peppered moth question! Is this graph based on data? And if so, does anyone know the reference? Or another reference with such a figure including the increase and decrease of dark morphs? www.coursehero.com/tutors-probl... @wtf-r-species.bsky.social

Registration is open for the CSHL Biological Data Science conference on Nov 4-7, 2026. Check out this awesome list of keynote speakers and session chairs. Learn more here: bit.ly/cshl-biodata26

New preprint describing collaborative work with Rozario and Ye Labs to assemble and annotate the genome of the rat tapeworm: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Assembly of a high-quality reference genome for the rat tapeworm Hymenolepis diminuta

The rat tapeworm, Hymenolepis diminuta , is an important laboratory model for uncovering molecular processes that underly the success of tapeworms as parasites. Despite its importance, a high-quality ...

biorxiv.org

We are pleased to announce a major donation to support the work of the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center. Lawerence Washington, husband of former BDSC director Kathy Matthews, has established an endowment in her honor. bdsc.indiana.edu/news-events/...

Excited to announce that I'll be joining the Department of Genetics at UGA (@universityofga.bsky.social) in January! My lab will use model systems, DNA sequencing, and new computational tools to study mutation rate evolution across the tree of life.

Official petition for the UK to rejoin the EU, open to UK citizens and residents: petition.parliament.uk/petitions/74... Takes literally 1 minute, very quick. With changing political climate, worth making your UK voice heard if this is your view. Petition closes June 8th 2026.

Petition: Apply to Rejoin the EU as soon as possible to increase growth in the UK

We believe Brexit's not working. The OBR judges that the UK economy is smaller and trade is weaker because of Brexit, and it will just get worse. 10 years after the Brexit vote, let's apply to rejoin ...

petition.parliament.uk

MemPang26 conference (today) Schedule: pangenome.github.io/MemPanG26/#_... Free Livestream: tennesseehipaa.zoom.us/j/86514448732

Andrea Guarracino@andreaguarracino.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Level up your #pangenomics game! Workshop, conference & biohackathon in #Memphis, May 11-15, 2026. Join us and get your hands dirty with sequence alignment, explicit and implicit graphs, cutting-edge methods, and AI. Register now! pangenome.github.io/MemPanG26/ #Bioinformatics #MemPanG26

👋 Transposon lovers: registration is now open for the CSHL TE meeting! We have a 🔥 lineup of invited speakers and many slots for short talks selected upon abstract across all areas of TE biology. 🧬➰🧬 #TEsky Abstract deadline: July 10 meetings.cshl.edu/meetings.asp...

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...

Retrovirus insertions in host transcripts trigger de novo piRNA immunity - The EMBO Journal

How host organisms adapt their defense systems to newly invading transposable elements remains poorly understood. Here, we show how Drosophila melanogaster acquired PIWI-interacting RNA (piRNA)-mediat...

link.springer.com

No surprise - its Optix and Ivory again - amazing predictability of gene re-use in convergent mimicry phenotypes across amazonian mimicry rings @joanameier.bsky.social @wtf-r-species.bsky.social journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Genetic parallelism underpins convergent mimicry coloration in Lepidoptera across 120 million years of evolution

The repeated evolution of similar phenotypes, or convergent evolution, is widespread in nature, but there are few studies investigating the genetic mechanisms across wide evolutionary timescales. This...

journals.plos.org

Alex Kramer, Alan Zhang and friends posted our preprint today. In it, we introduce Panmap, a tool for phylogenetic placement, assembly, lineage abundance estimation, and eDNA assignment using phylogenetic pangenomes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/ BRAKER4 hatched! The Earth BioGenome Project is on track to sequence ~1.5M eukaryotic species. Every one needs a structural annotation. No Perl monolith was going to survive that. So we rewrote BRAKER from the ground up. github.com/Gaius-August...

Dear letter writers, study sections, grant panels, etc…..(though expecting little will resonate)….

Maureen Barr@barrlab.bsky.social · 4mo ago

"men continued to publish the same number of papers after becoming fathers, women experienced a significant drop in research output (mothers had 31% fewer publications than did fathers 8 years after the birth of their first child)"

Congrats Maitreya!!!! 🎉🥳 A wonderful scientist, mentor, teacher, and leader @maitreya.bsky.social

American Association for the Advancement of Science@aaas.org · 4mo ago

Join us in congratulating the new 2025 AAAS Fellows class! This distinction is among the highest in the scientific community and honors scientists, engineers, and innovators whose efforts on behalf of science and its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished. https://bit.ly/4svrgaB

From my pangenomics story in @natmethods.nature.com, It's a colorful pangenome world, which is here www.nature.com/articles/s41... and here: rdcu.be/e8ZYC A comment from @camillemrcht.bsky.social

Level up your #pangenomics game! Workshop, conference & biohackathon in #Memphis, May 11-15, 2026. Join us and get your hands dirty with sequence alignment, explicit and implicit graphs, cutting-edge methods, and AI. Register now! pangenome.github.io/MemPanG26/ #Bioinformatics #MemPanG26

Need to annotate transposons in fungal genomes? 🧬 Good news #MycoMobilome is now live! Check it out here: doi.org/10.1093/narg... Access the sequences through our Zenodo community (you can also contribute seqs with credit), and synchronisation with @dfam.bsky.social! w/ @danielcroll.bsky.social

MycoMobilome: a community-focused non-redundant database of transposable element consensus sequences for the fungal kingdom

Abstract. Transposable elements (TEs) are found in nearly all eukaryotic genomes. Despite significant advances in the sequencing of genomes, TE resources r

doi.org

We just launched flyRoom — modern web-based stock management for Drosophila labs. No more spreadsheets, no more messy labels, no more lost stocks. Free to start, built by researchers for researchers. www.flyroom.net

Remembering Phil Bourne. Personal reflections on a legendary scientist, leader, builder, and mentor. blog.stephenturner.us/p/rememberin...

Remembering Phil Bourne

Personal reflections on a legendary scientist, leader, builder, and mentor

blog.stephenturner.us

Thrilled and honored to be part of the 2026 GSA Award recipient! This honor reflects years of teamwork - huge thanks to everyone who has been part of the #haploteam. Proud to share this with you all! @genetics-gsa.bsky.social genestogenomes.org/the-2026-gsa...

The 2026 GSA Awards: The brightest geneticists combine intellect with excellence in education, research, and mentorship

This year’s award recipients bring to the table expertise and leadership that have shaped, and will shape, science for years to come.

genestogenomes.org

Sad to learn that David Botstein has passed away. Few people truly shape how you think and do science, and David was definitely one of them. I had a fun and influential time at Princeton with the Botstein, Kruglyak and co gangs. It shaped the way I do science. www.online-tribute.com/DavidBotstein

David Botstein | 1942 - 2026 | Online-Tribute.com

David was a beloved husband, father, brother, scientist, teacher, mentor, musician, friend, who touched the lives of thousands. David’s wide-ranging scientific career spanned decades with a legacy o…

online-tribute.com

So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).

how LLMs change incentives for research - a great talk by @carlbergstrom.com , had to watch in parts, a lot to digest. #institutional_epistemology at its best! www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Mj3... #philsci

AI and the Nature of Science: Keynote presentation by Carl Bergstrom

YouTube video by MN Center for Philosophy of Science

youtube.com

Can't wait to release a 10-year-old birthday version for SeqKit! - 10 years - 2 papers, 3500 citations - 20 contributors - 40 subcommands - 880 commits - 500 issues - 685.5K Bioconda total downloads Thank you all, dear contributors and users! I'll keep maintaining it. github.com/shenwei356/s...

Release SeqKit v2.13.0 (10-year-old birthday version) · shenwei356/seqkit

Changelog SeqKit is 10 years old! SeqKit v2.13.0 - 2026-02-28 seqkit: add support for reading and writing LZ4 compression format. new command: seqkit sample2: improved seqkit sample by @stahiga....

github.com

Amazing peppered moth story from Saccheri lab - same locus, but different structural variants, underly parallel evolution of industrial melanism in the UK and across continental Europe.

bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology@biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Parallel evolution of industrial melanism in the peppered moth: one locus, many alleles https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.26.707722v1

@pratikkatte.bsky.social and I just released Lorax 🌲, a tool for interactive exploration of biobank-scale ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs). If you’ve ever wanted to scroll across the ancestries of thousands of genomes… this is for you.

With @litinice.bsky.social, we built a haploid resource from 33 wild Taiwanese Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains — including some of the most genetically divergent Asian lineages — to bring natural yeast diversity into a genetically tractable framework. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The #fly community aims to achieve a comprehensive genomic study of the Drosophilidae family. @pankajd.bsky.social @bernardkim.bsky.social @petrovadmitri.bsky.social @darrenobbard.bsky.social present a comparative gene annotation for 301 #Drosophilidae species @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4c3pyrI

Our paper is now out in Nature: “Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres” www.nature.com/articles/s41... A short thread on how retrotransposons helped give rise to yeast point centromeres. 1/14

Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres - Nature

Evolutionarily related ‘proto-point’ centromeres providing resolution to the evolutionary origins of point centromeres are identified in yeast, and comparison shows they evolved in an ancestor with re...

nature.com

🚨📢📄 Article in press in Genome Biology doi.org/10.1186/s130... We introduce panREPET, a reference-free pipeline to detect shared transposable element (TE) insertions across pangenomes and retrace their evolutionary dynamics #TEsky 🧵👇

A reference-free pipeline for detecting shared transposable elements from pan-genomes to retrace their dynamics in a species - Genome Biology

Background The role of transposable elements (TEs) in host adaptation has gained interest in recent years. Individuals of the same species undergo independent TE insertions, providing genetic variabil...

doi.org