How can we organize current theoretical approaches for developmental biology - from information to dynamical systems & GRNs - into a common framework? We propose to think along Marr's 3 levels: computational problem, algorithm, implementation Check out our review: arxiv.org/abs/2510.24536

What is the origin of diversity in allometric laws scaling across species? Check our new paper led by Andrea Tabi where we propose a new theory of metabolic scaling grounded in thermodynamics and stochastic fluctuations at the cellular level. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 Come join us @sheffielduni.bsky.social for a PhD on the evolution and development of feathers and flight! 🐣🔬 This project is supervised by @matt-towers.bsky.social & @alexgfletcher.bsky.social, and I'm excited to be involved as a project advisor. Please share! www.findaphd.com/phds/project... 🧪

A personal favorite, long time in the making. Adelina and David (@dduneau.bsky.social) were instrumental in getting this done. doi.org/10.1186/s129...

One of the most exciting works of my career, years in the making. We used high-throughput precision genome editing to test the fitness effects of thousands of natural variants. Our findings challenge the long-held assumption that common variants are inconsequential. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Polygenic risk scores obtained for a single individual over a range of commercially available tests. FFS

I’m excited to announce the launch of my lab at EPFL in Jan 2026 🎉. We’ll combine evolution & synthetic biology to study and (re)engineer bacterial communication. I’m recruiting PhD students to start in the first semester of 2026. Apply via EPFL PhD programs by Nov 1 drive.google.com/file/d/1cm-t...

New review out! With students in my lab, we explore how population size shapes speciation—from drift in small populations to selection in large ones. Do small or large populations speciate faster? The answer is more nuanced than you might think. esj-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Interpretable gene network inference with nonlinear causality https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.28.678927v1

I'm excited to share with you all a conference I'm planning Oct. 10-12: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin. It will be hybrid in Toronto and on zoom, so please join us however you can! Register for zoom link here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...

Now out in @nature.com: Our study discovering a neural circuit in Drosophila that predictively inhibits proprioceptor axons during voluntary leg movements, such as walking and grooming. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

⏳ Only 2 weeks left to apply to our PhD in evolutionary prediction!

(1/14) I’m happy and proud to introduce: SpinePy – a framework to detect the "spine" of gastruloids and measure biological and physical signals in a local dynamic 3D coordinate system. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Parallel but distinct adaptive routes in the budding and fission yeasts after 10,000 generations of experimental evolution https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.11.675703v1

A central finding is that, even if we could measure pairwise interactions up to a certain precision, strong indirect effects can make our efforts useless: at high collectivity, pairwise interactions no longer inform about community coexistence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Mutations in the circadian cycle drive adaptive plasticity in cyanobacteria in #PNAS from Raúl Fernández-López with @pabnik.bsky.social @amazeld.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

DeepAtlas: a tool for effective manifold learning https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.26.672474v1

Can a virus help uncover Turing patterns in nature? In this @commsbio.nature.com paper, researchers show how the tulip breaking virus triggers the expression of a pigment that can display a broad range of (observable) stripe patterns @philipcball.bsky.social biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨New PhD research published in PNAS!🚨 Combining fossils and lab experiments, we found that simple changes in tooth #development explain 6 million years of molar #evolution in #voles 🐭🦷 Shoutout to my coauthors @cnrs.fr @helsinki.fi @gtk-fi.bsky.social! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #FossilFriday

🚨 We're hiring! PhD position in Evolutionary Systems Biology at Stockholm University & SciLifeLab 🎓 Focus: evolution, development, computational & mathematical modeling, prediction 📍 Stockholm, Sweden 🕒 4 years, fully-funded 🔍 Details: su.varbi.com/en/what:job/... Please share!

! Evolution of developmental bias explains divergent patterns of phenotypic evolution in two nematode clades www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Developmental bias explains the evolutionary trend towards simple leaf shapes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.17.670617v1

How do regulatory genes control alternative life histories? We have an open PhD position to answer this question using functional genomics in Atlantic salmon. Apply by October 15th through www.jobbnorge.no/en/available... Please share widely! 🧬🦑🖥️

What is emergence? This is one of the most central ingredients of complexity, and a challenging one to formalize. Here's a paper by @seanmcarroll.bsky.social & Achyth Parola that attempts to classify different forms of emergence. @manlius.bsky.social @sfiscience.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15468

Adaptive radiation along ecological and morphological lines of least resistance in Cyprinodon pupfishes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.13.670168v1

Join us on the 26/9 in Lund for a symposium about #evolution #stemcells #development #EvoDevo and #plasticity

Latest on Waddington Landscapes: Computational methods to fit dynamical landscapes directly to single cell data Applied to neural tube patterning shows morphogen-signalling landscapes can be linearly interpolated Connects interpretable landscape models with data www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My first solo author paper is now available in early view at Methods in Ecology and Evolution! I develop a covariance reaction norm (CRN) model for estimating continuous, multivariate, and nonlinear environmental effects on G and P matrices. besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

*PhD position* 🦉 Would you like to do a PhD with Indo-Pacific birds and evolutionary genomics? Join us in Stockholm: <deadline> 05 September 2025, 23:59 PhD student in Evolution of Indo-Pacific birds recruit.visma.com/spa/public/a...

I am really excited to see this article on basic experimental design principles published. Definitely will be mandatory reading for incoming graduate students in my lab. Maggie Wagner who led this article did an amazing job with the illustrations of basic principles www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Constrained variation in the internal architecture of avian wing bones https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.07.669070v1

Our paper benchmarking foundation models for perturbation effect prediction is finally published 🎉🥳🎉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... We show that none of the available* models outperform simple linear baselines. Since the original preprint, we added more methods, metrics, and prettier figures! 🧵

Introducing five concepts from dynamical systems to decode developmental regulatory mechanisms, have a read! @perez-carrasco.bsky.social‬ @roederlab.bsky.social @mpipz.bsky.social This effort started in a morphogenesis meeting @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social‬ in 2023. journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

I am starting a computational lab at LIOS, Riga, Latvia, and going to recruit a few people. Please DM if you are interested in a postdoc or PhD position in my Metabolic Research Group within the TARGETWISE project. I can highly recommend Riga, it is a beautiful city with very good living conditions.

Super excited to share our new study, where we introduce and apply a data-driven modeling approach to predict dynamical regimes of ecosystems at unseen environmental conditions (e.g. beyond a tipping point): www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Our false head work is out! By analysing ~1000 #butterflies, we found many traits at posterior end of hindwings evolved correlatedly, likely forming a trait complex w/adaptive function to dupe predators into thinking these traits together are actual head!! royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Useful perspective incorporating GRNs & gene modules into theory of evolutionary novelty Parker & Pennell emphasise gene modules, not individual genes, as fundamental units of phenotypic evolution Provides a needed evolutionary lens for analysing scRNAseq & cell types www.cell.com/current-biol...

Promising way to learn flow maps directly from sparse and irregular data

Combining model-based and data-driven models: an application to synthetic biology resource competition https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.09.642275v1

Gene regulation, phenotypic memory, and selection in fluctuating environments https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.23.661119v1

🐢 The tortoise head is sculpted by physics and genes! Our new research shows that tortoise head scales form through two distinct processes: 👉 Chemical signaling shapes the sides 👉 Mechanical stress folds the top 🔗 cell.com/iscience/ful... @cellpress.bsky.social @biology-unige.bsky.social

Also, our study, "PMEL is involved in snake #colourpattern transition from blotches to stripes," shows how a #PMEL mutation causes striped patterns in corn #snakes. Excited to see these findings drive trait #diversification! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🐍🧬 #EvoDevo @naturecomms.bsky.social

Great work from Mochulska & Francois developing a generative framework for systematically building Dynamical Landscapes of cell fate decision making using modular dynamical components Important step to interpretable and predictive models of cellular differentiation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

"We cannot have the perfectly predictive model of causal determinism in evolution conjured by Laplace's demon, but modest increases in data can still lead to quantifiably more robust predictions." academic.oup.com/evolut/artic...

Preprint: Lab rat teeth took us (@rwburroughs.bsky.social & co) to unexpected places Developmentally cascading structures do not lose evolutionary potential, but compound developmental instability. #Evolvability & #PhenotypicPlasticity with implications for #Paleontology & #Macroevolution

📣 New review! Dynamical systems and low-dimensional geometric structures in phase space help rationalize how embryos develop form and function, from large datasets. We focus on morphogenesis, cell differentiation, and their interconnection. @alex-plum.bsky.social sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Epigenetic variation can promote adaptation by smoothing rugged fitness landscapes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.06.658353v1

Inferring fitness seascapes from evolutionary histories https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.08.658500v1

Experimental embryology postdoc available in my lab at the @biology.ox.ac.uk @ox.ac.uk working on the evolution of vertebral counts. Reach out if you’re passionate about EvoDevo, enjoy lab work and microscopy and are into or could get into cichlid fishes. Deadline on the 16th June. Please share!

Job in my lab: 3yr postdoc on how and when complexity promotes network stability. Looking for physics, math, or theory folks who use analytical approaches, but there'll be great opportunities for data connections too. docs.google.com/document/d/1...