Our paper is now out in Nature: “Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres” www.nature.com/articles/s41... A short thread on how retrotransposons helped give rise to yeast point centromeres. 1/14

🚨📢📄 Article in press in Genome Biology doi.org/10.1186/s130... We introduce panREPET, a reference-free pipeline to detect shared transposable element (TE) insertions across pangenomes and retrace their evolutionary dynamics #TEsky 🧵👇

We were all very sad to learn the death of Pierre Capy. Pierre was a professor at University Paris Saclay, in the 1990s, he started a group working on the evolutionary genomics of transposable elements; this group is still very active today. He was a great teacher, mentor, and colleague.

How does the piRNA pathway solve the self vs. non-self problem? 🧬 Since piRNAs come from single-stranded RNA, how does the cell choose the right ones? For years, "piRNA clusters" were seen as THE privileged source. But are they really special and earmarked for biogenesis? (1/19)

Looking for a postdoc to build my new lab at TGen (Phoenix, AZ) focused on pangenome methods for cancer and complex disease. Full stack — from pangenome assembly and compression to association studies and somatic variant discovery. Reach out if interested! guarracinolab.github.io#join

Crushed to hear of Mark Batzer’s passing. He was the Boyd Professor at Louisiana State University. His influential research revealed how mobile elements shape the genomes of humans & other mammals. Mark’s personality, generosity & positivity were larger than life. He lifted everyone up. HUGE loss 💔

🍄Transposon traffic in the mycocosmos🍄 Fascinating work reveals extensive horizontal TE transfer across fungi (@jromeijn.bsky.social, Iñigo Bañales & @mfseidl.bsky.social; doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...). I wrote a Dispatch to prime non-specialists,check it out here: doi.org/10.1016/j.cu.... #TEworldwide

Hey, good folks of #TEsky— Looking for good recent review, suitable for undergrads, of the fnxns of transposable elements in the genome, for class session on the nonlinear, highly regulated, 4D nucleome. Suggestions welcome! (I'm the author of the "other book" on Barbara McClintock) TIA!

very sad news. Peer Bork was one of the leaders of our field, a wonderful scientist, and he's much too young to be gone. www.embl.org/news/embl-an...

We are excited to invite abstract submissions for talks and posters for the 2026 Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases meeting at Virginia Tech (June 2-4). Abstract submissions should be made by February 3, 2026 for consideration, using the google form here: cpe.vt.edu/eeid2026/abs...

Hivemind: has anyone had a response from #NCBI about submissions started prior to the government shutdown?

Hivemind: has anyone had a response from #NCBI about submissions started prior to the government shutdown?

I have created a bot account. This bot will receive information about newly uploaded #Drosophila papers from pubmed and will automatically post every hour. If you find any bugs, please let me know! @fly-broadcast.bsky.social

Congratulations to Richard Durbin on being awarded our Genetics Society Medal!

💡 Novel work supported by HPRC members highlights Locityper, a tool bringing accurate genotyping to some of the most challenging regions of the human genome. Fast and precise, it outperforms current pipelines and scales to biobank-sized cohorts. More at: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thrilled to share our latest review! T2T assemblies are reshaping how we study genomic diversity. Pangenomes unlock structural variants, gene presence-absence, and genotype-phenotype relationship, across humans, plants, animals, and fungi. www.cell.com/cell-genomic...

#Wolbachia has puzzled scientists with its power to rewire insect reproduction. What if I tell you that we found one of the keys Wolbachia use to rewire its host AND a small molecule inhibitor uses this key to mimic what this microbe has mastered for millions of years. www.cell.com/cell-reports...

If you're interested in using pangenome graphs for comparative genomics, check out my webinar, part of EMBL-EBI's "Concepts, methods, and resources in pangenomics" series, available on-demand: www.ebi.ac.uk/training/eve...

Yesterday, Nina Marthe, our wonderful PhD student with Matthias Zytnicky, resubmit our tool GrAnnoT, for pangenome variation graph annotation! @ird-fr.bsky.social @inrae-france.bsky.social @peercommunityin.bsky.social #pangenomics 💻 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My former mentor, colleague, and friend Hamilton Smith passed away this week. He was a giant in science, a Nobel Laureate, but also one of the nicest people you could ever meet. He will be missed by many. www.jcvi.org/media-center...

We @uga_genetics are hiring a TT assistant professor in Human Genetics to investigate how genetic makeup influences an individual’s risks for diseases or responses to drugs and therapies. All research approaches will be considered. Please RT. ugajobsearch.com/postings/456597

When transposons jump, genomes diverge - even in cultured cells. I am happy to share our new preprint: a chromosome-scale genome assembly for Drosophila OSC cells, one of the key model systems in the piRNA field, especially for nuclear piRNA biology. 🧬🧵 (1/12)

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]

Come be our head of bioinformatics at @mrc-lms.bsky.social ! Our bioinformatics team are closely involved with lots of interesting science and we love working with them. Topics inc. development, cancer, metabolism, aging, TEs (my favourite of course 😜) #TEsky lms.mrc.ac.uk/work/vacanci...

Kicked off a series on #Drosophila TE discovery and naming. The first post covers elements that predate the term "mobile element", and more. artemilin.dev/posts/te_nam...

I share this picture of a printed out genome every once in while. It just occurred to me: it's got to be cheaper to acquire a finished copy of your genome (high accuracy, phased, SV-resolved) than to print it as a collection of bound books. (back-of-envelope checks out - anyone done the math?)

We are all super happy and proud to see our work on the function and evolution of the #cephalic #furrow published in @nature.com. Let me say a few things about the background and history of this work on the #Evolution_of_Morphogenesis (1/12)

Pangene, an innovative computational tool, maps gene orientation, order & copy-number changes across genomes. Applied to the human pangenome, it reveals both known variation & complex haplotypes. Read more: academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

An interesting editorial by @judithmank.bsky.social, with thoughts on the use and misuse of AI in academic publishing at @evolletters.bsky.social (and elsewhere).

~ 5 and 1/2 years ago, my then postdoc advisor @plantevolution.bsky.social gave me complete freedom to assemble a team and interrogate NLR diversity in pangenomic context. We used @pacbio.bsky.social CCS and Iso-Seq, to annotate genomes with pathogen-challenged transcriptome. We then manually.....

Very impressive demonstration of the rise of China as a scientific superpower in crop research! All papers on #crop genetics and genomics in the latest issue of Nature Genetics were produced by scientists working at Chinese research institutes. TOC: www.nature.com/ng/volumes/5...

New Paper! In 2019, my first dissertation chapter revealed complicated polyploidies in the cotton family (Malvaceae) but we lacked the tools and genomes to truly understand it. Now with better genomes and improved methods, it's much more complicated than we thought. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“In the heart of Illinois, while researching wildlife disease, I made a discovery that stunned me: More than half of the raccoons I sampled were infected with Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite that causes Chagas’ disease… It’s here, in the United States, spreading silently in wildlife.”

Looking forward to this new installment of the Woods Hole Mobile DNA Meeting! Fantastic program, laid-back atmosphere, and gorgeous setting at the Marine Biological Laboratory ⛵️🪼🐋 Abstract submission closes Aug 7 but registration after that date is possible. www.eventsquid.com/event.cfm?ev...

Postdoc position opening in my group! Research projects: pangenomes for diverse organisms, genome evolution, biocomputing, language models. Please reach out if interested!

My colleague David Garfinkel is looking for a postdoc to join our NIH-funded project on the “Evolution of Retrotransposon Control Mechanisms” More info here: reporter.nih.gov/search/u7dKr.... The official job listing can be found here: www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/437... Please repost! #TEsky

Pls. share widely Calling all transposon fans & lovers of genetic innovation MOBILE GENOME welcomes you in Heidelberg, Nov. 4–7 2025 → Vibrant & friendly community → Cutting-edge talks from mechanisms to physiology → Plenty of surprises (TEs never stop innovating) submit abstract by July 29

My colleague David Garfinkel is looking for a postdoc to join our NIH-funded project on the “Evolution of Retrotransposon Control Mechanisms” More info here: reporter.nih.gov/search/u7dKr.... The official job listing can be found here: www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/437... Please repost! #TEsky

🦟 Bioinformatics Research Scientist position open in my lab in Nice (FR) to study Aedes mosquito retrotransposons & their interactions with arboviruses collab w/ @salehlabparis.bsky.social & @lambrechtslab.bsky.social Apply: euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/359830 Please boost! #ArboRetro #Bioinformatics

@brunolemaitre.bsky.social once told me not to trust big claims from papers with no follow-up work. People have likely tried and failed to replicate, but not published negative results. One of the best pieces of scientific advice I’ve ever received.

The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field? That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience A 🧵 1/n

So what are you to do when you find that some random website like @dailyimagesde, or @dailypicturesn, or @DailyFramesnet is infringing on your copyrights? 8/n

Update! I challenged @dailyimagesde’s spurious infringement claim with their domain registrar and won. I can’t prove @colossal, @BenLamm, or anyone else was responsible for this obvious harassment. But let's use this opportunity to learn how to seize back our copyrights. 1/n

For the next @jobim2025.bsky.social we will have posters and presentations from our various resources to work with #pangenome #graphs: annotation, manipulation, indexing, diversity and so on... Indeed we have plenty of them, and they are all gathered in one suite: the GraSuite !

The SMBE Lifetime Contribution Award winner is Chung-I Wu. ⭐ 2025 Winners: members.smbe.org/news/Details... 📄 Information on the Faculty Awards: www.smbe.org/faculty-awards

Seeing this make the rounds, thought I would bring back this blog post (remember those?) on these matters from back in the day from Casey Bergman @caseybergman.bsky.social‬ : caseybergman.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/t...