How do duplicated receptor genes "find a home" in olfactory circuits? Great study by the Arguello lab shows the re-coding of olfactory channels across species. Neat combination of phylogenetic reconstruction, sc-transcriptomics and more. Check out the pre-print: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/n Check out our new paper, spearheaded by @fborne.bsky.social, just out in PLoS Genetics doi.org/10.1371/jour....

When caterpillars attack, the common bean plant relies on a receptor in its leaves to sound a chemical rallying cry that recruits predatory wasps, a new #ScienceAdvances study finds. https://scim.ag/434rXN5

Marc Feldman and Jessica Riskin with another withering critique of a "sociogenomics" popularization: "...you can’t add or subtract factors that interact, such as genetic and environmental influences. How much of a rainbow’s formation is due to moisture in the air and how much to sunlight?"

Our paper on recurrent independent duplications in the primate amylase locus is now out in Cell Reports! Huge thanks to @petarpajic, @spit-lab.bsky.social and @gokcumenlab.bsky.social for their support. More about the work in the thread below from when we first shared the preprint last August.

"Murmuration over Lanhydrock Park", 2020 by Annie Ovenden, English painter #WomensArt

Closely related species often exhibit distinct morphologies. Kenta Tomihara @pinharanda.bsky.social Takashi Kiuchi @pandolfatto.bsky.social &co uncover the #genetic basis of caudal horn size differences between the #SilkMoth and its wild relative @plosbiology.org 🧪 #evolution plos.io/4b3kwdR

Genome of the Abominable Snowfly uncovers the mysteries of cold tolerance in a winter active insect! New cool (literally) paper in @currentbiology.bsky.social from Marco Gallio, @matthewcapek.bsky.social, @tuthill.bsky.social, myself, and fine colleagues! ⛄ 🦟 authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Thrilled to finally share the magnum opus of my PhD that focuses on the genetic basis of evolutionary change! Specifically, we know we can map the genetic basis of a trait, but can we tell which genes will underlie the trait shift when it evolves? doi.org/10.1101/2025...

My main PhD work @monteirolab.bsky.social is now in @natecoevo.nature.com! We found a Hox gene promoter that helps butterflies🦋adjust their wing eyespots in response to seasonal temperatures🍃🍂, shedding light on the evolutionary origin of phenotypic plasticity. 1/9 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How is functional variation at large-effect loci maintained in natural populations, even as environments change? In a paper led by @mkarag.bsky.social, we tracked known pesticide resistant alleles in outdoor 𝘋. 𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘨𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳 cages & inferred selection and dominance from temporal sequencing data.

"The most transformative technologies, ..., emerged not from goal-directed efforts but from foundational inquiries with no predetermined outcomes." #curiosity-driven_science

So this came online over the weekend: My dive into the "definition" of coevolution is online ahead of publication in @journal-evo.bsky.social! Don’t ask "when is it coevolution?" — ask "how?" doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Preschool teachers provide fewer participation opportunities to working-class students than those from more privileged backgrounds | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Save the date! #PEQG26 June 9-12 2026 in Asilomar, CA. Happens only every 2yrs, but is my favorite conference. Full website coming soon, and registration and abstract submission opens November 14, but I'm allowed to tease that keynotes will be @jnovembre.bsky.social @jennytung.bsky.social and me!

Very excited to see this work in press! I think there is a reason to believe that this is a common means of stabilizing large-effect polymorphisms in general and might be an important reason for why diploidy is so common. news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

How do populations maintain an evolutionary memory? I am happy to share that our work with Dmitri Petrov @petrovadmitri.bsky.social, Paul Schmidt, and colleagues on dominance reversal and stabilization of insecticide resistance in changing environments over time is now published at Nature EE.

August’s Nature Plants cover story shows how we integrated large-scale multiDAP and snRNA data to reveal drivers of cell type identity and evolution in flowering plants. www.nature.com/nplants/volu... We packed a lot into this paper! Here’s a single-cell spin on what we found:

Earlier in summer, there was a gigantic 4-year longitudinal study in France showing that the school environment triggers a gender gap in mathematics. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I was down at Pacific Grove last weekend and a volunteer shared the monarch population is declining.. #pesticides #land_use_change

check out my new article published in @nautil.us on Sewall Wright's famous shifting-balance theory of evolution, told through the lens of his work with guinea pigs! nautil.us/evolution-an...

#Invertefest?! Okay! This one is a personal favorite out of all my bug art.

Just noticed this in last Sunday’s Observer, a week in the life of an Orange-tip as told to Simon Barnes. Brilliant.

Scientists have recently mapped the painted lady butterfly's annual flight from equatorial Africa to northern Europe and back, the world's longest butterfly migration. In Constant Bloom, photographer Lucas Foglia documents the journey.

Inferring Balancing Selection From Genome-Scale Data

For Women's History Month, may we all remember and summon the courage of Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring to inform the world what DDT was doing to the songbirds, raptors,and by extension, us. While battling cancer, she stood her ground against savage attacks by the chemical industry...

The PopGen Vienna Seminar series schedule is ready for the next term (Mar-Jun). It's jam-packed with fantastic speakers in #evolution, #genetics, #genomics, #popgen, and more! Details and streaming link signup can be found on our website www.popgen-vienna.at/news/seminars/

A century of theories of balancing selection www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How is functional variation at large-effect loci maintained in natural populations? Thrilled to share our work showing how beneficial dominance reversal helps fruit flies maintain a resistance polymorphism as selection varies in their environment! A thread 🧵 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...