With most psychedelic drugs, you never know what you're going to get. But this mysterious mushroom from China - without fail - causes users to hallucinate tiny people: crawling up walls, popping out from under furniture and marching under doors. www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Post-Doctoral Opportunity in Evolutionary and Conservation Genomics! If you are curious and passionate about ecology, evolution and the natural world come work with me in the Department of Biology at NYU! More details here! apply.interfolio.com/180051

I literally could not stop myself from inappropriately laughing out loud for real

Does anyone know of a method for testing GO enrichment in the context of the genome structure? For example, I have a highly significant GO category because my significant windows hit a cluster of 8 copies of a gene family. I could do a permutation, but seems like there must be a better way.

Our new @science.org paper is out! Cuckoos and hosts are locked in a coevolutionary arms race over egg mimicry. But how are these egg types inherited, and could this drive speciation? We sequenced hundreds of genomes to find out! doi.org/10.1126/scie... 🧵1/6

This was the product of a decade of work, led by Jochen Wolf @jochenwolflab.bsky.social) and kick-started by @frodefossoy.bsky.social & Bård Stokke, made possible by field teams from dozens of countries! @rytikerttunen.bsky.social @biosulc.bsky.social @btobirds.bsky.social @gregowens.bsky.social

I want to highlight the weirdest neighbourhood in Greater Victoria. In Langford, if you take exit #15 you enter a 6-lane road surrounded by a classic mix of strip malls and big box stores. Nestled of all of this, accessible only through a parking lot, is a small street of 16 single family homes.

Get your CVs updated. Zoology Department, University of Otago is hiring a Lecturer in Evolutionary Ecology! @zoologyotago.bsky.social otago.taleo.net/careersectio...

Excited to see the final version of this paper with @samurscicop.bsky.social and Daniel Matute out in @genomebiolevol.bsky.social! We took a dive into the complicated demographic history of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes and its impact on the distribution of genetic diversity doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...

OK who's ready for some science? Do you like speciation? Genomics? Hybridization? Bioinformatics? Then this is for you: Published today: "The Distribution & Dispersal of Large Haploblocks in a Superspecies" Bonus interest if you like ring species and cute greenish birds: doi.org/10.1111/mec....

Lungfish xkcd.com/3064

With @katiejenike.bsky.social and a bunch more of our fellow k-mer enthusiasts, we put together a manuscript on k-mers in biodiversity genomics. A guide if you will, that covers k-mers from basics to some really funky stuff... genome.cshlp.org/content/35/2...

Does anyone have an insight into why overhead rates are so different between US and Canada? Canadian rates are generally around 25%. Is it that Canada just provides more government base funding so they can accept lower overhead rates?

Excited to see our work on the cover of Current Biology this month! Read about it in the thread below. 🧪🦑🌊

My population isn’t working for QTL mapping. RIL issue.

Excited to announce our work on kelp genomics is now out at Current Biology. Lead by Postdoc extraordinaire Jordan Bemmels, we sequence WGS for 600+ bull and giant kelp across BC and Washington. authors.elsevier.com/a/1kSP93QW8S...

Congrats to @jeffgroh.bsky.social et al on publication of "Ancient structural variants control sex-specific flowering time morphs in walnuts and hickories" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

An intriguing new evolutionary story has just dropped, from my friend and colleague Leif Andersson: a discrete population of large predatory herring in the Baltic Sea, apparently in the process of evolving into a new species. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Genetic ancestry and population structure in the All of Us Research Program cohort https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.21.629909v1 🧬🖥️🧪

OK folks this is my first announcement of a lab publication on Bluesky: Congrats to PhD Candidate Rashika Ranasinghe on today's publication of her paper "Cryptic Hybridization Dynamics in a Three-Way Hybrid Zone of Dinopium Flamebacks on a Tropical Island." Happy holidays! doi.org/10.1002/ece3...

What do GWAS and rare variant burden tests discover, and why? Do these studies find the most IMPORTANT genes? If not, how DO they rank genes? Here we present a surprising result: these studies actually test for SPECIFICITY! A 🧵on what this means... (🧪🧬) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to see this paper out! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our lab is reading Hoffman et al this week in lab meeting. They look at inbreeding depression after an extreme bottleneck in northern elephant seals. 1/

"Before running structure, we applied a HWE filter to our SNP set"

Optimist: the cup is 1/2 full Pessimist: the cup is 1/2 empty Bioinformatician: I'll know how full the cup is as soon as I can figure out my conda environment.

While the experiment suggested by Reviewer 2 would help validate a key finding in the paper, I refer the editor to supplemental figure 5 which shows the degree to which I'm done with this paper (very) and how significantly I want to never look at it again (p <0.05).

Some cute bird time for a stressful day.

UVic Biochemistry and Microbiology is looking to hire a teaching professor. It's a great place to life and work. Please share with colleagues who you think might fit.

Apropos of nothing, grenepipe is very good and solves my lab's SNP calling needs. While there is character building in writing your own shell script, its nice to just get a VCF sometimes. @mexpositoalonso.bsky.social github.com/moiexpositoa...

Housing in Victoria

I too am recruiting graduate students, postdocs, and a lab technician for my group at UChicago, starting fall 2024! We will be doing exciting work to uncover the limits of plant adaptation in changing environments.

Does anyone have a program for getting a species ID from raw reads? I could blast random reads, but it doesn't seem very robust (and always hits goldfish).

Incredibly lucky start on this guess. 🦎 Animal #49 🐔 I figured it out in 3 guesses! 🟩🟩🟩 🔥 1 | Avg. Guesses: 7.2 metazooa.com #metazooa

The worst disappointment is seeing an email invite to department donuts and realizing its at a university you haven't been at for 5 years.

I've been exploring how to identify inversions in genome alignments. It's surprising to me how fast inversions break up visual synteny. Here's a simple simulation starting from perfect synteny and adding 5 random inversions

When you publish a paper where different PIs at first and last author, who pays the publication fee?

My first MSc student just graduated and left the lab. I'm so proud of her and sad to see her go. I didn't realize how tough it is as a PI to see your lab members move on.

Nbd just fishes that can see the color of their own skin from the inside 🧪🦑😱