We are hiring a tenure-track assistant professor in computational biology at USC! area: AI method development and its applications in biology. Do you combine quantitative research with a drive to develop innovative approaches for tackling biological questions? usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-ange...

Please repost: My department (quantitative and computational biology at the University of Southern California) is hiring a teaching-track faculty member. The new hire will focus on teaching statistics courses to biology students. Apply by Dec 1 usccareers.usc.edu/job/los-ange...

Always happy to add new Denisovans. This is quite a record now from ancient proteins, five sites that span a geographic area encompassing all of China. These people had remarkable stories we are starting to understand how to tell. www.johnhawks.net/p/new-deniso...

New Denisovans from China’s southwest

The site of Bianfu Cave provides evidence that this group spanned all of China during the later Middle Pleistocene.

johnhawks.net

Something happened in 1837, but it didn't last. Use of Vererbungsfähigkeit ('inheritance capacity' - not yet 'heritability') and Vererbung ('inheritance/heredity') in Austro-Hungarian agricultural journals.

One of the major pains of academia is having to click through labyrinths of webpages to submit papers. Now, thanks to Joe Rich (and AI), problem solved! His tool is called PaperPush and is available at github.com/pachterlab/p... It's super easy to use! 1/🧵

GitHub - pachterlab/paperpush

Contribute to pachterlab/paperpush development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Here’s the thing. It’s not the three hours that’s a problem. Plenty of parents spend less than that per day with their kids because they are busy working, and they are still good parents. It’s the self-centered idea that parenting (and life) is always supposed to be about you and your happiness.

Rob Larson@ironicprofessor.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Max three hours! Prioritize people!

With AI being so prevalent these days, i wonder if they helps people be more concrete and accurate when they compose emails even if they aren’t using AI to compose for them. Because, you know, you need to be descriptive for AI…

Happy to share a new preprint, where we studied the expected outcomes of polygenic embryo screening in real-world IVF patients. Key conclusion: gains are very small for most infertility patients, with risk reductions under 5%. 🧵1/12 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

In light of the latest news from Colossal Biosciences, now is the perfect time to announce my laboratory's groundbreaking Minion de-extinction project, which depends on state-of-the-art gene editing at 20 key sites in the genome of the common banana.

Happy #PiDay! Here's the first 1,000 digits of pi encoded as colours 🎨 made with #RStats

Are #openaccess fees that some journals charge authors too high? The Chinese Academy of Sciences, the world’s largest research institution, reportedly thinks so and plans to stop funding some, a move that could shake up #scientificpublishing. @science.org www.science.org/content/arti...

Major Chinese funder to stop paying fees for 30 pricey open-access journals

Move comes amid effort to grow the country’s own journals

science.org

Mendelian Randomization is powerful but often debated. We benchmarked it against the "ground truth" of human metabolic pathways to see how often it gets it right. 🧬 Result: MR is robust! It matches known metabolism in 43% of cases and identifies valid drug targets. www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltex...

People seem to often confuse "I can't" vs. "I don't want to". Using them interchangeably sends mixed messages.

📣 Today is our @science.org paper's press conference and online publication date! Print version will be out next month. The embargo on the paper will be lifted for our AAS press conference, scheduled at 10:15am MT. 🔭🧪 Here's the AAS live stream link if you're interested: aas.org/meetings/aas...

This new SciENcv format is so... ugly. Especially the contribution to science part of the biosketch supplement. Who wants to read a jumbled bunch of text together? Did NIH/NSF not learn grantsmanship?

1/You know the feeling. You open a CSV or log file in the terminal— and it’s chaos. Wrapped lines. Misaligned columns. Impossible to read. Here’s how to turn that mess into clarity:

Polygenic embryo screening is being marketed commercially – but how do IVF clinicians view it? • General approval is low (12%) For specific uses: • 59% approved of health-related embryo selection • 6% approved of trait-based selection 🧵 Survey findings in NPJ Genomic Medicine

We are excited to share our recent work on the surprising robustness of Ancestral Recombination Graph (ARG) inference tools to computational phasing errors, now available on BioRxiv: biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... This work is co-advised by @yundeng.bsky.social and Rasmus Nielsen. 1/7

Robustness of Ancestral Recombination Graph Inference Tools to Phasing Errors

Ancestral Recombination Graphs (ARGs) are fundamental population genetic structures that encode the genealogical history of a sample of haplotypes along the genome. They have recently received substan...

biorxiv.org

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

The missing heritability question is now (mostly) answered

Not with a bang but with a whimper

theinfinitesimal.substack.com

My next R01 for improving robustness of gwas methodology… an automatic self-cleaning computer screen swiper!

Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra@jrossibarra.bsky.social · 12mo ago

As someone who looks at a lot of Manhattan plots, I can say that an under-appreciated cause of false positive GWAS hits is stuff stuck to my computer screen.

Excited to help host the 54th European Mathematical Genetics Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, next spring! Speakers include @timfrayling.bsky.social, @marylynritchie.bsky.social, Dr. Joelle Mbatchou and Dr. Eleonora Porcu Travel grants available - register here: emgm2026.sciencesconf.org?lang=en

📣Online now! 📄The impact of Indigenous American-like ancestry on risk of acute lymphoblastic #leukemia in Hispanic/Latino children 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 @charleston.bsky.social @adamdesmith.bsky.social & co 👉 bit.ly/47qXY3Q

More than two decades have passed since we discovered that rare disruptions of the FOXP2 gene disturb development of proficient speech/language skills. Today we know of multiple FOXP genes that are directly implicated in distinct brain-related conditions with differences in symptoms & severity.🧪 1/n

We @uga_genetics are hiring a TT assistant professor in Human Genetics to investigate how genetic makeup influences an individual’s risks for diseases or responses to drugs and therapies. All research approaches will be considered. Please RT. ugajobsearch.com/postings/456597

No kings except for (1) the Kingman coalescent and (2) Kinship-based INference for Gwas

Thanks to the weather I've spent more time at O'Hare than #ASHG25 so far, but I'm now ready to go! As usual, our research is well-represented at #ASHG2025, with four trainees presenting the advances in their research from this past year. Please go bombard them with your questions!

I will presenting a poster on Thursday on our recent work led by Kelsey Johnson (USC, not on Bluesky) on the genetic architecture of mtDNA copy number in human milk! Board #3049T!

Ahead of #ASHG25, we’re sharing some great news: South Korea has selected #PacBio HiFi sequencing as the core technology for its National Pangenome Project to generate 1,000+ high quality multi-omic Korean genomes and advance precision medicine. Read the press release: bit.ly/4omiz06

in retrospect, it was a mistake to teach algebra and geometry but not "statistics for everyone" in high school we are drowning in lies, partly because we never learned to swim

Massive sibling regression study finds that human traits are largely environmentally driven (average heritability = 0.3)

Within-family heritability estimates for behavioural and disease phenotypes from 500,000 sibling pairs of diverse ancestries

Quantification of the direct effect of genetic variation on human behavioural traits is important for understanding between-individual variation in socio-economic and health outcomes but estimates of ...

medrxiv.org