Henry North

@henrylnorth.bsky.social

Research Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge Population genomics, invasive species, hybridization, adaptation, structural variation

Avocados come in 2 varieties - A-types start each day female and switch to male midday. B-types do the reverse. In work just published from the last chapter of my PhD, we show this system evolved 40+million yrs ago and is regulated by alleles of 1 transcription factor www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Balanced polymorphism in a floral transcription factor underlies the ancient rhythm of daily sex alternation in avocado | PNAS

In avocado and certain wild relatives in Lauraceae, a highly synchronized daily rhythm of floral sex timing promotes cross-pollination between two ...

pnas.org

New paper out! 🖨️ Glad to be part of this study, out in Science Advances: "Emergent patterns of island biodiversity in the Anthropocene" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Much of what looks natural in island biodiversity is a legacy of human impacts going back millennia. See main findings 👇🧵 (1/8)

Emergent patterns of island biodiversity in the Anthropocene

Human impacts substantially affect our ability to detect and understand natural biodiversity patterns.

science.org

How do transposons jump when they’re released from host control? I babysat two chromosomes for 2 years, making sure they are ok without most piRNAs. Here’s what we found & excited to share my 1st postdoc paper: “piRNA loss unleashes episodic transposition bursts” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

piRNA loss unleashes episodic transposition bursts

In Metazoa, transposon expression is suppressed by the piRNA pathway, and disruption of this pathway leads to rampant transposon expression. However, it remains unclear whether increased transposon ex...

biorxiv.org

Every time I teach Evolutionary Genetics, I assign the students to write a Digest in the style of the journal Evolution and encourage them to submit it if they are eligible. This past spring, an undergraduate student, Henry Ayers, decided to submit his, and it just got published. Way to go, Henry!

Digest: Longitudinal striping in rodents

Abstract. Why do some rodents exhibit longitudinal dorsal stripes rather than the much more common monochromatic pelage coloration? Caro et al. (2026) inve

academic.oup.com