Kieran Samuk

@ksamuk.bsky.social

Assistant Professor in the EEOB Department at UC Riverside. Studying evolution and recombination using genomics. 🍁🔬🖥️. samuklab.com

"How two hybridizing monkeyflowers resist phenotypic homogenization" I'm very happy to share this. We would really appreciate your feedback!

Slide with the title and authors list of a manuscript along with illustrations of the monkeyflowers Mimulus guttatus (left) and Mimulus glaucescens (right). In the background, a Manhattan plot with outlier loci and QTL locations.
Title: Maintenance of phenotypic divergence in two sympatric monkeyflowers with weak reproductive isolation
Authors: Henry Arenas-Castro, Cage Cochran, Quinn Evans, Hongfei Chen, Jenn M. Coughlan
Manuscript: bioRxiv, 10.64898/2026.07.28.741377
Jenn Coughlan@jenncoughlan.bsky.social · 3d ago

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...

Excited to share our new paper on genetic differentiation in Atlantic silversides! We investigated how genome structure influences adaptation under varying levels of gene flow using a species-specific reference genome and multiple recombination maps. Read on for insights! doi.org/10.1093/molb... 1/7

Genetic differentiation is constrained to chromosomal inversions and putative centromeres in locally adapted populations with higher gene flow

Abstract. The impact of genome structure on adaptation is a growing focus in evolutionary biology, revealing an important role for structural variation and

doi.org

An important point getting overlooked: When NIH cancels "diversity" grants (e.g., diversity supplements, Fs, Ks, etc), they aren't canceling the grants based on *what* the grant studies. They're cancelling them based on *who* is doing the research. And that disallowed "who" is anyone not white.

A new tool, vcfsim, developed by Paimon Goulart, a stellar undergraduate researcher in my lab! vcfsim allows for the quick and easy simulation (via parameterized msprime simulations) of "all-sites" vcfs, with arbitrary ploidy and amounts of missing data. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

vcfsim: flexible simulation of all-sites VCFs with missing data

VCFs are the most widely used data format for encoding genetic variation. By design, standard VCFs do not include data from sites where all individuals are homozygous for the reference allele ("invari...

biorxiv.org

@ksamuk.bsky.social pointed this out on the other site, but I don't see much discussion here. GATK will now encode missing genotypes as "0/0", or homozygous ref, instead of "./." in VCF files. To identify sites with missing data, you'll have to check the DP field.

GenotypeGVCFs and the death of the dot

If you have been keeping up with our GATK release notes, then you know that we have been rolling out a number of backend changes, tools, and features to GATK that we are hoping will improve the eff...

gatk.broadinstitute.org