Roses are redde Noble are the manatees For a bettir future Teach artes and humanityes
Joanna Rifkin they/them
@joannarifkin.bsky.social
Computational biologist, plant geneticist, gardener, SFF enthusiast, rock climber, not that kind of doctor, transplanted to Toronto, nonbinary, trans, Jewish, and more! Opinions my own.
SOAPMAKER: "Alas, thieves have stolen my supplyes!" NEIGHBOR: "What bitter tidinges! Ys that trewe?" SOAPMAKER: "Aye, wher ys the lye?"
If someone put me in a bsky starter pack, does that mean I've Arrived?
If you saw our new paper and thought "I didn't know aquatic plants use CAM!" boy do we have a fun project for you! Our lab is developing high throughput methods to screen plants for CAM. Do you work on, or know of, a plant that you think could be using CAM? Let us know! 👉 forms.gle/AyQc5KgzEYoM...
Are your plants CAM suspicious?
Have you ever wondered if the plants you work on are... living a double life working the nightshift? We are too. Our lab is looking to identify and screen more plants for CAM activity. We are beginnin...
forms.gle
Karolina Heyduk@kheyduk.bsky.social · 4w agoNew lab paper, led by @ellliieee.bsky.social with assist from @wickellomics.bsky.social, other lab members, and folks at @li-corenv.bsky.social - how do we study photosynthesis in aquatic plants? Turns out it's pretty hard! Part review, part methods paper. Check it out! doi.org/10.1002/aps3...
I was really not ready to lose Dolly Parton and Tim Curry in the same week. This sucks.
Evolution 2027 meeting logo contest! The winner will receive free conference registration and t-shirt! www.evolutionmeetings.org/2027-logo-co...
2027 Logo Contest
2027 Evolution Logo Contest! San Juan, Puerto Rico Please submit your original images to be considered. The winner will receive free meeting registration and t-shirt! Due October 1 Submit to...
evolutionmeetings.org
The first draft of the response to reviewers should not be the last draft of the response to reviewers.
Trying to post positive on here! We just walked past rehearsals of a summer school in the Southbank Centre where the kids were performing London Calling with a big band x steel band x orchestra plus dancers and it was absolutely as chaotic and joyful as it sounds. 🎺
Okay see I'm from New England and was happy to concede that "Yeah yeah fine old small mountains" but then I moved to Ontario and was legit SO CONFUSED when a lot of it was too flat to hike up. "But I'm from a non-mountainous region! What is wrong with this region?!?! Where do I hike??!?!?"
Kris 🎃 Lorischild@direkris.itch.io · last mo.It's so cute when people on the east coast talk about mountains
EcoEvoJobs 2026-27 just opened for business and we've already got 79 faculty / permanent jobs listed. Please repost! ecoevojobs.net
ecoevojobs.net 2026-27
ecoevojobs.net
The new album from @themountaingoats.bsky.social is out today and I am seeing them a week from Monday and that means I only have 10 days to study and frankly I am worried that is not enough ....
Thrilled to finally have a preprint for this work with @gbaucom.bsky.social, Stephen Johnson, Art Weis, and @stepheniwright.bsky.social. Hesperis is a charming plant with a nifty genome and I really enjoyed taking a deep dive into its repeatome!
bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · 2mo agoThe Dynamics of Long Terminal Repeat Proliferation in the Hesperis matronalis Genome https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.16.739001v1
Very proud of my employer HudsonAlpha leading a newly awarded NSF ENGINE grant!! I've been seeing updates from the application process for years and the amount of work and thought and dedication that went into this is incredible. www.nsf.gov/news/nsf-awa...
NSF awards 12 new Regional Innovation Engines to fuel research, jobs and economic growth nationwide
The U.S. National Science Foundation announced it awarded the newest NSF Regional Innovation Engines (NSF Engines) awards to 12 U.S. teams across 20 states. These NSF Engines will build and scale…
nsf.gov
The CBC version has a better account of the artist and the imagery she used, which included a raised fist for Black Lives Matter: www.cbc.ca/news/canada/... Kind of a weird omission on the NYT's part ...
U.S.-inspired World Cup beaver statue in Toronto destroyed, police investigating | CBC News
A United States-themed beaver sculpture designed to welcome World Cup tourists to downtown Toronto was destroyed over the weekend, prompting a police investigation and indignation from the U.S. ambass...
cbc.ca
Artologica aka Michele Banks @artologica.net · 3mo agoHappy Canada Day!
Looking forward to #Evolution2026! If you're there, come say hi! Or better yet, come here my talk on Tuesday in collaboration with the phenomenal @avril-m-harder.bsky.social on why pangenome graphs are a lifesaver for evolutionarily important structural variation!
@trevormugoya.bsky.social did a quick test on indexing a large plant genome: minibwa: real 8m59.243s user 20m16.834s sys 1m18.394s bwa-mem2: real 30m33.378s user 28m13.661s sys 2m10.261s Well dang! Life changing - thank you, @lh3lh3.bsky.social!
HHeng Li@lh3lh3.bsky.social · 3mo ago
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
Recipe for a Good π. How to Properly Estimate Population Genetics Summary Statistics and Why we Should Systematically Report Them academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...
A Recipe for a Good π. How to Properly Estimate Population Genetics Summary Statistics and Why we Should Systematically Report Them
Abstract. Many long-standing questions in population genomics can now be addressed through comparative analyses and by leveraging the vast amount of genomi
academic.oup.com
I'm confused ... I thought we were doing "speedrun the 20th century" but this feels more "speedrun the 19th"??
Robert Downen@robertdownen.bsky.social · 3mo agoThe Texas GOP just brought an elephant into the convention hall and it apparently pissed all over the place
I wish @themountaingoats.bsky.social would come back to Canada one of these days.
For a period of a couple of years during the 2010s I was employed regularly by cattle to shoot the covers for the albums they had recorded. It was always wonderfully inspiring to witness the love, hard work and passion they had put into their music and I think that comes through in the photos.
It's legitimately hard and unfair and preserves a legacy of colonialism that a lot of biological nomenclature and taxonomy is in Greek and Latin. However as a former Classics major it is so much FUN. Like, I am always seeing these paper titles in journal TOCs with "Swordbearer!" and "Tiny spear!"
Joanna Rifkin they/them@joannarifkin.bsky.social · 4mo agoThe existence of this subgenus (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorsilo...) reeeally makes me think taxonomists hate people with dyslexia ...
Immigrant from the US to Canada here, and I'm not sure any US state hates its biggest city as much as Ontario hates Toronto ...
Tim Carmody@tcarmody.bsky.social · 4mo agoWhat US state hates its own biggest city the most? I am biased because I grew up there, but I don't think anybody beats Detroit vs. the rest of Michigan
