Reminder: PhD position in my lab is open for two more weeks. How do germ cells use their own private transcription factors? Come help us find out. Fully funded. Deadline May 1. Flyer attached — please boost! 🙏

Nature News on the tantalising possibility of the first documented sex-ratio distorter in humans. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Cow Tools! We have lived alongside cows for nearly 10,000 years. We breed them and exploit them It is now, only now, that we have discovered THEY CAN USE TOOLS Here I describe our study (paper) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... in @currentbiology.bsky.social with @auersperga.bsky.social

Last Friday over dinner, we talked with @svenklumpe.bsky.social and @jnoms.bsky.social about this very creative paper—and quickly went off track. Why? Because, as Sven put it, Vaults ( #Vaults ) remain the “siren 🧜‍♀️ of cell biology 🔬” intriguing and attractive, but maddeningly hard to figure out. 1/3

Thrilled to share that I recently got a position of an Assistant Professor/SciLifeLab Fellow at Stockholm University, where I will continue my work on #lichen symbiosis. The lab opens in April 2026, and if you are interested in joining please get in touch! #newPI

Beautiful story on the evolutionary response to fly telomeres battling the genome they protect the ends of! Also, nice to see that the dream data clarity we all imagine when starting a project can actually materialize! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @sungyalin.bsky.social @levine-lab.bsky.social

Happy to share that my PhD project is finally published!🪱✨ Selfish genes are found across the tree of life. They can disrupt inheritance patterns and at the same time act as units for molecular innovation. Here we tried to answer one big question: how do selfish genes emerge in the first place?

A new preprint from the lab. I won't do a tweetorial until this is peer reviewed, but I think it's a banger, led by @JedNzy. It's about Rubisco and what chaperones are really for. He's on the market, get him while you can. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1/ How do animals develop immunity against a newly encountered transposable element from scratch? Our study reveals that the mobility of TEs is their Achilles heel, allowing hosts to develop a powerful small RNA-mediated silencing response. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I'm excited to announce our new biorxiv preprint, wherein we investigate the evolution of the weirdest genetic locus I've ever seen! Behold the tgr genes of the social amoeba, which mediate self/non-self discrimination during facultative multicellularity 🐅 🧵 1/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congratulations to Polina Tikanova on the completion of her PhD! Polina, a researcher in the Burga Lab, presented her work on “Molecular mechanisms of intra- and interspecific genomic conflict” at her PhD defense.