My 1999 self would weep at how totally broken the internet has become. AI slop, social media walled gardens that rot the brain, surveillance pricing and advertising, every single goddamn website has an endless cloudflare captcha loop before you get to read anything. Burn it all down.

🧬 New research from the Burga lab! We took a closer look at a rogue selfish protein and caught evolution in the act of turning something old into something radically new 💡 (a.k.a. neofunctionalization) @imbavienna.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Curious? Here’s a breakdown:

#Paper Our new study on #Asgard archaea is out in Nature Communications. We find a distinctive evolutionary pattern: widespread #HGT, but genome expansion mainly through gene duplication. An interesting window into the origins of #eukaryotic complexity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I’m re-reading Eugene Koonin’s The Logic of Chance, and it might be one of the most important books I’ve ever read. I hadn’t fully realized it before, but for me it feels like a necessary companion to The Selfish Gene - my favorite biology book.

Now out @natbiotech.nature.com ! Do lncRNAs commonly bind 1000s of genomic sites? Maybe they do, but the dozens of studies that report genomic binding maps of lncRNAs are deeply flawed, with probes binding suprious DNA sites rather than RNA-bound ones.

obsessed with this US department of agriculture zine about snail farming from 1986 openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/c...

I am disgusted that Danske Bank has decided to terminate the account of Stoparmy, a Russian non-profit working to help end military conscription.

I'm super happy to finally see the paper published ! Check out the full story here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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...

of many projects Craig Venter led, of personal significance was the fly genome, a unique and i think unexpected collaboration of his company Celera Genomics and the BDGP, led by my pd advisor Gerry Rubin. the power of a shotgun sequenced metazoan, benchmarked to a physical map, transformed genomics.

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.

30 years ago, the yeast genome was completed by an international team of scientists. Since then, S.cerevisiae has become a key model for understanding conserved biological processes and driving discoveries. Explore the annotated Baker’s yeast R64-1-1 genome in @ensembl.org @yeastgenome.bsky.social

All dogma dispute aside, this is the first time I hear about an enzyme that builds a dna sequence (AC repeats) without a nucleic acid template. Fantastic work!

Very intense queen bumblebee migration at Rosenvold, Vejle Fjord, Denmark today. The bees migrated into the wind towards SW along the coastline, many crossing the fjord. Intensity across a 100 meter front estimated to 5-10 individuals per second. @thijsfijen.bsky.social

I had an amazing time at #DrosEU2026 in beautiful Montpelier 🇫🇷 this week! Met wonderful people, shared exciting ideas, saw brilliant research from all the participants🔥 Huge thanks to the organizers!

Very upsetting to hear the sad news of Greg Hannon’s passing. I always enjoyed our far too few conversations we had over the years. He had an interesting and insightful perspective on any science being discussed. He will be missed. www.cruk.cam.ac.uk/news/in-memo...

PostDoc position available! (links in post below) Feel free to share!

In Drosophila, a heterochromatin protein (HP2) must transcribe AAGAG satellite DNA before sperm packaging. Without it, Y-bearing spermatids die more than X-bearing ones, producing sex-ratio meiotic drive. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.10.632443

Male octopuses use a specialized arm that acts as both a sensory and reproductive organ to navigate the female’s mantle, locate oviducts, and transfer sperm. These findings reveal how sensory systems shape reproductive behavior and drive speciation. Learn more in Science: https://scim.ag/4dYMtFq

The variety of German bees before the Industrial Revolution (187, top) vs after the introduction of pesticides (43, bottom), DHM

📣📣📣 A post-doc opportunity not to be missed in an ATIP-Avenir funded lab in the @i2bcparissaclay.bsky.social (and our neighbor 🪰🔬🧬)! Heterochromatin, spermatogenesis, meiotic drive and Drosophila, with @cecilecourret.bsky.social. Apply before the position fills!

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the first author, Zooey Deschanel as the editor, meet the (500) days of suffer🥀

If you love working with Drosophila and you’re looking for a PhD in a great, supportive environment with an exciting project, this is your chance💫

🚀🚀🚀

Time to share some data that might get buried in the supplement of our recent paper here rdcu.be/e91Kj Here you can see how cells intercalate in a coordinated fashion. They move from a double rowed organisation to a single row stalk. 🧵

Batch-22

Join us in Heidelberg for your PhD! If you are excited about CRISPR genome engineering and would like to develop and apply new methods to investigate Wnt signaling in different model systems, than this project is for you. More info here: my-hbigs.uni-heidelberg.de/site/index.p... 🧪🧬🔬

Surprisingly, a very good analogy😁

Want to know how histone marks regulate your favorite gene? Go single molecule with ChromSMF: integrated measure of chromatin accessibility and histone marks + DNA methylation, TF footprints and genotype for free! Very proud of @mpalamin.bsky.social ! @embl.org

Excited to share my PhD work! The question: How is genome organization established? Here, we developed a low-input Micro-C method, Pico-C, and used it to map chromatin architecture across early stages of fly development. Here’s a quick Blue-torial 🙂 (1/n) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🔬 Recruiting a Postdoc!!!! I’m looking for a motivated postdoc to join my lab and work on characterizing the role of a heterochromatin protein involved in a sex-ratio meiotic drive system in Drosophila. If you know someone who might be interested, please share widely!

Postdoc positions available in my lab in Aarhus, Denmark on 'Mammalian Nuclear RNA Production and Turnover Systems'. Please get in touch for further information or simply apply here: mbg.au.dk/en/news-and-...

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...

"Nobody will care about your work about sugar metabolism and transporters in Neurospora crassa" Nobody can predict what can happen with your work. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#Drosophila calling. Delighted to share our new collection of ShineGAL4 drivers for CNS, FB, muscles, enterocytes, oenocytes and MTs made by @vgirard.bsky.social, @sebsorge.bsky.social and colleagues @crick.ac.uk. All at Bloomington @bdsc.bsky.social @dev-journal.bsky.social tinyurl.com/4jpw9jd6

You still have 3 days to apply to the postdoc positions available in my lab 😀 🔬Come and work with us 🔬

Not something you see in textbooks very often: tripolar mitosis.

This is a beautiful case of how real science happens & serious scientists work. Kudos to both set of authors: “This has been a humbling experience, but one that speaks to the self-correcting nature of the scientific endeavor.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

One protein. One pathway. A whole germline fate. New paper from my postdoc @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social out in PNAS: Germline fate determination by a single ARGONAUTE protein in Ectocarpus www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I'm sorry

I am very happy (and a bit scared) to present to you what we have been working on over the last 4 years. This manuscript is exactly what I dreamt of when I started the lab and I could not be happier and prouder of the outcome!

Ok, it's time to spill some tea🫖

It’s out! Using cryo-ET in Dicty cells, we take a fresh in situ look at vaults. Surprisingly, we uncover vaults associated with ER and NE membranes, and find that many vaults enclose ribosomes in defined orientations, opening new avenues to their cellular function! www.biorxiv.org/lookup/conte...

Make a Bond movie academic The World Is Not Enough: Increased frequency of microplastic clusters detection among Low Earth Orbit debris

Balanced polymorphism in a floral transcription factor underlies an ancient rhythm of daily sex alternation in avocado https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.22.695989v1

RepeatMasker 4.2.3 released! Fixes a sensitivity issue affecting staged searches in Rodentia species and adds support for BGZIP input files without in-place decompression. More details www.repeatmasker.org

RNA decay via the nuclear exosome is essential for piwi-mediated transposon silencing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.16.694471v1

Can one map the genome-wide binding (1) and its protein partners (2) simultaneously from the same sample? Yes, one can. with CUT&ID ✂️🪪 Spearheaded — singlehandedly — by @annanordin.bsky.social No need of transgenesis, cloning and overexpression. Check it out, it's fast and its works.

The first paper of my PhD is now available as a preprint! 🎉 Transposable elements (TEs) don't just jump within fungal genomes, they also move extensively between species. In this study, we screened over 1,300 fungal genomes and found a conservative estimate of 5,500+ horizontal transfer events.