🧬🪰🐜

Lots of inspiring talks & posters at our GEvol symposium at #ESEB2025 yesterday! Thanks to everyone who presented, especially our invited speakers @ahuylmans.bsky.social & @rmwaterhouse.bsky.social. From GEvol, Marie Lebherz, Elisa Israel and Barbara Feldmeyer gave talks about their work. (1/2)

Erich travelled to Marseilles this week and visited former postdocs, now PIs, Anna Grandchamp and Nicolas Terrapon. Great to catch up with both of them! ☀️

A night full of fun, science and insects: We invite you to join our “Lange Nacht der Insekten” on Sept. 5th, 6pm until midnight, at LWL Museum of Natural History in Münster. Bring your family and friends and explore an ant farm, watch a science slam and visit the planetarium! Entrance is free.

We are proud of our master student Brenda who did a research module at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) in Tokyo, working on enzymatic nucleotide phosphorylation focusing on the PPK2 Class III enzyme MAN (1/2).

Excited for the upcoming @gevol.bsky.social symposium at @eseb2025.bsky.social ! ☀️Marie give a talk there, while Erich will give two talks at symposium 46 on synthetic biology, evolution, and the origin of life and symposium 25 on gene content across genomes. Hope to see you there! 🙌

Looking to detect newly expressed ORFs (neORFs) in your transcriptomes? Check out the DESwoMAN preprint, authored by former group/ @gevol.bsky.social member Anna Grandchamp, alongside Marie and Elias.

We also just posted to @biorxiv-genetic.bsky.social a new manuscript led by our superb staff scientist Dr. Prajal Patel in collaboration with @lacholt.bsky.social from @bornberglab.bsky.social. We explored the functionality of orphan gene orthologs in D. melanogaster. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

📢Last Chance: @eseb2025.bsky.social in Barcelona🏖️-->Abstract submission deadline Mai 5th. Please submit a abstract to our symposium #29 Genomic Basis of evolutionary Innovation eseb2025.com/list-of-symp.... With our invited speaker @rmwaterhouse.bsky.social and @ahuylmans.bsky.social.

Excited to announce the EMBO Conference: Molecular Biology of Archaea (MBoA) 2026! Join us in Cambridge, UK, from 6–10 July 2026 for the only international meeting dedicated entirely to Archaea.

New Paper Alert! Together with the Parsch lab, we investigated the expression of neORFs (newly evolved expressed open reading frames, identified in a previous study) in Drosophila populations using publicly available RNA-seq data. (1/2) doi.org/10.1002/jez....

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... why are protein fitness landscapes often very rugged and what does this mean for evolution and engineering? We have been interested in this for a while - in this paper (led by Matt Spence) we look at it quantitatively using eg spectral graph theory.

biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Here’s a paper that was many years in the making. The idea that the climate can affect the thermodynamic mechanism of binding due to the temperature dependence of the entropy term is interesting- we see gradual shift in binding mode along evo trajectory…

Gemma Solomon and I are looking for a postdoc to work across the two groups on modelling biological systems with a view to applications for quantum computing More details about the project including how to apply in the link below. Deadline April 9 2025 candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

Check out DeNoFo Toolkit to annotate, convert and compare the methodology used in studies on de novo emerged genes! @drdomain.bsky.social @margaubel.bsky.social @lacholt.bsky.social and more!

DeNoFo: a file format and toolkit for standardised, comparable de novo gene annotation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.31.644673v1

Check out the recent "Genetics" paper by our Gevol members Pete Czuppon and Daniel Omole: "Maintenance of long-term transposable element activity through regulation by nonautonomous elements" doi.org/10.1093/gene...

The MIMIC lab is hiring a Postdoctoral Research Associate to join my team at @Cambridge_Uni! Exploration and engineering DNA-mimicking proteins (wet-lab position.) 🧬 Details: www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/50652/ Please get in touch / circulate !

We are very proud that we can already present some of the publications resulting from Gevol. Check out the recent paper by Gevol member @Katja Nowick: Regulatory networks of KRAB zinc finger genes and TE changed during human brain evolution and disease. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

New work out in collaboration with Tim, his post says it all! Feedback more than welcome.

Marie, Sarah, Bharat and Lars (@lacholt.bsky.social) presented their research last week at the Münster Evolution Meeting 2025!

Ever heard of the Red Queen hypothesis? It's an evolutionary hypothesis that states species must constantly evolve to adapt to their environment. Like the Red Queen tells Alice in Lewis Carol's Through the Looking-Glass: "it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place". 🧵1/9 #ISRVT25

GeVol is now on BlueSky! Please join as at @eseb2025.bsky.social this year!

We have symposium 29 at the @eseb2025.bsky.social this year. We are looking forward to your abstracts.

Join us for our inaugural #ProSE Seminar, launching a monthly series on Protein Structure Evolution! Speaker: Andrei Lupas (MPI for Biology) Topic: “Highly repetitive genomic ORFs: a source of new fibrous proteins?” When: Feb 11, 3PM GMT, 4PM CET Link: t.co/x5qrQJr4G1

Join the ProSE Seminar Series! A monthly discussion on the #Evolution of #ProteinStructure 🧪 Next up: Andrei Lupas “Highly repetitive genomic ORFs: a source of new fibrous proteins?” 11th February | 3 PM GMT 🔗 Register here: tinyurl.com/prose-seminar1

Great collaborations in Prague! 🇨🇿✨ Group photo from our VW Consortia meeting with members of @ivarssonlab.bsky.social, Klara Hlouchova, and Florian Hollfelder group.

Thrilled to share that Lars Eicholt from our group has received the Faculty’s Best Dissertation Award this year! 🎉👏 Huge congratulations on this well-deserved recognition!