SMBE rotates its meetings geographically to encourage international participation. The next two meetings will be in Copenhagen, Denmark (2026) and Quebec City (2027). For 2029, we are particularly requesting proposals from *outside* Europe and North America.

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

Mitochondrial introgression in North American red-backed voles is facilitated by co-introgression at nuclear-encoded mitochondrial genes

Mitochondrial genomes encode for the proteins and RNAs that serve as the basis for aerobic respiration and energy production. Yet mitochondria depend on the nuclear genome for hundreds of additional g...

biorxiv.org

1/4 In today's funding climate, every grant and fellowship matters. Based on feedback from our GSAC Community Check-In Survey, we're building a growing hub of graduate & postdoctoral funding opportunities and job boards to make them easier to find. 🧵

This looks super cool: www.cell.com/current-biol...

Florida scrub-jay genomes across space and time reveal impacts of population decline and reduced gene flow

By analyzing genomes from 241 Florida scrub-jays across five populations and two time points, Nguyen et al. reveal substantial losses of genetic diversity and increased inbreeding following population...

cell.com

The Manul/Pallas' Cat is a wild felid of arid Asian highlands and has the densest and longest fur of all #cats A new study by Jiaqing Yuan &co finds that it belongs to a distinct lineage despite many traits shared with cats in genus Felis www.cell.com/current-biol... Image: tinyurl.com/yc6banxa

big things happening: I'll be defending my dissertation next week on July 15! to procrastinate preparing, I will be posting a meme for each of my chapters until the big day. also, please DM me if you'd like a zoom link to attend my public defense, but be prepared for 45 minutes of mouse toe talk!

The Iberian wolf population is quite the oddball among European wolf populations, because its dispersal is so limited. Here Quevedo et al explore what determines the range dynamics. 🦊

Mario Quevedo@quevedomario.bsky.social · 4w ago

"Resident mortality determines grey wolf range dynamics", superbly lead by Ana Morales-González. It is a modelling effort, connecting dispersal and mortality over habitat availability (yes, for wolves habitat means prey, and no guns). 1/2 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We're excited to announce the second edition of the SMBE Fellows Program! ✍️ 🔗 smbe.org/smbe-fellows-program The SMBE Fellows Program provides mentorship to early-career researchers in scientific writing for evolutionary and molecular biology by writing Highlight articles for MBE and GBE. #society

Bummed to miss #Evol2026. For all those students looking for a position, we're recruiting MS students (polyploid genomics) and a PostDoc (conservation genomics) for next year. Shoot me an email!

I'm looking for a postdoctoral researcher to join our group in Okinawa, Japan later this year/early next year. Area of research is wide open, and creative/unconventional projects are encouraged. Together, let's make ecology less of a mess! 📈📈📈 www.oist.jp/careers/okin... DM/email any questions!

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Postdoctoral Scholar, Integrative Community Ecology (Armitage) Unit

A postdoctoral position in ecology is available in David Armitage’s research group at OIST (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology) in Okinawa, Japan, with a flexible start date, ideally in early...

oist.jp

I'm recruiting a master's student for Fall 2026 to join my lab at The University of Arizona, to work on a project investigating the population genomics and hybridization dynamics of native and invasive leopard frogs in central Arizona! 🐸 🧬 Ad with details is posted below.

Great to see @annikafreudiger.bsky.social paper published! 🎉 We analyzed how genetic markers are used to estimate relatedness in wild animals - a big field with 2861 relevant publications. 📈🧬 Even in 2026 mainly STRs are used - and we argue for low coverage WGS data and a simple aDNA estimator.

Molecular Ecology@molecology.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New in MEC! @annikafreudiger.bsky.social et al. assess genetic relatedness on rhesus macaques and find that low-coverage whole-genome sequencing offers an accurate, cost-effective alternative to widely used methods. @wileyecology.bsky.social 📷 Caribbean Primate Research Center 🔗 buff.ly/pPOONsu 1/3

NSF BIO is having office hours on 6/17 about the new PRFB. Hopefully, we learn if the new solicitation means "use machine learning tools in pursuit of your biological questions" or if this program is also steering the questions themselves. www.nsf.gov/events/nsf-b...

NSF BIO Virtual Office Hour: Updates from the NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences

Looking for postdoctoral support? Join us to learn about NSF BIO Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology.

nsf.gov

UVic is hiring a Terrestrial Plant Ecologist Assistant Professor! Come join our department! We're nice and Victoria is awesome. www.uvic.ca/science/biol...

Faculty Position in Terrestrial Plant Ecology - University of Victoria

Department: Biology                 &am...

uvic.ca

Excited to share this new pre-print from the fantastic @kelsiehunnicutt.bsky.social! Kelsie put together a thoughtful and thorough review on hybridization in animal evolution: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v.... She tracks notable shifts in perspectives on the study of hybridization through time.

Conspecific Scaffold-Level Genome Assembly Outperforms Heterospecific Chromosome-Level Assemblies for Assessing Genetic Indicators in a Threatened Marine Fish onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Conspecific Scaffold‐Level Genome Assembly Outperforms Heterospecific Chromosome‐Level Assemblies for Assessing Genetic Indicators in a Threatened Marine Fish

Understanding the genomic architecture of species of conservation concern is essential for fostering effective conservation initiatives. Current biodiversity assessment approaches increasingly incorp...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

1/ New paper out in Nature Communications! We studied the salivary amylase gene, AMY1, in Indigenous Andean populations and found evidence that high AMY1 copy number rapidly increased in frequency, likely through recent positive selection. doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Rapid adaptive increase of amylase gene copy number in Indigenous Andeans - Nature Communications

The salivary amylase gene exhibits copy-number variation linked to dietary shifts. Here, the authors describe an adaptive expansion of the amylase gene in Indigenous Andean populations coinciding with...

doi.org

This semester I developed and taught a course on applied population genomics. Lab activities proceed from the basics of the command line and Git to variant calling with workflow managers and a suite of downstream analyses (e.g., ADMIXTURE). All materials can be found here: elinck.org/genomics_eco...

Wrote a fun little thing on gene tree discordance: authors.elsevier.com/a/1mzPI3QW8S...

Fox Friday and last call! This Sunday, April 13, is the final day to apply for this summer’s arctic fox fieldwork. Spend weeks in the mountains contributing to conservation research. Learn more & apply: link in bio #FoxFriday #ArcticFox

Wanna learn how to explore your genomic data to know how related your samples and populations are to each other? Come and join us and @jolijnerven.bsky.social on our next #AaRCademy workshop! April 16h at 14:00 CET!

🚨PhD opportunity! Study brown bears in the Balkans using ancient DNA 🧬🐻 Interested in paleogenomics & conservation? Apply! @lpcg.bsky.social 🔗 Details here: www.uw.edu.pl/wp-content/u... #PhD #AncientDNA #Paleogenomics #ConservationGenomics #WildlifeConservation

Graph transformer for ancient ancestry inference https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.05.714076v1

Getting close to a robust pipeline for ARG inference for messy genomes. 1. get a vcf. Align short reads to a reference and GATK and pray, or use whole genome assemblies and github.com/baoxingsong/... followed by github.com/RILAB/argprep

Genomics and species delimitation: which genealogical divergence index should you choose?!!! Graphs of hotness of species-ness versus scaled genomic measures of actual gene flow and divergence time. doi.org/10.1093/sysb...

Just a heads up that I will soon be advertising for a Postdoctoral position in my group to work on the evolution of cannibalism in Tribolium, starting ~September. Official Job ad to come soon. #academicjobs #postdoc #eeb

a woman says " would you like to join us " with her eyes closed

ALT: a woman says " would you like to join us " with her eyes closed

media.tenor.com

Every wonder how deer, elk, and pronghorns use habitat across the annual cycle? This report should be a treasure trove of info for ungulates in the US. 🌍 🧪

Jenny McKee@jennymckee.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The 6th volume of our USGS report series on #ungulate migrations in the Western United States is LIVE! The new vol. features 23 herds of mule deer, elk, & pronghorn, bringing the series total to 237 unique herds—a huge feat. Check out the report & download free data! pubs.usgs.gov/publication/...

New paper led by Yu Mo, with @psudmant.bsky.social Ever wonder how extreme genealogical discordance can help you to find the genetic basis for trait variation? Wonder no more! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Spun off a lightweight python package “pedigraph-sim” for simulating meiosis on arbitrary pedigrees. It tracks how crossing over produces segments of local ancestry and contains convenience functions like exporting the tree sequence to tskit for analysis: github.com/pmckenz1/ped...

GitHub - pmckenz1/pedigraph-sim: Combining explicit pedigrees with crossover simulations with ARG tracking.

Combining explicit pedigrees with crossover simulations with ARG tracking. - pmckenz1/pedigraph-sim

github.com

Out today is our paper 'Genomic history of early dogs in Europe', in which we uncover the identity of the dogs that lived in Europe before agriculture—during the Paleolithic & Mesolithic periods: doi.org/10.1038/s415.... A thread ⬇️ (10) @biouea.bsky.social @crick.ac.uk @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social