New preprint! Concerning Erythranthe angulosa, a charming little monkeyflower from the Eastern Sierra that makes up for its lack of extrafloral nectaries with striking morphological variation.
Hagar Soliman
@hagarsoliman.bsky.social
PhD candidate at Yale University studying speciation in Mimulus at the Coughlan lab | Fulbright scholar. (she/her)
"How two hybridizing monkeyflowers resist phenotypic homogenization" I'm very happy to share this. We would really appreciate your feedback!
Jenn Coughlan@jenncoughlan.bsky.social · 3mo agoSo proud of this manuscript- lead by the fantastic @henryarenas.bsky.social with two undergraduates (Cage Cochran and Quinn Evans) each doing a Herculean effort during their honors theses, and Hongfei Chen helping out tremendously with lab work. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
2/2 The fitness seascape elaboration has invented to consider how contexts of various sort shape the topography of fitness landscapes. In a new study, we find that context meaningfully shapes molecular evolution at every scale we studied, but the pattern depends on scale and system.
🚨NEW PAPER 🚨 "Deconstructing empirical fitness seascapes across scales of granularity" published in #G3 (@genetics-gsa.bsky.social) 1/2 The fitness landscape has been among the most influential instruments in evolutionary theory for nearly a century. But we often treat them as fixed and static.
So proud of this manuscript- lead by the fantastic @henryarenas.bsky.social with two undergraduates (Cage Cochran and Quinn Evans) each doing a Herculean effort during their honors theses, and Hongfei Chen helping out tremendously with lab work. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Maintenance of phenotypic divergence in two sympatric monkeyflowers with weak reproductive isolation
Sympatric species often exhibit permeable reproductive barriers, yet many of them coexist as phenotypically distinct entities. One way to account for this apparent paradox is that selection on loci th...
biorxiv.org
🎉 Happy Birthday to Barbara McClintock, GSA’s first female president (1945) and a pioneer who transformed genetics. Born June 16, 1902, her discovery of transposable elements, or “jumping genes,” reshaped our understanding of genomes and earned her the 1983 Nobel Prize. 🧬🌽
Celebrating Swathi Nachiar Manivannan and @cbo.bsky.social newly accepted paper at G3!!!! Check the manuscript out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #PEQG26
New story on the Avian Hybrids blog, featuring flowers! Parental conflict explains how introgression can contribute to postzygotic isolation avianhybrids.wordpress.com/2026/05/06/p... Based on the Current Biology paper by Megan Frayer and her colleagues
Parental conflict explains how introgression can contribute to postzygotic isolation
Monkeyflowers reveal an overlooked role for introgression in speciation.
avianhybrids.wordpress.com
New for @undark.org: "What I Learned from Teaching Darwin" "For Darwin at least, science was a conversation between humans and nature, more than it was an industry. I wish that were true today, for all of us." undark.org/2026/04/23/o...
What I Learned from Teaching Darwin
Opinion | Charles Darwin’s books offer lessons for how to grapple with the current state of science and its complicated future.
undark.org
We are also pleased to announce the Dobzhansky Prize Honorable Mention, Dr. Sean Anderson! Learn more about his work: www.evolutionsociety.org/news/display... @seananderson.bsky.social
Thrilled to share that my first dissertation chapter is now published at Ecology! dx.doi.org/10.1002/ecy.... We embed TPCs into population dynamics to show how changing temperatures' ordering — not just its distribution — increases extinction risk (i.e. heatwaves matter!) @esajournals.bsky.social
Applications to the Gordon Research Seminar in Speciation are now open! We encourage PhD students & postdocs from all geographies, backgrounds, disciplines to APPLY! This 2d seminar in beautiful Lucca 🇮🇹 will be followed by a 5d conference open to the broader community. www.grc.org/speciation-g...
So all-in-all, we think that hybrid seed inviability is evolving so rapidly, in part, because selfish evolution paired with introgression means that incompatibility alleles can invade and spread. This creates a patchwork of incompatibility in these closely related species.
We find evidence that this barrier seems to evolve via conflict. Interestingly though, we also find evidence that two incidences appear to share a genetic basis & have a history of introgression, potentially suggesting that introgression has moved incompatibility alleles around the landscape.
There are other, closely related species endemic to the Sierras. So we crossed those too! Low & behold, they too have the SAME pattern of incompatibility. Wild! But that's not all- I'd seen this pattern of incompatibility before: www.cell.com/current-biol...
a man in a leather jacket is making a funny face while looking at the camera .
ALT: a man in a leather jacket is making a funny face while looking at the camera .
media.tenor.com
We performed an absolutely MASSIVE intraspecific crossing survey (3K crosses!) & find that hybrid seed inviability has evolved within the widespread M. guttatus, with seeds dying when pops from the Sierras are the sire. Curiously, these Sierran pops are NOT monophyletic, which got us thinking...
a man with curly hair and glasses is making a funny face and saying huh .
ALT: a man with curly hair and glasses is making a funny face and saying huh .
media.tenor.com
So, we've discovered what looks like a rapidly and repeatedly evolving barrier (the entire complex is ~600-700kya). The barrier is strongly structured by geography rather than phylogeny. What's up with that?
a black and white dog is sitting on a couch with its tongue out and says `` wait ! what ?? '' .
ALT: a black and white dog is sitting on a couch with its tongue out and says `` wait ! what ?? '' .
media.tenor.com
I am SO THRILLED to share our first fully-lab lab paper!!!!!! Led by @hybridzones.bsky.social & @hagarsoliman.bsky.social, w/ a major assist from @pfschwarz.bsky.social!!!!!!!!!!!!! Read more below, if you're curious (you should be- it's AWESOME!!!!!!!) link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Introgression and parental conflict shape repeated occurrences of postzygotic isolation in Mimulus
Postzygotic reproductive isolation is often thought to accumulate as a byproduct of neutral divergence. Yet it frequently evolves rapidly, in line wit…
sciencedirect.com
Carl Linnaeus's beloved pet raccoon, Sjupp, was a gift from the King of Sweden, and regularly stole snacks from Linnaeus's students. This drawing is thought to be Sjupp. (LM/PF/ALS/1) #EYAPets
"What James Watson got wrong about DNA" By the great Sohini Ramachandran (@sramach.bsky.social) and your boy for The Boston Globe (@bostonglobe.com). www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/14/o...
What James Watson got wrong about DNA - The Boston Globe
The science he helped pioneer consistently undermines his view that genes determine everything about us.
bostonglobe.com
I'm so proud of this work!!! It was an incredible amount of effort that started when I was trapped in a greenhouse during the pandemic and is only now seeing the light of day. Kudos to Megan, Hagar, & Pia! We'd love to hear your thoughts! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Introgression and Parental Conflict Underlie Repeated Occurrences of Postzygotic Isolation
Postzygotic reproductive isolation is often thought to accumulate as a byproduct of neutral divergence. Yet, it frequently evolves rapidly, in line with non-neutral evolution. A major driver of intrin...
biorxiv.org
We're on a roll: Super proud of this paper lead by Dr. Megan Frayer & GS Hagar Soliman (with a major contrib from GS Pia Schwarz): Introgression and Parental Conflict Shape Repeated Occurrences of Postzygotic Isolation @hybridzones.bsky.social @hagarsoliman.bsky.social @pfschwarz.bsky.social
This collaboration was so much fun!! I’m excited to see it online! www.cell.com/trends/genet...
The molecular evolutionary basis of species formation revisited
How do new species arise? This is among the most fundamental questions in evolutionary biology. The first genetic model for how reproductive barriers lead to the origin of new species was proposed nea...
cell.com
Jenn Coughlan@jenncoughlan.bsky.social · last yr.Oh hey, we did a thing!!! Fun collab between the Coughlan and @mollyschumer.bsky.social labs!!! www.cell.com/trends/genet... Lead by the absolutely ✨STELLAR✨ @hybridzones.bsky.social, @nemovrobles.bsky.social, and @majorodriguezb.bsky.social.
I’m proud to present the main work from my postdoc, 3+ years in making from scratch, my ultimate #MimulusPropaganda up till now: The Moment That Symmetry Breaks. #plantscience #development #imaging #microscopy 🧪🌸🔬 w. Captain Yaowu & @biancatash.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A little belated but I've started a faculty position at Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology department at @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social. I'm absolutely stoked! I'll be recruiting at all levels and will be at #Botany2025 Reach out! www.martinezgomezlab.com
Martinez-Gomez Lab
Plant Evo-Devo
martinezgomezlab.com
Huge congratulations to Isabela Hernandez on receiving the Lewontin Award from @sse-evolution.bsky.social! 🐸✨ Isabela’s research highlights behavioral and ecophysiological diversity in Caribbean rain frogs. We’re incredibly proud to see her talent and dedication recognized in such an inspiring way!
With @hybridzones.bsky.social & @jenncoughlan.bsky.social, we have been working on an update to Daven Presgraves' influential 2010 review on hybrid incompatibilities (shorturl.at/cJndf). The preprint is available here (shorturl.at/DTC48) with an updated table of almost 100 incompatibilities!
The molecular evolutionary basis of species formation - Nature Reviews Genetics
Recently, several new speciation genes have been identified that have contributed to our understanding of the molecular details of the evolution of hybrid dysfunction. This Progress article describes ...
shorturl.at