UBC is hiring elite senior faculty for the generously funded Canada Impact+ Research Chairs Program. Requires recruitment from outside Canada, but welcomes Canadians abroad to come home. Expressions of interest due 15 January. research.ubc.ca/federal-rese...

Just a few days left to apply to the PhD position in our group. It focuses on selfish genes in #fungi and how they might affect the spread of giant #TEs called Starships.

I wrote about the bizarre case of Herasight, the embryo selection company going all in on eugenics.

I posted a long reply to Freddie deBoer's comment on my piece about intelligence with Dan Willingham @dtwuva.bsky.social. substack.com/profile/1707...

just say NO to emails

Anyone looking for roommates for #Fungal26 in Asilomar? I will participate and I am looking for someone to share a room for the week! I'm a female PhD student, looking to share a room with another female. Please DM me if you'd like to team up with me 😄 Reposts appreciated!

Happy to have played a part in this one! This method (air sampling + selective media) is very powerful, and can reveal a lot of fungal ecology.

Louse Glass presented some of this work a few years ago, great to see it out. I still don't completely understand how the barcoding enrichment works though. Might be a very powerful tool??? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My own institution (WUR) will also cut access to WoS this year. Hopefully a sign of good changes in the system!

From January 1st 2026, the CNRS will cut access to one of the largest commercial bibliometric databases, Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science, along with the Core Collection and Journal Citation Reports.

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

I named my fists AUG and UGA because one starts it and the other finishes it.

Hard choices for preprint servers. bioRxiv has always declined reviews/hypotheses b/c of concern about signal:noise and a wish to avoid subjective judgments. AI slop makes screening certain content similarly challenging so other servers are adopting new restrictions. Two thoughts... 1/3

The University of Nottingham's Ono lab seeks a postdoc in Mating and Gene Flow in *Candida albicans*. Candidates must have a relevant PhD and experience in microbiology. Apply by Dec 1, 2025: https://jobs.nottingham.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?id=53421&forced=2 #postdoc

"Postdoc in the job market"

We are phasing out the terms “extant” and “extinct” from our exhibits and will now refer to species as either “Darwinners" or “Darlosers.”

Congratulations to Joe Felsenstein on being awarded the 2026 Mendel Medal!

TEs aren’t just genomic parasites, they’re also engines of genomic novelty. Our new study with ~2,000 Z. tritici genomes shows repeated TE mobilization waves during global expansion. With @danielcroll.bsky.social & @guidopuccetti.bsky.social 🧬 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #TEworldwide

An empirical approach to evaluating the prevalence of long-lived balancing selection in humans--and important limitations. Work by @hannahmm.bsky.social

For anyone else whose Mac Outlook 365 has started making regular, massive faux pas through Autocorrect recently: Start typing new email > Edit > Spelling and Grammar > uncheck 'Correct Spelling Automatically'. Literally just called a new collaborator Baby because of this ... 🙄

So, maybe some of you have seen this new work on Neurospora nuclei. I have some words about it, as a comment on the preprint. Short version: The long history of Neurospora shows mutation and transformation experiments are not consistent with this result. disq.us/t/4xk0nij

Fungal Friends - Some of you may have seen the recent preprint on chromosomes in Neurospora nuclei. I have something to say about that, but waiting while bioRxiv moderates the comment

"i asked grok" "i asked chatgpt" yeah well i asked carl sagan and he said the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge 🧪

My reviewing style has changed over time. Rather than litigate every little thing, and pushing my own ideas, I focus only on 2 things: (1) Are the claims interesting/important? (2) Does the evidence support the claims? Most of my reviews these days are short and focused.

Interesting story in this preprint. A male infant was diagnosed with Fanconi anemia due to an X-linked frameshift mutation. Three years later, his hematopoiesis became normal (without intervention). How? www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

New research in #GENETICS suggests accessory chromosomes in #fungi #fusarium might be maintained because of Spok genes and not because of their beneficial effects on virulence. Learn more about this work from @fungage-lab.bsky.social and colleagues: buff.ly/R2CRa3O

While there may be "pay to publish" and "predatory" journals, the fact that an editor does not agree with the position of any given peer reviewer is not evidence of this. Peer review is merely advisory, it is not decision making. Confusion over this leads to some very bad reviewer practices.

Our paper was included in the Collection "Microbial Genomics of Eukaryotes" from the @microbiologysociety.org 🧬 😁 #genomics #longreadsequencing www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/micr...

Proud of the latest edition of my free intro biostats book. gitrepo: github.com/ybrandvain/b... book: ybrandvain.github.io/biostats/ Not complete but at a good point to take a break, and I think its quite usable dm me with comments , ideas etc

📣 I’m excited to share two open positions in my lab @leibniz-hki.de. For this interdisciplinary project with @luziagyr.bsky.social, I’m seeking (1) an enthusiastic PhD student interested in fungal natural product research and genetic engineering, as well as (2) a technical assistant 👇🏻

Probably unpopular opinion: I don’t think we need conservation efforts focused on microbes. Focus on the environments. (The microbes and their pathways will always be fine…loss of microbes is a consequence of environmental degradation/loss and not a driver of it)

it's real support from actual racists

Congrats to the group's first PhD student, the newly minted Dr. Brassington!! Phillip relocated back to Oceania in the period between submitting his dissertation and his oral defense, so we had to make do with a virtual defense, but I am still incredibly proud of him.

Very excited to see the final version of our kingdom-scale fungal genome defense manuscript out in @plosbiology.org ! This work has been a major project of @tbadet.bsky.social during his time in our lab. We hope to stimulate much more exciting work on fungal TEs. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

You gently massage the data, cheekily omitting that one participant lingering teasingly beneath the exclusion cutoff. Then a final flourish, as you add the covariate you're almost ashamed to justify. You feel — you 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 — it's wrong, and it's exhilarating. ...p = .049.

Want to understand how entire fungal chromosomes can be horizontally transferred? Join us to unravel the mechanism/consequences of horizontal chromosome transfer in a fungal pathogen as part of an ERC-funded project. Postdoc/PhD positions available. fungal-evolutionary-genetics.de/open-positio...

Editorial Manager account created

We roughly set up the tree today to get an idea on how it will look. Will get some tiny wire lights instead of these big bulky ones. Attached some red belted conks to give a mushroom/nature vibe lol. It will serve as our Christmas tree too. It's going to be a long winter I believe. My poor hubby 😂

Ooh, this looks interesting!

If you saw my talk on the population structure of #Aspergillus flavus at Fungal Genetics in 2024, you might have heard someone ask "how does Aspergillus oryzae fit into the picture?" If so, you heard my answer was "wait and see--we're working on this exact topic" Well, the wait is over! Preprint ⬇️

New pre-print from our group showing remarkable synchrony of proliferative growth and regulated cell death during plant infection- each conidial cell has a different fate - by the rice blast fungus. Led by Alice Eseola with @osesmir.bsky.social Lauren Ryder @danmaclean.bsky.social and Martin Egan

Ink paintings of mitosis in drosophila embryos were a little too niche for the art festival crowd, but I know my Blooskies will love them #sciart 🧪🪰 www.etsy.com/shop/artolog...

1st desk rejection ! I am very proud of this paper and will persist nevertheless, Wish me luck (and share the paper widely ! Yes, I am doing shameless self-promotion) ! 💪

And look at this graphic abstract….. 😱🤯

Video: a Japanese scientist was attacked by flies while giving the acceptance speech for his Ig Nobel Prize-winning research paper that proved painting Zebra-like stripes on cows led to a decrease in biting fly attacks.

"You're in charge of the autoclave"

Reviewers asking for additional experiments