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Elia Mascolo

@eliamascolo.bsky.social

Postdoc researcher at ISTA in Gašper Tkačik's group, studying biological evolution through the lens of information theory. Math enthusiast and amateur jazz piano player. https://eliamascolo.github.io/

34 Posts258 Follower198 Folgt
Izzie Héjja-B.@izziehb.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The @fusanilab.bsky.social + vogelwarte.at will be there to talk about sexual selection 🐦🐠 & human impact on animal behaviour and physiology 🪶🐦🐊 Come and visit our stations! langenachtderforschung.at/station/6662 langenachtderforschung.at/station/3588 For all age groups & German/non-German speakers!

Universität Wien / University of Vienna@univie.ac.at · 4mo ago

📣 Save the date: Lange Nacht der Forschung an der Uni Wien! 📅: 24.04.2026, 17:00 - 23:00 Uhr 📍: über 100 Stationen an 5 Standorten: Hauptgebäude, Fakultät für Chemie, Fakultät für Physik, Sternwarte & Biologiezentrum Das gesamte Programm der Uni Wien im Überblick: ⤵️ www.univie.ac.at/lange-nacht-...

"Lange Nacht der Forschung - Wir sind dabei!" 24.04.2026 Link: go.univie.ac.at/lnf26
Izzie Héjja-B.@izziehb.bsky.social · 5mo ago

So hyped to see the paper out!! 🤩 A great within-lab collab: 2 undergrads, 2 postdocs, 1 PI, cute rainbow darters, and much fun! 🌟 Please read (now-faculty ❤️) Kara's recap to learn more about what we did, she has a real knack for storytelling! ⏬️

Dr. Kara M. Million@darterdancer.bsky.social · 5mo ago

First rule of darter fight club is... nah, we're totally going to talk about darter fight club right here in our new paper!! I'm pleased to share the latest from myself, @izziehb.bsky.social , @tamramendelson.bsky.social, and two brilliant undergraduate co-authors! #FishSci #FishSky 🐟❤️ 1/

Elia Mascolo@eliamascolo.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I'm really excited to join ISTA's scientific community! I feel really welcome 🤗 Looking forward to doing awesome science together!

Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA)@istaresearch.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Article in TIME, featuring ISTA postdoc @eliamascolo.bsky.social​. After 4 years in the US, he moved to Austria with the APART-USA fellowship, a program that supports outstanding researchers in relocating their work to Austria. 🔗 https://time.com/7379376/scientist-migration-us-to-europe/

ISTA postdoc Elia Mascolo
Izzie Héjja-B.@izziehb.bsky.social · 10mo ago

With @eliamascolo.bsky.social we'll be presenting this project at the #EvoKE2025 conference in Athens🇬🇷 this November! Check out what the initiative is doing to promote the education and outreach of (biological) evolution in Europe! ➡️ @evokeproject.bsky.social

Izzie Héjja-B.@izziehb.bsky.social · last yr.

With @eliamascolo.bsky.social we developed an interactive class on biological evolution (focusing on mutations 👾) for science #teacher through a card game 🎲 We crash-tested it with #HighSchool students from Milan and made it available online for broader use: replicards.netlify.app #SciCom #EvoBio

Timothy Fuqua@timothyfuqua.bsky.social · last yr.

Happy to announce that our study on the latent cis-regulatory potential of mobile DNA is officially published! TLDR: mobile DNA in bacteria (Insertion Sequences) have a proclivity for evolving new promoters. At least 25% of them probably already encode functional promoters as well.

The latent cis-regulatory potential of mobile DNA in Escherichia coli - Nature Communications

The mechanism and extent to which transposons can alter the gene expression of their hosts is not well understood. This study finds that in the IS3 family of transposable elements in E.coli, de-novo p...

nature.com

Elia Mascolo@eliamascolo.bsky.social · last yr.

The best part was seeing students who were never exposed to #evolution concepts using evolutionary thinking to interpret the results of the card game. Only after they figured out what was going on, we introduced the scientific jargon (like "selection" and "drift") used to refer to those phenomena.

Izzie Héjja-B.@izziehb.bsky.social · last yr.

With @eliamascolo.bsky.social we developed an interactive class on biological evolution (focusing on mutations 👾) for science #teacher through a card game 🎲 We crash-tested it with #HighSchool students from Milan and made it available online for broader use: replicards.netlify.app #SciCom #EvoBio

Elia Mascolo@eliamascolo.bsky.social · 2y ago

With neural style transfer we can paint an image with the style of van Gogh. But can we also use it to study the evolution of visual signals and preferences? YES!!! Cool experiments on Darters 🐟😍 👇

Izzie Héjja-B.@izziehb.bsky.social · 2y ago

🚨Freshly published in Ecological Informatics: our paper on using neural style transfer to test preferences for patterns in E. caeruleum 🐟 with Kara Million, Julien Renoult & Tamra Mendelson! #GenerativeAI #ML #EvoBio doi.org/10.1016/j.ec...

Neural Style Transfer. Panel A: The algorithm produces a new image by minimising the distance with both content and style images. The style information corresponds to local statistics of the image (texture, colour, paint strokes), while the content information corresponds to the global arrangement of an image (what the image is made of, e.g. the row of houses along the river)—adapted from Gatys et al., 2016. Panel B: Creation of the stimuli. A picture of an original fish (male individual) and a picture of the habitat (either gravel or sand) are fed to the Neural Style Transfer algorithm as content and style images, respectively. The algorithm extracts the style information via a Gram matrix while the content information corresponds to the usual feature layers of a CNN. The original colours of the fish were put back on the final image to make it look more naturalistic.
Elia Mascolo@eliamascolo.bsky.social · 2y ago

Why are 🦠 genes organized into operons? Gene copy number fluctuates depending on distance from ori due to DNA replication. Operons keep gene clusters balanced in terms of copy number, reducing unbalance in expression level. Evo explanation for metabolic operons 👇 journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

A new selective force driving metabolic gene clustering | mSystems

The formation of clusters of functionally related genes in microbial genomes has puzzled microbiologists since their discovery. Here, we suggest that replication, and the copy number variations due to...

journals.asm.org

naturepoker@binomicalabs.org · 2y ago

Reading through a thread on latest conda TOS issue Conda TOS changed last year, and they're blocking IPs from larger nonprofit organizations (such as universities) with more than 200 connections/downloads. Connections will remain blocked until targeted organizations pay up. 💻🧬🧪

Elia Mascolo@eliamascolo.bsky.social · 2y ago

Can AlphaFold3 predict bacterial transcription factor binding sites on DNA? I tried to devise a fair test. The results are quite impressive. My test: I chose LexA (favorite TF at the @ErillLab) from E. coli K-12, and I generated "randomized" binding sites from the PWM. First 1/