I learn from my students of the Icelandic Saga map: hours of fun! sagamap.hi.is/is/

Revisiting the Evolution of Lactase Persistence: Insights from South Asian Genomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.05.686799v1

Apropos of nothing in particular, I think it's useful to signal-boost this old paper on "how not to over-interpret ADMIXTURE bar plots". www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Can't believe I'd never heard of Euplotes before today: single-celled organisms who scurry around on little "legs"! Around 50 μm long, so ~1000x smaller than a tardigrade. This one has a kind of horseshoe crab habitus, flattened and with a "carapace". Incredible. youtu.be/uJF30emkWt8?...

The big tech companies are reversing the intellectual and political gains of the Enlightenment and returning us to a New Dark Ages of ignorance, rage and superstition - it's the most important story of our time jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-o...

Something deeply strange happened to the ADMIXTURE run here! The American component, and to some extent the European one, seem to have been co-opted to describe Arab variation. Very little real indigenous American ancestry here, as indicated by e.g. mitochondrial haplogroup counts.

Kristin Tsuo, @genetisaur.bsky.social, & Mark Daly just wrote the best proteomics paper I've read. They convincingly show how smoking and alcohol (aka, the environment) dramatically influences proteomics data. Some 🤯 results 1) proteomics predicts frequency (5a) & quanity (5b) of alcohol consumed

A study led by @zhofmanova.bsky.social @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social used ancient DNA to investigate the spread of Slavic language and culture 1,500 years ago. “This wasn’t a migration of elites, or a few male warriors,” 1 co-author says. “This was the migration of an entire population.” @science.org

Are you interested in doing a PhD in Copenhagen? Interested in studying Neanderthals and Denisovans which live on in our genomes? Than you are more than welcome to apply to join my group starting Jan 2026 :) candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI... Please reach out if you have any questions!

I wrote about gene-gene interactions (epistasis) and the implications for heritability, trait definitions, natural selection, and therapeutic interventions. Biology is clearly full of causal interactions, so why don't we see them in the data? A 🧵:

**Please repost** If you're enjoying Paper Skygest -- our personalized feed of academic content on Bluesky -- we'd appreciate you reposting this! We’ve found that the most effective way for us to reach new users and communities is through users sharing it with their network

High resolution analysis of population structure using rare variants https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.18.665597v1

Even if individuals with recent African ancestry, such as these, were relatively rare in medieval NW Europe, we can probably expect many more such discoveries as increasing numbers of ancient and historical genomes are sequenced. www.science.org/content/arti...

Always good when senior USSR officials lie about independent European scientific research and call for its retraction. Oh wait sorry, I meant US. www.reuters.com/business/hea...

Our study of WGS of all UK biobank participants published in final form rdcu.be/ezAyi

Benchmarking Imputed Low Coverage Genomes in a Human Population Genetics Context onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Characteristics of papers and authors affecting risk of irreproducible results*. Higher risk associated with high-ranked universities, perhaps also dilettante last authors and glam journals. *in Drosophila immunity, according to a mostly subjective, literature-based reproducibility measure.

Sent a cold email in March to a young researcher and entrepreneur warning him that the "short-sleep gene" studies he was basing his work on were bogus. Very relieved that it eventually had the intended result. Shocking amounts of time and resources are still being wasted on candidate gene results.

Our paper @hakonjon.bsky.social (missing other colleagues from Bluesky!), Sequence diversity lost in early pregnancy, was published in Nature (@nature.com) today www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Kári Stefánsson, founder and CEO of deCODE Genetics, the Icelandic company wholly owned by Amgen but operated largely independently, has been fired. www.mbl.is/frettir/innl...

I am recruiting a quantitative/computational postdoc to my group at UCLA. This is a great opportunity to work on foundational theory, methods, and software in statistical genetics. Link to apply: recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF10275. Please repost!

Check out our ancient DNA paper on the maritime Punic civilization! 🦴🧬🌊 We find that their Levantine Phoenician cultural ancestors contributed surprisingly little ancestry to Punic sites in the central and western Mediterranean! (1/4) doi.org/10.1038/s415... #aDNA #PopGen #Punic #Phoenician

I have no idea why this is leading on @theguardian.com website The substance here is 1. Some adults provided written consent for their health data to be shared with researchers for the good of science 2. UK Biobank facilitated this 3. Some researchers are Chinese

Awesome. I guess obtaining residues for 51 proteins (22 usable for phylogenetics) was important being able to place the sample in a finely resolved proteomic phylogeny: two previous papers (see below) indicate that ~10 protein sequences is insufficient to resolve primates/hominins at species level.

FRS3 as a BMI-associated gene, encoding an adaptor protein known to act downstream of BDNF and TrkB, which regulate appetite, food intake, and energy expenditure through unknown signaling pathways @naturecomms.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... #obesity #genetics

Geneticist @maartenlarmuseau.bsky.social tackles a touchy question: How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?

Genetic architecture in Greenland is shaped by demography, structure and selection www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Nature publishes the deeply flawed "Black Death selection paper" in Oct 2022. A preprint refuting it is uploaded to bioRxiv Mar 2023. Now, 2 years later(!), Nature finally publishes the preprint as "matters arising". Number of accesses on the original paper since: 200k. Number of cites: 173. 1/2

Interesting thread on the sharing of scientific articles on Twitter vs Bluesky. For better or worse, the emigration of scientists from Twitter is real and ongoing:

Complete human recombination maps www.nature.com/articles/s41... - continuation of 25 yeas of work in building recominbation maps.

Just spent $5 to export my Twitter posts to this Bluesky account with blueark.app. Quite happy with the results. Pros: quick, easy, keeps tweet date, keeps images Cons: doesn't export tweets that quoted/replied to other accounts, so only exported 1/6 of my total posts; doesn't export poll reponses

How population stratification makes environments look like genes. A short 🧵:

I can't help but feel that this wagon-circling and fact-massaging reflects a pattern of behaviour by the leadership of Science - of treating the science world as a kind of guild whose interests must be advanced, of explicitly leveraging the institution to promote certain political views as truth.

EXTREMELY cool and demonstrates clearly the promise of deep learning + bio. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Great perspective on the near-term viability of human embryo editing. Much-needed nuance to the modelling exercise presented today in Nature.

In Top10 @ScienceMagazine 2024 breakthroughs of the year: Reconstructing ancient pedigrees + IBD segment sharing in aDNA. 😮😊 🎉 Great write-up by @spoke32.bsky.social ! 👏👏

Silicon Valley has lost its mind about genetics. Huge interest in short-sleep etc variants (candidate gene nonsense), embryo selection for cognitive traits (extremely low real-life predictive ability), and Jiankui He (charlatan whose human gene editing totally failed AND made many off-target edits)

Doctors in England can record a greater number of medical conditions at inpatient visits than doctors in Wales and in Scotland. This may be why the prevalences of certain conditions as recorded in UK Biobank are surprisingly different across the countries.

Fascinating technical aspect: Imputing & ancIBDing 45ky-old human genomes works well. With modern ref panels and down to 0.1x WGS coverage! We used downsampling of the two high coverage genomes to prove that. 🎯 That direct experiment showcases the application range of those tool. ✅️✅️ (3/3)

I now prefer B___sky for keeping up with science. Was quiet for a while but there's now a lot of activity and discussion – probably more than what remains on here. Recommend making the jump if you haven't already! Image via @salonium includes some tools to help you start:

PhD opportunity in computational population genetics at @MPI_EVA_Leipzig: Join our fully funded project to develop IBD-segment tools, connecting high-quality genomes from 500 Black Death victims to modern Europeans. 🌍💻🧬 Please spread the word! 📢🙌 #aDNA #PopGen www.eva.mpg.de/de/karriere/...

"Short sleep" candidate genes are a classic example of zombie bad science which refuses to die. Announced with great acclaim 2009-2021 but decisively debunked in a 2022 biobank study (linked). Debunking has just 7 citations while originals still get 100s a year and keep going viral in popsci land.

Very excited (and a bit nervous) to announce that I will be hiring two Postdocs for my new group(!) in Copenhagen to study the Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA which survives in present-day humans. Retweet will be much appreciated :) Link for application: candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

Heterozygous mutations in leptin receptor gene (LEPR) do not cause obesity. The finding goes against the rationale for a recent clinical trial that test setmelanotide for obesity treatment in heterozygous carriers of LEPR variants. Delplanque et al. AJHG www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We have made a large update to HaploGrouper, our haplogroup assignment program. A notable addition is a fork of the ISOGG 2019 tree in which we correct the placement of 4k mutations by analysing 300k Y chromosomes. Repo in reply - see my thread on "the other place" for details:

We have updated HaploGrouper, our haplogroup assignment program. The most notable change is a new fork of the ISOGG 2019 chrY tree in which we correct the placement of 4200 mutations after analysis of 300k chrY sequences. Gitlab repo linked in this post - and see thread below for more details: 1/

I believe I have found an error in the data underlying this paper. Correcting this causes the central finding - no overlap between Icelandic and Faroese Y haplotypes - to disappear. Explanation: The repeat counts for the DYS389i STR (and thus DYS389ii) seem deflated by 3 for Icelandic samples. 1/4

Strange paper here. Quite a blast from the past to see an analysis of Y STR-based haplotype networks. Study has seen a surprising amount of media coverage but I'm not entirely convinced by the findings, as I describe below:

Oh my stars, I have been tearing my hair out on this exact problem. There are charities that try to address "diaper need" for families, and they often cite a figure that diapers for a single child cost $1200 a year. www.pdxdiaperbank.org