Bacterial immune proteins have repeatedly evolved to become parts of eukaryotic immunity. But how? Our new preprint uncovers a recent horizontal transfer event & shows how eukaryotes co-opted a toxic bacterial immune protein 🦠🧪🧵 1/

New from my lab: Ancestral sequence reconstruction analysis indicates the furin-cleavage-site insertion in the SARS-CoV-2 spike gene likely interrupted a codon academic.oup.com/ve/article/1...

Ancestral sequence reconstruction analysis indicates the S1/S2 insertion in the SARS-CoV-2 spike gene likely interrupted a codon

Abstract. The genome of the seasonal acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus has a 12-nucleotide insertion that produced a furin cleava

academic.oup.com

🧬 New today! 📄Best practices for improving alignment and variant calling on human sex chromosomes 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 @sexchrlab.bsky.social @angela-oill.bsky.social & co

Best practices for improving alignment and variant calling on human sex chromosomes

Aligning and calling variants in a way that accounts for the sex chromosome complement of the sample will reduce false-positive variants and increase true-positive variants on the X and Y chromosomes.

cell.com

Pregnancy loss is common in humans, and chromosomal abnormalities are the leading cause. Using genetic data from ~140,000 IVF embryos, we show that maternal variation in meiosis genes influences recombination and aneuploidy risk. First authors: @saracarioscia.bsky.social & @aabiddanda.github.io

Common variation in meiosis genes shapes human recombination and aneuploidy - Nature

Analysis of data from pre-implantation genetic testing sheds light on the genetic basis of meiotic-origin aneuploidy, the leading cause of human pregnancy loss, identifying common genetic variants ass...

nature.com

🚨 PhD opportunity in Strasbourg! 🚨 We’re looking for a motivated PhD student to join the @haploteam within the IMCBio program (PhD-2026-17). 🔗 imcbio-phdprogram.unistra.fr Please spread the word or contact me if you’re interested!

Come join us in beautiful Britanny, France in May 2026 for a workshop that I am organizing with @lucievirevolte.bsky.social and @psudmant.bsky.social on Rapid host adaptations to infections: sites.google.com/berkeley.edu...

Happy to share the final story from my thesis, demonstrating that the common ancestor of all terrestrial fungi had zymocin-like killer plasmids, a toxin system found in some budding yeasts. Come with me on an all-too-familiar, database dumpster-diving journey (1/10) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Zymocin-like killer plasmids were present in the common ancestor of terrestrial fungi

Some budding yeasts secrete killer toxins made by linear dsDNA plasmids located in the cytosol. The best-known example is the Kluyveromyces lactis toxin zymocin, which is encoded by a 9-kb killer plas...

biorxiv.org

✨ Latest exciting story of the group in @nature.com. Here, we go beyond SNPs and built a species-wide atlas of genetic variants in yeast. With >1,000 near T2T genomes, we show how large genomic variations affect trait diversity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

From genotype to phenotype with 1,086 near telomere-to-telomere yeast genomes - Nature

A newly compiled atlas of species-wide structural variants and gene-based and graph pangenomes derived from highly complete assemblies of genomes from 1,086 natural isolates enable integrative genome-...

nature.com

Just imagining research talks in antiquity. EUCLID: …thus, there does not exist a rational number whose square is equal to 2. HIPPOCRATES: [grumbling] I fail to see the clinical relevance of any of this

Final version of our paper out now on how high-throughput methods can be useful for answering everyday “low-throughput” genetic questions!

Genetics Society of America@genetics-gsa.bsky.social · last yr.

New paper in #G3journal from @merusadhu.bsky.social and colleagues presents a barcode-based high-throughput method that can track large numbers of independent replicates of a small number of combinatorial genotypes. buff.ly/Q0qgBQz

Now out officially, with the entire kit on @addgene.bsky.social. Great collaboration with @merusadhu.bsky.social, with more to come.

Genetics Society of America@genetics-gsa.bsky.social · last yr.

New #CRISPR resource in #G3journal: A set of plasmids expressing Cas9-EcRT allows for co-transformation with the gRNA-repair template plasmid in a single step while containing different antibiotic or auxotrophic markers for gene editing in #yeast. buff.ly/TC8ECCV

Kamilla Laidlaw, Hatwan Nadir, Chris MacDonald @yorkyeast.bsky.social and team @biologyatyork.bsky.social discover that killer toxin K28 resistance in yeast relies on COG complex-mediated trafficking of Ktd1. journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/... Article: journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

New paper from my lab! We describe our idea that high-throughput pooled experimental methods – typically used to test thousands of hypotheses at once – also have huge potential to help in “everyday” experiments testing one or a few focused hypotheses. Why? Two reasons: doi.org/10.1093/g3jo...