I feel incredibly honored to have known Professor Gvozdev personally, and his passing was a tragedy. He retained his brilliant mind until the very end, and it was always a pleasure to talk with him about anything, whether science, culture, or politics.

fly paper broadcast@fly-broadcast.bsky.social · yesterday

Prof. Vladimir A. Gvozdev (1 May 1935-13 June 2025): the passion for Drosophila genetics #Drosophila

What's common between Helicoverpa zea and All Caps from Madvillain?

Why do I love doing the analysis but hate writing the Materials and Methods so much?🫩

How do transposons jump when they’re released from host control? I babysat two chromosomes for 2 years, making sure they are ok without most piRNAs. Here’s what we found & excited to share my 1st postdoc paper: “piRNA loss unleashes episodic transposition bursts” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

piRNA loss unleashes episodic transposition bursts

In Metazoa, transposon expression is suppressed by the piRNA pathway, and disruption of this pathway leads to rampant transposon expression. However, it remains unclear whether increased transposon ex...

biorxiv.org

Hello World ! We have another postdoc position open in the lab! Are you a freshly minted Ph.D. with a passion for chromatin and evolution ? Come join our ERC project #EvoEpi ! Inclusive environment + cool people + great science = success details 👉 tinyurl.com/3r6zk54n Repost are always appreciated

My first paper is up on bioRxiv! We asked a simple question: why are fruit flies smaller when they grow up in a crowded vial? #Development #Plasticity #Drosophila

bioRxiv Developmental Biology@biorxiv-devbio.bsky.social · 4w ago

Room to breathe: Nutrition and developmental oxygen modulate the crowding effect on size in Drosophila melanogaster https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.02.736161v1

This seems more like a hard sell than a soft cell.

I find it a bit concerning that the authors went to journalists after the rejection, even before the preprint was posted. Also, synthetic biology does not strike me as a field of “underdog scientists”; if anything, it seems like exactly the kind of field where results can easily be overhyped.

Buzz Baum@buzzbaum.bsky.social · last mo.

Dear fellow researchers. I think we need to discuss this: www.newscientist.com/article/2532... While peer review is flawed, and while preprints are a great way to share data before publication, as a community we mustn’t trade rigour for hype. This paper was peer reviewed and rejected.

You vs the guy she told you not to worry about

Ian Dworkin@idworkin.bsky.social · last mo.

I am excited to tell you about our new study led by Tyler Audet and in collaboration with Stefan Lüpold's group. Below you see two species. On the right is Drosophila melanogaster. On the left, Drosophila prolongata. Notice the highly exaggerated legs of the males in D.p! doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Major development in the #Transposon world! Repbase is joining the Dfam project and becomes open-access! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Unifying Repbase and Dfam: a new open foundation for transposable element research - Mobile DNA

Repbase and Dfam, the two foundational resources for transposable element annotation, are being unified into a single, fully open access framework, with Repbase released under CC-0 and its core curati...

link.springer.com

Dfam Database of Transposable Elements@dfam.bsky.social · last mo.

A New Open Foundation for TE Research: GIRI is transitioning the full Repbase collection to an open-access license and joining the Dfam effort to help build a unified open resource for transposable element research. Full announcement: tinyurl.com/48665xss

This sencha is lit🌞

Now online! Gregory J. Hannon (1964–2026)

Gregory J. Hannon (1964–2026)

Gregory J. Hannon passed away in April 2026 at the age of 61. A towering figure in modern molecular biology, Greg influenced remarkably diverse areas of science. His work reshaped our understanding of gene regulation, advanced the discovery of tumor suppressors that regulate the cell-cycle machinery, and uncovered fundamental mechanisms of RNA interference. By establishing core principles of small RNA biology, he not only transformed our mechanistic view of RNA-silencing pathways but also pioneered functional genomics approaches that revolutionized basic and biomedical research in mammalian systems.

dlvr.it

How do cells distinguish functional genetic messages from molecular noise? Researchers in Clemens Plaschka's lab at IMP, together with Julius Brennecke's lab at IMBA and collaborators at Aarhus University, reveal a new principle of gene regulation: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10650-0

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Cysteine-rich repeats trace past horizontal gene transfers in eukaryotes

Movement of genetic material between non-parental organisms, called horizontal gene transfer (HGT), is well recognized in prokaryotes but represents an underestimated force for the acquisition of nove...

biorxiv.org

@ericanadolski.bsky.social et al. present sex-specific chromosomal-level genome assemblies of the southern African beetle Onthophagus binodis; analyses show that the nine autosomes and the X chromosome are likely conserved throughout Onthophagini. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evag023 #genome #evolution

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

Have you ever wondered how chromatin states shape developmental trajectories? In our preprint, we address this question using single-cell nanoCUT&Tag, a method developed by Marek Bartosovic @mardzix.bsky.social, which simultaneously profiles active H3K27ac and repressive H3K27me3 in the same nucleus

📣 POSTDOC position available in the Feschotte Lab at Cornell to work on #TRANSPOSONS! More details below. Pls send informal application or inquiry ASAP by DM or email to cf458_at_cornell.edu. Pls spread the word 🙏 #TEsky www.thefeschottelabatcornell.com

Thermo Fisher has responded to research integrity activists who spotted apparent manipulation in its antibody catalog: "In ... preparing antibody images for publication on our website, some images may have been adjusted to clarify for presentation purposes." More: cen.acs.org/research-int...

Next year it's gonna be a giant sequoia (from the same acorn)

In Preparation@inprep.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Earlier this week I posted an example of a fake western blot provided by ThermoFisher to demonstrate the validity of a p53 antibody. I considered it an amusing curiosity. In fact Thermo Fisher Scientific has systematically manipulated antibody validation data!

My 1999 self would weep at how totally broken the internet has become. AI slop, social media walled gardens that rot the brain, surveillance pricing and advertising, every single goddamn website has an endless cloudflare captcha loop before you get to read anything. Burn it all down.

🧬 New research from the Burga lab! We took a closer look at a rogue selfish protein and caught evolution in the act of turning something old into something radically new 💡 (a.k.a. neofunctionalization) @imbavienna.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Curious? Here’s a breakdown:

#Paper Our new study on #Asgard archaea is out in Nature Communications. We find a distinctive evolutionary pattern: widespread #HGT, but genome expansion mainly through gene duplication. An interesting window into the origins of #eukaryotic complexity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I’m re-reading Eugene Koonin’s The Logic of Chance, and it might be one of the most important books I’ve ever read. I hadn’t fully realized it before, but for me it feels like a necessary companion to The Selfish Gene - my favorite biology book.

Now out @natbiotech.nature.com ! Do lncRNAs commonly bind 1000s of genomic sites? Maybe they do, but the dozens of studies that report genomic binding maps of lncRNAs are deeply flawed, with probes binding suprious DNA sites rather than RNA-bound ones.

Igor Ulitsky@igorulitsky.bsky.social · 9mo ago

A preprint‼️that's bound to ruffle some 🪶 "Widespread DNA off-targeting confounds studies of RNA chromatin occupancy" led by our Micah Goldrich and Louis Delhaye from Pieter Mestdagh in Ghent. TL;DR we show that many of lncRNA chromatin occupancy obtained are flawed www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

obsessed with this US department of agriculture zine about snail farming from 1986 openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/c...

I am disgusted that Danske Bank has decided to terminate the account of Stoparmy, a Russian non-profit working to help end military conscription.

I'm super happy to finally see the paper published ! Check out the full story here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The EMBO Journal@embojournal.org · 3mo ago

Retrovirus insertions in host transcripts trigger de novo piRNA immunity: Kirsten-André Senti, @juliusbrennecke.bsky.social et al investigate the 20th-century invasion of D. melanogaster by iERV Tirant to reveal piRNA-pathway evolution in response to new threats link.springer.com/article/10.1...