📄 Queen bees offload pesticide burden to eggs when social buffering is overwhelmed 🐝 ⬇ www.cell.com/current-biol...

Queen bees offload pesticide burden to eggs when social buffering is overwhelmed

Encerrado-Manriquez et al. show that honey bee hive sociality influences pesticide deposition across hive matrices, with worker bees buffering the colony and the queen affecting colony-wide distributi...

cell.com

📄 Haplodiploidy alone does not predict the evolution of eusociality 🐜🐝 ⬇ www.cell.com/current-biol...

Haplodiploidy alone does not predict the evolution of eusociality

Suresh and Linksvayer use insect phylogeny to show that transitions to eusociality are not generally driven by haplodiploid sex determination systems but strongly associated in one specific lineage, t...

cell.com

Our latest contribution on #regulatoryevolution in which we show that the shape of fitness functions and the distribution of mutational effect sizes jointly limit adaptation by regulatory mutations. Led by @simonaube.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The shape of fitness functions and the distribution of mutational effect sizes jointly limit adaptation by regulatory mutations - Nature Ecology & Evolution

Saturation mutagenesis of the FCY1 promoter in budding yeast shows that adaptation to 5-fluorocytosine is not accessible through single cis-regulatory mutations, despite large mutational effects on pr...

nature.com

📄 Species-specific brain transcriptomic responses to clothianidin and sulfoxaflor in pollinators 🧬🐝🪰🦋 ⬇ www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Species-specific brain transcriptomic responses to clothianidin and sulfoxaflor in pollinators

Wildlife genetics; Genomics; Toxic agents

cell.com

📄 Adaptive molecular convergence is pervasive across deep time and largely decoupled from phenotypic convergence 🧬⏳ ⬇ www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Adaptive molecular convergence is pervasive across deep time and largely decoupled from phenotypic convergence | PNAS

Reuse of homologous genes during the evolution of similar traits or ecological transitions is often taken as evidence that evolution is repeatable ...

pnas.org

Our new paper is out! Congrats to all involved. Dosage compensation and meiotic sex chromosome inactivation are maintained under relaxed selection | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Dosage compensation and meiotic sex chromosome inactivation are maintained under relaxed selection | PNAS

Dosage compensation and meiotic sex chromosome inactivation (MSCI) are key mechanisms regulating gene expression from the X chromosome in male-hete...

pnas.org

Just had a great zoom with a very talented undergraduate student from another country I would love to recruit. I really don't love telling students not to come here, but because our funding and visa situation is so volatile I can't in good conscience recommend a PhD in the US.

Preprints don’t change much after peer review — and are rarely retracted. go.nature.com/4pebHmM

Think preprints are unreliable? Analysis of 70,000 studies might change your mind

Preprints don’t change much after peer review — and are rarely retracted.

go.nature.com

Our new paper is out in @nature.com! We uncovered how a naked mole-rat queen 👑 controls an entire colony: a natural contraceptive scent that suppresses reproduction in other females! A remarkable mammalian parallel to bees and ants! 🐝🐜 @garyrlewin.bsky.social youtu.be/enfv3zJrWKM?...

Naked mole-rats are ruled by a queen: this chemical puts her in power

YouTube video by nature video

youtu.be

Nature research paper: A queen odour mediates reproductive suppression in a eusocial mammal go.nature.com/4fiVIzv

A queen odour mediates reproductive suppression in a eusocial mammal - Nature

Naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber) queens produce isopropyl myristate, a low-volatility ester that high-ranking animals detect and avoid, which alters prolactin and progesterone in other females to suppress reproduction and preserve eusocial hierarchy.

go.nature.com

Apollo 3: Multi-Species Genome Curation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.08.730970v1

Foley & Murphy reveal that UCEs and BUSCO loci are not sampled randomly from the genome and are underrepresented in mammalian sex chromosomes and other low-recombining genomic regions. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag155 #societyjournal #evobio #molbio

Some of the nation’s top research universities are shrinking doctoral programs because of uncertain federal funding. (Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/u...

Decline of Ph.D. Admissions Could Imperil a ‘Generation of New Talent’

nytimes.com

High-resolution reconstruction of cell-type-specific transcriptional regulatory processes from bulk sequencing samples - @weillinstitute.bsky.social @cornelluniversity.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

High-resolution reconstruction of cell-type-specific transcriptional regulatory processes from bulk sequencing samples - Nature Biotechnology

DeepDETAILS enables cross-modality deconvolution of bulk sequencing samples.

nature.com

📄 Inhibitory modulation of age-dependent behaviour through dsx-expressing cells in honeybees 🐝🧬 ⬇ doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

minibwa-0.4 released with minor improvement and a few fixes to typos. Also a new blog post on "minibwa is the new bwa-mem": lh3.github.io/2026/07/04/m...

NEW RESEARCH 🔍 #Aging and early life adversity are associated with increased mortality risk. But how similar are they at the molecular level? We investigated #epigenetic profiles across tissues in macaques and you can find the full story in our @science.org article! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Age and early life adversity shape heterogeneity of the epigenome across tissues in macaques

Age and early life adversity (ELA) are key determinants of health, but whether they affect similar physiological mechanisms across tissues is unknown. We generated DNA methylation (DNAm) profiles acro...

science.org

Our paper is out! 📣 we find that molecular measures of genetic variation do not predict heritable genetic variation across species - important implications for the application of genomic data for conservation! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Nucleotide diversity is a poor predictor of short-term adaptive potential | PNAS

The capacity to adapt is essential for a population to avoid extinction in a changing world and is recognized as a global conservation priority. Ad...

pnas.org

📄 Ancient inversion polymorphisms are locally adaptive in a widespread butterfly species 🦋🧬 ⬇️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Ancient inversion polymorphisms are locally adaptive in a widespread butterfly species

Phenotype-agnostic methods detect inversion polymorphisms involved in cryptic ecological adaptation in Neotropical butterflies.

science.org

Our new genome annotation method relies almost entirely on transcriptome and alignment evidence, and as a result outperforms pretty much all other de novo pipelines. Check out the just-published paper led by Aleksey Zimin: rdcu.be/frSOg

Efficient evidence-based genome annotation with EviAnn

Nature Methods - EviAnn surpasses existing genome annotation methods by leveraging gene expression and protein sequence homology evidence to achieve higher accuracy and efficiency.

rdcu.be

One of our top-rated posts on @altmetric.com this past week was published open access in @natcomms.nature.com. You can read 'Nesting behaviour predicts heat tolerance evolution and climate vulnerability in bees' here: spklr.io/63321E3xQ1

Nesting behaviour predicts heat tolerance evolution and climate vulnerability in bees - Nature Communications

Species risk to climate change depends in part on their capacity to evolve. Here authors show that the microclimates that native bees occupy in their nests shapes the way tolerance to heat evolves and species corresponding sensitivity to warming.

spklr.io

The 2026 Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics has been awarded to the R Project. #RStats www.rousseeuwprize.org/2026

A new Science study shows that bumble bees can position a ball underneath a fake “flower” to reach a reward, suggesting they can exhibit spontaneous problem-solving and challenging the notion that such advanced cognitive abilities are exclusive to large-brained vertebrates. https://scim.ag/4vs08dC

The first single-cell three-dimensional lamprey brain atlas reveals that the vertebrate common ancestor already had a highly regionalized brain, and subsequent neuronal specialization likely drove vertebrate brain diversification. Learn more this week in Science: https://scim.ag/4whLqXp

Minibwa is a hybrid of bwa-mem and minimap2 and the successor of bwa-mem for short-read mapping. ~4X/2.5X as fast as bwa-mem/bwa-mem2 for WGS reads at comparable accuracy. Native support of directional bisulfite-seq. Applicable to long reads. Preprint at arxiv.org/abs/2606.15357

Academic freedom assessment across the world. The US is on a steep decline, below >120 countries www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-...

The heaviest Russian air attack on Kyiv in two weeks saw several people killed and the Pechersk Lavra monastery, a symbol of Ukrainian spiritual and cultural history, catch fire, authorities said.

Nineteen russian ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and Shahed drones are raining down on Kyiv right now. This is horrific. The UNESCO-listed Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra has been targeted. A thousand years of Ukrainian history, faith, and culture are once again under attempted destruction.

Brault et al. propose guidelines for standardized π estimation, systematic reporting of summary statistics, and the adoption of richer metadata to ensure that population genomic data remain comparable and reusable across a wide range of systems. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/... #genome #evolution