Sailing in @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social ready for summer, our study on the iconic Portuguese man o' war 🪼 is out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... We use (epi)genomics to understand a critter that fascinates me since childhood. Massive team effort with @obog.bsky.social, Cummins and Neely groups. 🧵

Congratulations to @kremnyovs.bsky.social, @tclebedeva.bsky.social and @hejnol.bsky.social - this is a fantastic paper. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Very happy to have been part of this collaboration.

A blastoporal organizer in a ctenophore - Nature

Experiments using the comb jelly Mnemiopsis leidyi and the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis reveal that the emergence of a core signalling pathway may have been a key innovation enabling the transit...

nature.com

Capolavoro 🎨 alert 🚨! What is the role of gene body methylation in invertebrates? Despite extensive speculation linking it to plasticity and environmental responses, its mechanistic effects and heritability remain unclear. Our take out in @natecoevo.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/

Gene body methylation suppresses intragenic transcription and permits epigenetic inheritance in a cnidarian - Nature Ecology & Evolution

Experiments in the cnidarian Nematostella vectensis show a role of gene body methylation in transposable element suppression and that epigenetic inheritance is constrained by chromatin context and tra...

nature.com

Hey look: A job! @echinerd.bsky.social and I are looking for a research technician to work on sea urchin development. If you are good at segmenting CT scans and want a chance to work on some super cool organisms, this job here at UCL is for you! apply now: bit.ly/4o2qccY

Had a smasheroony time at Walton-on-the-Naze with my fellow microscopy nerds today. I’m putting together a little reel about it. But in the meantime, here’s an amuse bouche… I saw a phoronid larva (horseshoe worm) with tentacles! The first time! #marineplankton 🦑 #zooplankton

Our work on Trichoplax locomotion and mechanosensing capabilities is out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social. Congrats Marvin Leria & all co-authors! authors.elsevier.com/c/1n8Ig3QW8S...

🚨 We discovered a new mode of Hox gene regulation in annelids! 🪱 A distal enhancer acts as a "global control region", lifting Hox genes from Polycomb repression. This is reminiscent of Hox gene control in vertebrates, but the two modes likely evolved convergently. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Please join the upcoming Jacques Monod Conference on the mechanistic and evolutionary basis of programmed DNA elimination in Roscoff, France. Deadline for abstract submission extended to May 20, 2026. cjm.sb-roscoff.fr/en/conferenc...

@sandraduharcourt.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The Jacques Monod Conference on the mechanistic and evolutionary basis of programmed DNA elimination is approaching. There are selected talk slots available. Abstract submission deadline: Tuesday, May 5, 2026.

What do shrimp see? “These guys have completely different eye designs,” according to Dr. Jan Hemmi, a visual neurobiologist. Their large eye size tells Dr. Hemmi and his colleagues that eyes are pretty important to these animals. #designingthefuture3 Read more: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Did you know that today is #InternationalCrabDay? 🦀 Started by The Crab Museum, this holiday encourages people to share photos of crabs so we’d love to see the Crabby Darwins you’ve created in Everything is Crab! Here's one I made earlier…

Finding molecular tags that localise fluorescent proteins to the cell membrane was the goal of our latest paper, now published in Development @dev-journal.bsky.social. The tags act as address labels, sending proteins to the cell membrane, where they highlight the shape and arrangement of cells. 2/9

Targeting the cell membrane in established and emerging model organisms

Summary: Screening a toolkit of diverse membrane-localising tags identifies candidates that efficiently localise proteins to the plasma membrane in a wide range of animals and choanoflagellates.

journals.biologists.com

#DBfeature #InHoxWeTrust 🪲 Divergent Hox cluster arrangement in horned beetles retain conserved embryonic and adult expression patterns. by Erica Nadolski, Isabel Manley, Sukhmani Gill, Armin Moczek @ericanadolski.bsky.social tinyurl.com/ycxabrh5

Last day to submit an abstract! This is a meeting aimed at all career stages, but especially geared on early career scientists (PhD/postdoc), don't feel you need to have a perfectly polished story to present!

Alex de Mendoza@alexdemendoza.bsky.social · 5mo ago

May 5th: if you are around London, please join the London #EvoDevo symposium at QMUL / Charterhouse campus, as usual we will have selected talks and post-event 🍻. A warm up for #EED2026 in Glasgow. Registration £0, more info here: londonevodevo.co.uk

Pablo Villar et al discover male octopus mating arms are sensory organs used to find females, navigate internally to the oviduct & deliver sperm. From behavior to structure, these findings offer a framework for how sensory systems shape reproduction & species barriers www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Nice opportunity to join QMUL as a PhD student (or postdoc). Lee works on cool insect symbiosis projects, and I am co-supervisor on this one. Don't miss it if you're into microbiome / host-microbe interactions.

Lee Henry@henrylabsymbio.bsky.social · 5mo ago

🚨 PhD opportunity in evolutionary microbiology! Join our lab to study how horizontal gene transfer drives host–microbe symbioses and ecological function Plus: a PDRA position in comparative genomics is available ✉️ l.henry@qmul.qc.uk Apply below #PhD #Postdoc #Microbiology #Evolution #Genomics

May 5th: if you are around London, please join the London #EvoDevo symposium at QMUL / Charterhouse campus, as usual we will have selected talks and post-event 🍻. A warm up for #EED2026 in Glasgow. Registration £0, more info here: londonevodevo.co.uk

LondonEvoDevo

meeting's website

londonevodevo.co.uk

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).

BMC Biology is currently welcoming submissions of original research to the “Genome organization and evolution” Collection, which I am supporting as a Guest Editor. If interested check out the link: www.biomedcentral.com/collections/... Deadline: 26 March #GenomeEvolution @bmc.springernature.com

Our work on the evolution of the regulatory genome of echinoderms is now out in @natecoevo.nature.com. Led by my former PhD Marta Magri, Danila Voronov & Saoirse Foley. Great collaboration of Arnone, Hinman & Maeso labs, started long time ago with our missed José Luis Gomez-Skarmeta: rdcu.be/eXX8l

Deep conservation of cis-regulatory elements and chromatin organization in echinoderms uncover ancestral regulatory features of animal genomes

Nature Ecology & Evolution - Analysis of the 3D chromatin architecture and cis-regulatory elements in a sea urchin and a sea star reveals mechanisms of 3D chromatin organization in echinoderms...

rdcu.be

Anouk Necsulea, @maelledaunesse.bsky.social and myself are organising a symposium at SMBE this year. Send us all of your abstracts!!

Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution@official-smbe.bsky.social · 8mo ago

SMBE2026 Symposium 22 | Evolution of gene regulation: insights from novel molecular and statistical approaches 📨 Abstract submission smbe2026.org/abstracts 📋 Programme details smbe2026.org/programme #SMBE2026

Very happy to see this piece on the Tunicate Ciona published. Grateful to @alexandrejan.bsky.social and @chiaracastelletti.bsky.social for the Illustrations, and to @natmethods.nature.com for the opportunity to showcase our ever emerging model organism www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The tunicate Ciona - Nature Methods

The ascidian tunicate Ciona, one of the closest relatives of the vertebrates, inhabits shallow temperate waters in the worldwide ocean. A unique combination of simple stereotyped embryogenesis, regula...

nature.com

Out today, our take on 6-methyladenine #6mA evolution in Eukaryotes @natgenet.nature.com. We asked a simple question, is really DNA 6mA common across the eukaryotes? The answer is "yes" if you're a unicellular eukaryote 🦠, not so if you're multicellular 🐝🌱🍄. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/9

Adenine DNA methylation associated with transcriptionally permissive chromatin is widespread across eukaryotes - Nature Genetics

Long-read sequencing in 18 unicellular eukaryotes reveals that 6mA is widespread across eukaryotes and is enriched at transcriptionally permissive regions, which are also marked by H3K4me3.

nature.com

Gene annotations matter for downstream analyses: different structural gene-annotation pipelines yield markedly different orthology calls. We compare four strategies across species and argue for standards & QC before inference. Work led by @silviaprietob.bsky.social. Paper: doi.org/10.1093/bioi...

Pleased to share our latest paper led by @tomlewin.bsky.social, now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! We present the first chromosome-level genome of a phoronid and show that shared chromosomal fusions unite phoronids and bryozoans as sister groups. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Laurent Joly, historien. « L’union des droites on l’a déjà eue, c’est le gouvernement de Vichy »

Laurent Joly, historien. « L’union des droites on l’a déjà eue, c’est le gouvernement de Vichy »

Charlie Hebdo : Vous écrivez dans votre conclusion que la digue entre l’extrême droite pétainiste et la droite républicaine pourrait bientôt céder. Quels en sont les signaux ?Laurent Joly : Cette digue s’est formée au lendemain de la guerre. La droite nationaliste et l’extrême droite, compromises dans Vichy et le collaborationnisme, étaient complètement délégitimées après […]

charliehebdo.fr

Come join the #LondonEvoDevo network half day meeting, hosted at @ucl.ac.uk on Friday November 7th, 2025. Submit your abstract by Oct 27th (or your interest in joining) here: forms.gle/TRbdrCkQTcY2.... Friendly vibes and free registration. More info here: londonevodevo.co.uk.

LondonEvoDevo

meeting's website

londonevodevo.co.uk

Adding loops into a genome is a complicated and costly business for a cell. New findings suggest that it may be the reason that ancient life became complex. @philipcball.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/loops-of-dna...

Loops of DNA Equipped Ancient Life To Become Complex | Quanta Magazine

New work shows that physical folding of the genome to control genes located far away may have been an early evolutionary development.

quantamagazine.org

Chaetognaths have lost gene body methylation and shifted #5mC back to Transposable Elements. This reversion to the ancestral state is coupled with a simplification of DNMT3 architecture. We posit that trans-splicing might compensate. It is an honour to have contributed to this 20y struggle ⛰️.

Ferdinand Marlétaz@ferdix.bsky.social · 12mo ago

After nearly twenty years in the making, our attempt at understanding what makes the chaetognath phylum so unique has finally been published! www.nature.com/articles/s41... with #LauraPiovani @dariagavr.bsky.social @alexdemendoza.bsky.social @chemamd.bsky.social and others /1

A genome sequence and single-cell atlas of a marine worm species point towards bursts of gene emergence, duplication and loss as the drivers of lineage-specific body traits go.nature.com/4oAI2nf

The perplexing body plan of arrow worms decoded

A genome sequence and single-cell atlas of a marine worm species point towards bursts of gene emergence, duplication and loss as the drivers of lineage-specific body traits.

go.nature.com

New Nature study (co-authored by Queen Mary researchers) reveals that arrow worms evolved unique organs by inventing brand-new genes — not just reusing old ones. 🧬🌊 🔗 www.qmul.ac.uk/sbbs/news/it... @qmulse.bsky.social

Cracking the Genetic Code of Arrow Worms: How Chaetognaths Got Their Unique Body Plan

qmul.ac.uk