Every year Bionieuws hosts a Darwin Café. This year, they invited philosopher Gerard Jagers op Akkerhuis. What a missed opportunity! His “theory” is philosophical handwaving with no empirical support, while there is so much real evolutionary research out there. www.resource-online.nl/index.php/20...

Fun news! @gcbias.bsky.social and I are teaching a 2-week online population genetics workshop this summer to raise money for the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis. We're trying to gauge interest -- please fill this out if you might be interested! And please share broadly!

journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.... new findings in the ant fungus gardens 🐜🍄

Take me down to the Parallax city where the far moves slow and the near moves quickly

A new extreme of meiotic evolution: ✔️ 𝗻𝗼 crossovers ✔️ 𝗻𝗼 gene conversion ✔️ 𝗻𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗹 meiosis & fertility Sex mimics clonality without becoming asexual, in the holocentric multicellular eukaryote 𝘙𝘩𝘺𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘢 𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘶𝘪𝘴. more about it: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

In reviewing grants and papers lately, as an exp., I have been using LLMs *after* my reviews to see how they stack up. And let me tell you - they're (all) *completely* off the mark. That makes sense if you understand the fundamentals of LLMs, but I'm worried many don't. But, please, don't do this.

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below! Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

OUT NOW! Parasex generates highly recombinant progeny in Candida albicans with increased virulence By Robert Fillinger, Scott Filler, Anna Selmecki, Richard Bennett, Matthew Anderson & colleagues. #microsky @annaselmecki.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🌟 New position announcement! 🍄 I’m happy to share that I’ve started a new position as a Postdoc at @naturalis.bsky.social, within the Understanding Evolution group. In this role, I will be working on the next volume of the Flora Agaricina Neerlandica, focusing on the genus Russula.

⚡️Fully funded #PhD position in my lab at Stockholm University / SciLifeLab! If you’re interested in #lichens, #symbiosis, fungal biology, or meta-omics, please apply. Deadline Feb 1. Read more here: su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

Our eLetter github.com/caseywdunn/s... responding to a recent Science paper was just posted. The paper found more genes with consistent support for sponge-sister than ctenophore-sister. We found several technical issues that, when corrected, reverse the conclusions and recover ctenophore-sister.

A few years ago, through luck and vibes, I managed to produce this blue colored bean variety. This was an early step in trying to answer the question, [paraphrased] "Why isn't blue as common as red in beans, even though they're both anthocyanins and the plant has the genes for both?"

Giving the gift of negative data 🥰 Since I joined @lsajournal.org I have handled several stellar manuscripts that report null results. These papers do very well and reviewers almost always appreciate them! Thanks @rockefeller.edu news team for the article! www.rockefeller.edu/news/38829-t...

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.