📣 Paper alert! I am delighted that our paper exploring the impact of Neanderthal-derived variants on the activity of a disease-associated craniofacial enhancer has been published in Development today! journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

New preprint from another part of my PhD! 📝👇 Some mutations arise after fertilisation 🧬, so early they can appear in both a parent’s body and their germ cells. By analysing family trio genomes 👪, we built one of the largest catalogues of these “hidden” inherited variants yet. tinyurl.com/mvns2ytv

Landscape of parental postzygotic mutations in >11,000 rare disease trios

Postzygotic mutations (PZMs) arising post-fertilisation, prior to primordial germ cell specification, may be subsequently inherited by both somatic and germ cells, causing somatic mosaicism in the par...

tinyurl.com

Interesting new @medrxivpreprint.bsky.social study, bearing on the interpretation of GWAS results: 
“Common and rare genetic variants show network convergence for a majority of human traits” 🧪🧬 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Common and rare genetic variants show network convergence for a majority of human traits

While both common and rare variants contribute to the genetic etiology of complex traits, whether their impacts manifest through the same effector genes and molecular mechanisms is not well understood...

medrxiv.org

This package is a game changer for population genetics. You can do pretty much all of the “usual” analyses, in R, and at a super fast speed 😍😍😍 So thanks mainly Evie and Andrea for creating this for all of us!

Evolutionary Ecology Group, Cambridge@eegcam.bsky.social · last yr.

We are excited to announce that tidypopgen – a new package for rapid population genetic workflows in R – is now available at evolecolgroup.github.io/tidypopgen/ 🧬💻 Read more in the preprint describing its features here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #popgen #Rpackage #genetics 1/2

New online! Making sense of the polygenicity of complex traits

Delighted that the 'flagship' manuscript on our @genesandhealth.bsky.social 44k exomes (British Pakistanis & Bangladeshis) is now preprinted. Great academic-industry collaboration. Lots of new associations (mostly additive, a few recessive) and new insights into homoz knockouts & drug discovery.

Georgios (Yiorgos) Kalantzis@yiorkala.bsky.social · last yr.

Preprint alert! 🚨 doi.org/10.1101/2025... Our manuscript on Exome sequencing and analysis of 44,028 British South Asians, using @genesandhealth.bsky.social is now available at @medrxivpreprint.bsky.social! We present several great results, and I’m thrilled to highlight the pieces I worked on:

Check out the new pre-print from Luci! 👇🏾 Super cool work highlighting the discovery of a blood biomarker of IBD! 👀🧬🔬

Lucia Ramirez-Navarro@luciaramirez.bsky.social · last yr.

🚨 SUPER EXCITED to share our new preprint on the mucosal and circulatory immune landscape of Crohn’s disease! 🩸 Blood is commonly used in biomarker discovery and drug development, but how well does it reflect what's actually happening in the gut? 👀 🧵 1/10 🔗 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

It's finally out people ✅🗞️! Check out the final version of our work exploring factors influencing the germline mutation rate and spectra on ~10,000 WGS family trios 🧬👨‍👩‍👦! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The impact of ancestral, genetic, and environmental influences on germline de novo mutation rates and spectra - Nature Communications

Here the authors analyze de novo mutations in >10,000 parent-offspring trios and find that ancestry and smoking independently associate with mutation rate, but that common genetic variants likely c...

nature.com

Our preprint describing and assessing the variant prioritisation approach for genomic newborn screening in the Generation Study @genomicsengland.bsky.social is now on medRxiv www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Assessment of the variant prioritisation strategy for genomic newborn screening in the Generation Study

Purpose Genomic sequencing offers the opportunity to screen for hundreds of rare genetic conditions with a single test. To minimise potential negative impact on families and clinical services, it is c...

medrxiv.org

We did it! We caught Starship #transposons moving between #fungal species in the lab, including between species separated by ~100my. We think Starships are a mediator of HGT in fungi, akin to conjugative elements in bacteria. Check out the preprint. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thrilled to share new work led by @jieyang437.bsky.social in the lab published today in @Nature. We find that Aspirin prevents metastasis by releasing T cells from immune suppression by platelet TXA2. @Cambridge_Uni @CRUKCamCentre rdcu.be/eci1U

Comparative analysis of human and mouse ovaries across age https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.27.640481v1

I want to tell you a story about computers, creativity and art. (1/N) 🧵 Sydney Brenner once said in 2012 that “nobody has actually read the human genome. I mean, computers have processed the human genome, but we all know computers are stupid.” (Summary of a talk I gave at the Sanger last week)

Pubmed

Contralateral cancers are an enigma: the unaffected organ is perfectly matched on exposures across life, yet despite this at older ages the risk of cancer in that organ is not much higher than a randomly selected organ from the same population. What can be happening? youtu.be/7rbsGpz9-XE

Really excited to share our next population-scale WGS work preprint. Here, we analyse three anthropometric traits in nearly 700,000 individuals (discovery UKB ~450K, replication AoU). We show, for these traits, that common and rare variant heritability is convergent www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Whole-genome sequencing analysis of anthropometric traits in 672,976 individuals reveals convergence between rare and common genetic associations

Genetic association studies have mostly focussed on common variants from genotyping arrays or rare protein-coding variants from exome sequencing. Here, we used whole-genome sequence (WGS) data in 672,...

biorxiv.org

We finally have some well-powered whole-genome heritability estimates, including a quasi-behavioral trait (BMI). For height, ~89% of the heritability estimated to reside in common variants. For BMI and WHR, ~100% estimated in common variants. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Interesting new paper on links between male infertility and increased cancer risk from Maris Laan: academic.oup.com/hropen/advan...

Significantly increased load of hereditary cancer–linked germline variants in infertile men

AbstractSTUDY QUESTION. What is the comparative load and profile of hereditary cancer–linked germline variants in infertile compared to fertile men?SUMMARY

academic.oup.com

Excited to finally share that our paper looking at the effect of rare non-coding variants using WGS on circulating protein levels in the UKB has been released in Nature Genetics @naturegenet.bsky.social! We now analyse the full 3,000 circulating proteins in all 50,000 individuals rdcu.be/ea16i

Whole-genome sequencing analysis identifies rare, large-effect noncoding variants and regulatory regions associated with circulating protein levels

Nature Genetics - Rare variant association analysis of plasma proteins using whole-genome sequencing data in 54,306 individuals in the UK Biobank demonstrates that combining both single-variant and...

rdcu.be

Quantitative genetics is poorly understood by many biologists, and that's surely a failure in how it is taught. But teaching biology as 'fundamentally complex' seems like one of the least promising educational ideas since those 1970s schools that made lessons optional. www.cell.com/cell-systems...

Should biology put complexity first?

The dictum “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” poses a problem for biology. How simply can it be told without doing damage to its complex nature? The answer might be foun...

cell.com

I'm so happy that I can finally share the results of my first postdoc paper with @baym.lol!!! Turns out plasmids are an amazing system to study multi-scale evolution and we can track within-cell and between-cell dynamics! (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/earl...

Intracellular competition shapes plasmid population dynamics

Conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution, from populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements in microbes. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-r...

biorxiv.org

Thrilled to share my 1st PhD's 1st publication at @liigh-unam.bsky.social. Anecdotally it is also my 1st paper as corresponding author from my group / the "Paloegenomics and Evolutionary Biology". shorturl.at/VumOq Let us know what you think about it.

Ancient DNA HLA typing reveals significant shifts in frequency in Europe since the Neolithic - Scientific Reports

Computational HLA typing has surged as a cost-effective strategy to uncover questions regarding the evolution of the HLA system, enabling immunogenic characterization from ancient DNA (aDNA) data. Nev...

shorturl.at

We are excited to announce a new faculty position here in Cambridge, for researchers in computational and/or theoretical biology, based jointly in Genetics and Mathematics. Come and join us! Happy to answer questions about research, teaching and working here. www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/50414/

Our lifestyle and environmental exposures are the predominant influencers of healthy aging and premature mortality, compared with polygenic risk, in the first comprehensive assessment www.nature.com/articles/s41... open-access

Integrating the environmental and genetic architectures of aging and mortality - Nature Medicine

Based on a systematic analysis of environmental exposures associated with aging and mortality in the UK Biobank, the relative contributions of such exposures and genetic risk for mortality and a range...

nature.com

Our thymus, a critical source and trainer of T cells, involutes with aging. 2 new studies find a growth factor (FGF21) that delays involution (in mouse models) and may be a way to rejuvenate our immune system and promote healthy aging in the future.

🚨NEW PAPER! Together with Wuno Akingbuwa (@wonuola.bsky.social) we developed a way to estimate non-linear genetic correlations. It didnt sit well with us that known non-linear relations (e.g. BMI and MDD with a famous U shaped ) are poorly captured in statistical genetics. 🧵

Many of us scientists in the Global South have been sciencing forever with limited resources, higher costs for infrastructure and reagents/consumables, high bureaucratic burden, no overheads, and still contributed to the generation of knowledge. We’ve developed adaptive strategies.

The human immunoglobulin heavy chain constant gene locus is enriched for large complex structural variants and coding polymorphisms that vary in frequency among human populations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.12.634878v1

Excited to share a new paper from @insitro.bsky.social (first author @zmccaw.bsky.social ) in @hggadvances.bsky.social vances.bsky.social on scrutinizing the practice of using a ratio trait (numerator / denominator) for GWAS. www.cell.com/hgg-advances...

Pitfalls in performing genome-wide association studies on ratio traits

Any variant associated with either numerator or denominator will associate with the ratio in GWAS of sufficient size. Associations with ratio traits are thus not specific to the ratio. Instead, we rec...

cell.com

Happy 1-year anniversary today @bsky.app!

Eric Topol@erictopol.bsky.social · 2y ago

Welcome immigrants from X interested in science to the friendlier skies of @bsky.app, as documented by a new @nature.com survey (but you already knew that 😉) "Bluesky is much better for science. There is much less toxicity, misinformation, and distractions." www.nature.com/articles/d41...