Braasch Lab @ Michigan State University

@fishevodevogeno.bsky.social

Lobe-finned, gene hunting garfishionados & proud members of the tetrapod fishes. Read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall. www.fishevodevogeno.org

We are deeply saddened to share that Michael Freeling passed away on 7/20/2026 after a year-long battle with cancer. Our deepest condolences go to his family, friends, colleagues, and the many students he inspired. We will share additional memorial information soon.

We are very sorry to share the sad news that Michael Freeling passed away on 7/20/2026 after a year long battle with esophageal cancer.  Mike was a long-time faculty member in the Plant and Microbiology Department at University of California-Berkeley, a groundbreaking plant geneticist, and an inspiring teacher and mentor to over two dozen Ph.D. students, four dozen postdocs, and countless undergraduates. He was best known for pioneering work on maize anaerobic metabolism and gene regulation, transposon biology, developmental genetics of the maize ligule, and the discovery of biased gene retention following whole-genome duplications in plants. Mike was hired by UC-Berkeley as an assistant professor straight out of graduate school in 1973, and he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1979 and to full professor in 1984. He was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1980, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1994, and won the McClintock Prize for Plant Genetics and Genome Studies in 2017. Mike taught genetics, comparative genomics and scientific reasoning to our graduate students, and he also taught a popular genetics course for non-majors that had various titles over the years but was affectionately known as “Genetics for Poets.”  Our deepest condolences go out to his family, friends and many colleagues.

New in @science.org ...since our first discoveries of early tetrapods, they have been thought of as "amphibians" characterized by aquatic larvae. But is this true? For the first time, we report exceptional fossils of stem tetrapod babies that upend this paradigm. 1/n www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Direct development of stem tetrapods across the fin-to-limb transition

Modern amphibians are characterized by an aquatic larval stage that ends abruptly with a period of widespread tissue remodeling (metamorphosis) upon transition to terrestrial adulthood. A transient la...

science.org

I first met Neil Shubin 30 years ago when he was digging for fossils of our fishy ancestors in Pennsylvania road cuts. Now he's becoming president of the National Academy of Sciences. We talked about taking the helm of the 163-year-old organization at this fraught moment. Gift link: nyti.ms/4giD3FX

nyti.ms

🧐Are you an Early Career Investigator (starting PI, Postdoc or a PhD candidate)? Would you like to present your EvoDevo research with the PASEDB community? #EvoDevoMondays webinar series aims to bring together the EvoDevo research community across all the Americas 🌎

🚨 2026 PASEDB Elections are open 🚨 Voting is now open for our executive council positions. Thank you to everyone who volunteered to help our society by standing for election☺️ 🗳️Cast your vote from June 1 to June 15

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