'Scarlet poppies' by contemporary Impressionist style US contemporary painter Erin Hanson #WomensArt

How do duplicated receptor genes "find a home" in olfactory circuits? Great study by the Arguello lab shows the re-coding of olfactory channels across species. Neat combination of phylogenetic reconstruction, sc-transcriptomics and more. Check out the pre-print: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Evolutionary Recoding of Olfactory Sensory Neurons

Odorant receptors ( Or s) are the interface between an animal’s nervous system and its olfactory environment. In insect genomes, the Or s are often the largest gene family, and their rapid duplication...

biorxiv.org

1/n Check out our new paper, spearheaded by @fborne.bsky.social, just out in PLoS Genetics doi.org/10.1371/jour....

Epistasis among clustered lineage-specific amino acid substitutions in the Drosophila Trio protein

Author summary Proteins fold into three-dimensional structures that are essential for their function. Because these structures depend on interactions among amino acids, the fitness effect of a mutatio...

doi.org

When caterpillars attack, the common bean plant relies on a receptor in its leaves to sound a chemical rallying cry that recruits predatory wasps, a new #ScienceAdvances study finds. https://scim.ag/434rXN5

A plant immune receptor mediates tritrophic interactions by linking caterpillar detection to predator recruitment

A plant receptor detects caterpillar attack and triggers emission of chemical cues to attract predatory wasps.

scim.ag

Marc Feldman and Jessica Riskin with another withering critique of a "sociogenomics" popularization: "...you can’t add or subtract factors that interact, such as genetic and environmental influences. How much of a rainbow’s formation is due to moisture in the air and how much to sunlight?"

Not in Your Genome | M.W. Feldman, Jessica Riskin

Generations of “sociobiologists” have tried and failed to argue that genetic analysis offers the key to understanding social inequality. A new book fares no better.

nybooks.com

Our paper on recurrent independent duplications in the primate amylase locus is now out in Cell Reports! Huge thanks to @petarpajic, @spit-lab.bsky.social and @gokcumenlab.bsky.social for their support. More about the work in the thread below from when we first shared the preprint last August.

Convergent evolution through independent rearrangements in the primate amylase locus

Structurally complex loci can repeatedly generate similar traits; Karageorgiou et al. established primate amylase locus as a structural variation hotspot, potentially seeded by transposable elements. ...

cell.com

"Murmuration over Lanhydrock Park", 2020 by Annie Ovenden, English painter #WomensArt

Closely related species often exhibit distinct morphologies. Kenta Tomihara @pinharanda.bsky.social Takashi Kiuchi @pandolfatto.bsky.social &co uncover the #genetic basis of caudal horn size differences between the #SilkMoth and its wild relative @plosbiology.org 🧪 #evolution plos.io/4b3kwdR

Genome of the Abominable Snowfly uncovers the mysteries of cold tolerance in a winter active insect! New cool (literally) paper in @currentbiology.bsky.social from Marco Gallio, @matthewcapek.bsky.social, @tuthill.bsky.social, myself, and fine colleagues! ⛄ 🦟 authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Thrilled to finally share the magnum opus of my PhD that focuses on the genetic basis of evolutionary change! Specifically, we know we can map the genetic basis of a trait, but can we tell which genes will underlie the trait shift when it evolves? doi.org/10.1101/2025...

High-resolution mapping of a rapidly evolving complex trait reveals genotype-phenotype stability and an unpredictable genetic architecture of adaptation

The extent to which adaptation can be predicted, particularly for traits with complex genetic bases, is unknown. Here, we leveraged a model complex trait, model species, and high-powered longitudinal ...

doi.org

My main PhD work @monteirolab.bsky.social is now in @natecoevo.nature.com! We found a Hox gene promoter that helps butterflies🦋adjust their wing eyespots in response to seasonal temperatures🍃🍂, shedding light on the evolutionary origin of phenotypic plasticity. 1/9 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How is functional variation at large-effect loci maintained in natural populations, even as environments change? In a paper led by @mkarag.bsky.social, we tracked known pesticide resistant alleles in outdoor 𝘋. 𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘨𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳 cages & inferred selection and dominance from temporal sequencing data.

"The most transformative technologies, ..., emerged not from goal-directed efforts but from foundational inquiries with no predetermined outcomes." #curiosity-driven_science

For the love of frontier research, or why Elon’s rockets keep blowing up | EMBO reports

EMBO Press is an editorially independent publishing platform for the development of EMBO scientific publications.

embopress.org

So this came online over the weekend: My dive into the "definition" of coevolution is online ahead of publication in @journal-evo.bsky.social! Don’t ask "when is it coevolution?" — ask "how?" doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Don’t ask “when is it coevolution?” — ask “how?”

Abstract. Coevolution has come to be widely understood as specific, simultaneous, reciprocal adaptation by pairs of interacting species. This strict-sense

doi.org

Preschool teachers provide fewer participation opportunities to working-class students than those from more privileged backgrounds | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Save the date! #PEQG26 June 9-12 2026 in Asilomar, CA. Happens only every 2yrs, but is my favorite conference. Full website coming soon, and registration and abstract submission opens November 14, but I'm allowed to tease that keynotes will be @jnovembre.bsky.social @jennytung.bsky.social and me!

Homepage - Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics Conference

Visit our website to learn more.

genetics-gsa.org

Very excited to see this work in press! I think there is a reason to believe that this is a common means of stabilizing large-effect polymorphisms in general and might be an important reason for why diploidy is so common. news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

Classic recessive-or-dominant gene dynamics may not be so simple

New fruit fly research provides the first direct evidence of “dominance reversal,” revealing why pesticide resistance is so hard to eliminate in changing environments.

news.stanford.edu

Marianna Karageorgi@mkarag.bsky.social · 2y ago

How is functional variation at large-effect loci maintained in natural populations? Thrilled to share our work showing how beneficial dominance reversal helps fruit flies maintain a resistance polymorphism as selection varies in their environment! A thread 🧵 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How do populations maintain an evolutionary memory? I am happy to share that our work with Dmitri Petrov @petrovadmitri.bsky.social, Paul Schmidt, and colleagues on dominance reversal and stabilization of insecticide resistance in changing environments over time is now published at Nature EE.

Beneficial reversal of dominance maintains a large-effect resistance polymorphism under fluctuating insecticide selection - Nature Ecology & Evolution

Measuring selection and dominance in fitness of the insecticide-resistant Ace alleles in Drosophila melanogaster, the authors show evidence for beneficial reversal of dominance, a mechanism that can s...

nature.com

August’s Nature Plants cover story shows how we integrated large-scale multiDAP and snRNA data to reveal drivers of cell type identity and evolution in flowering plants. www.nature.com/nplants/volu... We packed a lot into this paper! Here’s a single-cell spin on what we found:

Earlier in summer, there was a gigantic 4-year longitudinal study in France showing that the school environment triggers a gender gap in mathematics. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I was down at Pacific Grove last weekend and a volunteer shared the monarch population is declining.. #pesticides #land_use_change

Monarch butterflies’ mass die-off in 2024 caused by pesticide exposure – study

New peer-reviewed research found an average of seven pesticides in each of 10 butterflies tested

theguardian.com

check out my new article published in @nautil.us on Sewall Wright's famous shifting-balance theory of evolution, told through the lens of his work with guinea pigs! nautil.us/evolution-an...

Evolution and Guinea Pig Toes

How one animal's oddity inspired Sewall Wright to take on one of Darwin's big ideas

nautil.us

#Invertefest?! Okay! This one is a personal favorite out of all my bug art.

Just noticed this in last Sunday’s Observer, a week in the life of an Orange-tip as told to Simon Barnes. Brilliant.

Scientists have recently mapped the painted lady butterfly's annual flight from equatorial Africa to northern Europe and back, the world's longest butterfly migration. In Constant Bloom, photographer Lucas Foglia documents the journey.

Photos: Scientists trace a butterfly migration route that is millions of years old

Scientists have recently mapped the painted lady butterfly's annual flight from equatorial Africa to northern Europe and back, the world's longest butterfly migration. In Constant Bloom, photographer ...

npr.org

Inferring Balancing Selection From Genome-Scale Data

Inferring Balancing Selection From Genome-Scale Data

Abstract. The identification of genomic regions and genes that have evolved under natural selection is a fundamental objective in the field of evolutionary

academic.oup.com

For Women's History Month, may we all remember and summon the courage of Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring to inform the world what DDT was doing to the songbirds, raptors,and by extension, us. While battling cancer, she stood her ground against savage attacks by the chemical industry...

The PopGen Vienna Seminar series schedule is ready for the next term (Mar-Jun). It's jam-packed with fantastic speakers in #evolution, #genetics, #genomics, #popgen, and more! Details and streaming link signup can be found on our website www.popgen-vienna.at/news/seminars/