Bacterial immune proteins have repeatedly evolved to become parts of eukaryotic immunity. But how? Our new preprint uncovers a recent horizontal transfer event & shows how eukaryotes co-opted a toxic bacterial immune protein 🦠🧪🧵 1/

New from my lab: Ancestral sequence reconstruction analysis indicates the furin-cleavage-site insertion in the SARS-CoV-2 spike gene likely interrupted a codon academic.oup.com/ve/article/1...

🧬 New today! 📄Best practices for improving alignment and variant calling on human sex chromosomes 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 @sexchrlab.bsky.social @angela-oill.bsky.social & co

Pregnancy loss is common in humans, and chromosomal abnormalities are the leading cause. Using genetic data from ~140,000 IVF embryos, we show that maternal variation in meiosis genes influences recombination and aneuploidy risk. First authors: @saracarioscia.bsky.social & @aabiddanda.github.io

🚨 PhD opportunity in Strasbourg! 🚨 We’re looking for a motivated PhD student to join the @haploteam within the IMCBio program (PhD-2026-17). 🔗 imcbio-phdprogram.unistra.fr Please spread the word or contact me if you’re interested!

Come join us in beautiful Britanny, France in May 2026 for a workshop that I am organizing with @lucievirevolte.bsky.social and @psudmant.bsky.social on Rapid host adaptations to infections: sites.google.com/berkeley.edu...

Happy to share the final story from my thesis, demonstrating that the common ancestor of all terrestrial fungi had zymocin-like killer plasmids, a toxin system found in some budding yeasts. Come with me on an all-too-familiar, database dumpster-diving journey (1/10) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

✨ Latest exciting story of the group in @nature.com. Here, we go beyond SNPs and built a species-wide atlas of genetic variants in yeast. With >1,000 near T2T genomes, we show how large genomic variations affect trait diversity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Just imagining research talks in antiquity. EUCLID: …thus, there does not exist a rational number whose square is equal to 2. HIPPOCRATES: [grumbling] I fail to see the clinical relevance of any of this

Final version of our paper out now on how high-throughput methods can be useful for answering everyday “low-throughput” genetic questions!

Now out officially, with the entire kit on @addgene.bsky.social. Great collaboration with @merusadhu.bsky.social, with more to come.

Kamilla Laidlaw, Hatwan Nadir, Chris MacDonald @yorkyeast.bsky.social and team @biologyatyork.bsky.social discover that killer toxin K28 resistance in yeast relies on COG complex-mediated trafficking of Ktd1. journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/... Article: journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

New paper from my lab! We describe our idea that high-throughput pooled experimental methods – typically used to test thousands of hypotheses at once – also have huge potential to help in “everyday” experiments testing one or a few focused hypotheses. Why? Two reasons: doi.org/10.1093/g3jo...