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

Renowned Evolutionary biologists Peter & Rosemary Grant are back with new research on adaptive radiation in Geospiza finches on Daphne Major, looking at the long term impacts of hybridization on 3 species of ground finch! You can read the full paper below 👇 🧪 (1/2) doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Fission, fusion and the generation of novelty in Geospiza species on Daphne Major Island, Galápagos

Abstract. Early stages in the adaptive radiation of Darwin’s finches are characterized by divergence (fission) and convergence (fusion) caused by natural s

doi.org

Magic traits, search costs, and the persistence of species in secondary contact Jack R. Farley, Darren Irwin bioRxiv 2026.07.23.740407 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Magic traits, search costs, and the persistence of species in secondary contact

When two populations come into secondary contact, assortative mating can act as a barrier to gene flow. However, when assortative mating is incomplete, associations between preference and cue loci can...

biorxiv.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

Happy to share that Maëva Gabrielli's latest work on Zosterops borbonicus is now published in Evolution! Interested by identifying barrier loci with genomic data? I hope you will find this piece of work interesting! ⬇️ academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

Accounting for recombination rate variation improves inference of barrier loci and reveals the role of both natural and sexual selection in an incipient bird radiation

Abstract. Examining genomic patterns of differentiation across lineage pairs at different stages of the speciation continuum, in combination with recombina

academic.oup.com

We published a new paper, which was a fun side quest of mine ➡️ 🧭❓🗺️ : Hybridization with wild individuals fuels reindeer domestication. royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Hybridization with wild individuals fuels reindeer feralization

Abstract. Domestication has profoundly influenced the development of human agriculture, and is characterized by intense artificial selection. Feralization

royalsocietypublishing.org

In our Viewpoint (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...) we synthesize the gametic definition (outlined by Janicke et al below) and other definitions of sex (e.g., multivariate definition). We contend that is NO consensus on “biological sex” (maybe a consensus isn’t actually necessary…)

There is No Consensus on Biological Sex

At this critical moment when misinformation about sex is being applied to policy globally, scientific clarification on the definition of biological sex is valuable. Here, we evaluate the primary appr...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Tim Janicke@timjanicke.bsky.social · 4w ago

In a new #Viewpoint we argue that the binary definition of #BiologicalSex based on gamete size is a scientifically robust framework that is entirely compatible with the diversity of sexual phenotypes and human gender identities. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Paper alert!🧬🐦💻 Divergent selection is the textbook explanation for narrow inversion clines. Our blackcap inversion cline doesn't fit: it is wide, and the inversion is always the rarer arrangement. We show that negative frequency-dependent selection shifting between populations underlies this!

Shifting Balancing Selection Underlies an Inversion Cline in Eurasian Blackcap

We investigated what factor contributes to a cline of a chromosomal inversion of the Eurasian blackcap, which differs from typical inversion clines maintained by divergent selection. Using a simulati...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Bit late posting this... MicroFinder is now published in GigaScience: academic.oup.com/gigascience/....

MicroFinder: conserved gene-set mapping and assembly ordering for manual curation of bird dot microchromosomes

AbstractBackground. Obtaining chromosomally complete genome assemblies across the tree of life is an important goal of biodiversity genomics. However, some

academic.oup.com

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

1/ BRAKER4 hatched! The Earth BioGenome Project is on track to sequence ~1.5M eukaryotic species. Every one needs a structural annotation. No Perl monolith was going to survive that. So we rewrote BRAKER from the ground up. github.com/Gaius-August...

🧨 New publication out (I think this one is 🌶️ ): Cerca & @stelkens.bsky.social - "The identity crisis of speciation genomics". academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...

📣🧬 Postdoc Alert🧬📣 We are hiring a 2+ year NERC-funded postdoc at Edinburgh Uni investigating causes and consequences of sex differences in recombination in house sparrows in Norway. Informal enquiries welcome at Susan.Johnston@ed.ac.uk 🙂 Details here: elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Jeremy Wang developed rammap, a minimap2 rewrite in Rust. It achieves comparable or better performance than minimap2 and produces identical output to minimap2. During rewrite, Jeremy found two long-existing bugs in minimap2 which are fixed in v2.31. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Wong et al. present IQ-TREE version 3, with new features including mixture models, gene and site concordance factors, integration with phylogenomic divergence time estimation, and a fully featured sequence simulator. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag117 #evobio #molbio #compbio

Love this quote: "We used to make fun of Edgar Anderson by saying that he was finding hybrids under every bush. Then we realized that even the bushes were hybrids." academic.oup.com/jeb/article/...

Hybridization and speciation*

Abstract. Hybridization has many and varied impacts on the process of speciation. Hybridization may slow or reverse differentiation by allowing gene flow a

academic.oup.com

⏰⏰⏰ 6 days more to apply!! Don't be shy if you feel like you don't fit all criteria; motivation, curiosity and fun to work with, are the most important traits that we are looking for! ⏰⏰⏰

Mozes Blom@moosblom.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🚨 Wanted: PhD student excited about population genomics, Natural History Collections and birds! 📍 Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, Germany 🕒 3 Years, funded by the Leibniz Junior Researchgroup program Details and Application portal 👇 jobs.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/jobposting/d...

Don’t reach for ChatGPT Images or Nano Banana as your first option when creating scientific images There are multiple free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations. #plantscience @stephenturner.us blog.stephenturner.us/p/free-open-...

Free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations

Phylopic, NIH Bioart, Bioicons, Scidraw, Open Science Art, Health Icons, Servier Medical Art, Biodiversity Heritage Library, the Noun Project, Segment Anything, Excalidraw, draw.io, Biographics

blog.stephenturner.us

New simulation study with Ethan Gyllenhaal highlighting a potentially big problem for biogeographic inference. royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Spatial impacts on gene flow may hinder linking phylogeographic data to macroevolutionary patterns

Abstract. Biogeography relies on estimates of phylogeny and gene flow to test hypotheses. Established theory posits: (i) gene flow varies non-randomly with

royalsocietypublishing.org

Ver excited to share my just-published Darwin Review with @lh3lh3.bsky.social on population-scale long-read sequencing! royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Population-scale long-read DNA sequencing: peering under the hood of the new evolutionary genomics

Abstract. Population-scale long-read DNA sequencing (PLRS) is rapidly reshaping our understanding of genomic variation in humans and non-model species. In

royalsocietypublishing.org

📣 EvolDir is now managed by @eseb.bsky.social! We are delighted to be taking the reins and express our gratitude to both Brian Golding who began this service to the community in the mid-1980s and to @rdmpage.bsky.social who ran this account until now 👏 You can now find evoldir here: evoldir.net

This is lovely: www.theguardian.com/environment/... #science #biology

In the footsteps of Linnaeus: scientists share their passion for species from tiny wasps to hairy plants – in pictures

For his project ‘De Oförtrutna’ (The Relentless), photographer Christer Björkman pictured Swedish scientists working in the spirit of Carl Linneaus, the botanist who created the modern taxonomic syste...

theguardian.com

The first chapter of my PhD thesis is out: doi.org/10.1111/mec.... !!! This comparative study explores the presence and maintenance of a joint contact zone among three important forest tree species (formed during recolonisation after the LGM). Trees, genetics and evolution, just a perfect combo!

When South Meets North: A Joint Contact Zone Coinciding With Environmental Gradients in Three Boreal Tree Species

Post-glacial recolonisation of Fennoscandia created secondary contact zones in many species, offering opportunities to study how gene flow and selection contribute to their establishment and maintena....

doi.org

Really excited that this major work from my PhD is finally published in @plosbiology.org ! In it, we were trying to tackle a fundamental question in evolution - how do genetic mutations map onto evolutionary fitness? (1/n) journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Genotype-fitness mapping of adaptive mutants reveals shifting low-dimensional structure across divergent environments

Predicting the effect of a genetic mutation on fitness is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. This study uses fitness effects of a large collection of adaptive yeast mutants in multiple lab env...

journals.plos.org

An Evolving View of Species Tree Inference academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

An Evolving View of Species Tree Inference

Abstract. Nearly all modern studies that address evolutionary questions require consideration of the phylogenetic relationships among species. But what, ex

academic.oup.com

Ancestral-area algorithms are unreliable onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Ancestral‐area algorithms are unreliable

We examine two standard phylogenetic–biogeographic patterns and how these are interpreted by current ancestral-area algorithms. In the first pattern, a basal, paraphyletic grade is restricted to one ...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Pangenomes: new tools for ecological and evolutionary genomics

Genomic structural variation is an important component of genetic variation in natural populations. By assembling and analyzing multiple high-quality genomes within a species or clade, pangenomes capt...

cell.com

Check out our cover article by @timjanicke.bsky.social and colleagues about the role of sexual selection in animal speciation. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic.... The beautiful illustration is by Katharina Bóth.

📰 Starting this friday with some positive news: Our publication "Pangenomes as a framework for adaptive radiation, speciation, and adaptation" came out today in the American Journal of Botany! bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1537...

I have a new preprint demonstrating a genome-architecture-aware approach to inferring species trees and introgression landscapes from a small number of genomes. If you are interested in phylogenomics, birds, or hybridization, this is for you! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...