Seeing this paper finally published feels incredibly rewarding. Prairie voles are especially interesting because their social and pair-bonding behaviors parallel questions we care about in humans.

Megan Dennis@mydennis.bsky.social · 2w ago

Our vole preprint is officially published in Cell Genomics @cellpress.bsky.social as part of the T2T special issue! www.cell.com/cell-genomic... Lead author @mabuelanin.bsky.social also built this amazing website that we hope will be a useful resource to the vole community: voles.dennislab.org 🐭

Our previously preprinted study "Influence of cis-regulatory elements on expression divergence in human segmental duplications" is now published in @genomeresearch.bsky.social! Please check it out: genome.cshlp.org/content/earl...

Megan Dennis@mydennis.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Happy to share work spearheaded by former grad student Colin Shew testing shared duplicated cis regulatory elements (CREs) using an MPRA. While we find some high effect CREs, collectively paralog differences represent modest effects accounting for observed gene expression divergence.

People see the destination and judge whether you arrived, but rarely see the effort and sacrifice it took to get there. The joy is in the journey, not just the destination. Remembering that helps us slow down, breathe, appreciate life, and show more grace to ourselves and others.

Just learned github exposes every user's public SSH keys at github.com/<username>.keys i removed one of mine, and a random throwaway account snatched it within seconds, killing the keypair for me.

It was an amazing meeting with very cool science!

🇲🇽 Leonardo Collado-Torres@lcolladotor.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Mohamed @mabuelanin.bsky.social included a super cute slide about microtus radiation (referring to new species not ☢️) 🦫🐀 They used #CiFi cifi.dennislab.org which they developed recently. Got chromosome-level scaffolds including several T2T genome 🧬 cases #BoG2026 @cshlmeetings.bsky.social

Thrilled to share that my abstract was selected for a 15-minute talk at #bog26 @cshlmeetings.bsky.social! I'll present our prairie & meadow vole assemblies using CiFi long reads, we built the first chromosome-scale diploid assemblies that fully resolve the Avpr1a duplication linked to pair bonding 🐭

I had a blast working on this paper! This was the first mammalian assembly paper using the new CiFi tech, and we combined multiple lines of evidence to verify a prairie-vole-specific duplication of Avpr1a. All methods will be open source and reproducible, enabling the community to build on them.

Megan Dennis@mydennis.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Excited so share our newest study using a single-library HiFi-CiFi approach to generate chromosome-scale diploid assemblies of two vole genomes, identifying putative drivers of divergent pair-bonding behavior, namely a prairie-vole-specific duplication of Avpr1a gene, led by @mabuelanin.bsky.social

Age verification? My first game was "↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → X O".

stealingsand@stealingsand.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Age verification? I made websites in Netscape Navigator 😂 not a flex on OP but this brought back memories

One of the most-viewed PNAS articles in the last week is “Tattoo ink induces inflammation in the draining lymph node and alters the immune response to vaccination.” Explore the article here: https://ow.ly/zhn450XGvmW For more trending articles, visit https://ow.ly/7BgF50XGvmV.

🎉🎉🎉

Megan Dennis@mydennis.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Excited to share our final accepted version of the CiFi method out today: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I watched a video titled “Why Smart People Struggle to Succeed” and the ideas were surprisingly accurate. Here is the breakdown:

Morning dew turned my windshield into a perfect pattern of glassy bubbles!

I did not expect to find a paper in a new graph genotyper (using colored de bruijn graphs) which quotes Maya Angelou on line 1! academic.oup.com/gigascience/...

A new paper from the lab! Work led by @drtamermansour.bsky.social and others not here on bsky. "We propose the Great Genotyper, a population-scale genotyping workflow to address the N+1 problem."

The Great Genotyper: a graph-based method for population genotyping of small and structural variants

Long-read sequencing (LRS) enables high-quality structural variant (SV) discovery. SV genotypers utilize these precise call sets to improve the recall and precision of genotyping in short-read sequenc...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

That is cool! webassembly.org/news/2025-09...

Wasm 3.0 Completed - WebAssembly

WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the...

webassembly.org

Can't say how much I love this type of education! phet.colorado.edu phet.colorado.edu/en/simulatio...

Natural Selection

Explore how organisms with different traits survive various selection agents within the environment.

phet.colorado.edu

For decades, NIH funding has fueled breakthroughs in cancer, heart disease and more. But a new policy puts progress at risk. We need Congress to oppose this abrupt change. Join me in emailing lawmakers today! #SaveNIHresearch bit.ly/4hxmfsK

Protect research funding

Federal funding for biomedical research is under threat.

bit.ly

not paying indirect costs for research is like only paying the players in the Super Bowl. can't have a Super Bowl without coaches, referees, security, janitors, announcers, stadium staff, and a stadium - and you can't have research without supporting people and facilities

🚨 Keynotes at RECOMB-seq 2025! 🚨 🌟 Alicia Oshlack – computational transcriptomics @aliciao.bsky.social 🌟 Rayan Chikhi – sequencing data structures @rayanchikhi.bsky.social 🗓️ Dates: April 24–25, 2025 📍 Seoul, South Korea recomb-seq.github.io/speakers/

American science and medicine has been thrown into chaos and uncertainty over the past week. Here are some stories to get up to speed. 1/12

If you’re in the US and you’d like to know what projects and vital services federal grants currently fund in your state, you can search here: www.usaspending.gov And you can find the contact information for your elected representatives here: www.usa.gov/elected-offi... They need to hear from you.

Significant performance improvement in de-hashing sourmash signatures. Looking for 100k hash in 1.4B Reads using 32-cores took 2:30hrs and 95MB RAM.

GitHub - mr-eyes/sourmash_plugin_dehash: Dehash sourmash signatures

Dehash sourmash signatures. Contribute to mr-eyes/sourmash_plugin_dehash development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Wow! I Am not sure they were waiting for permission, tho.

Woman’s Ancestry DNA kit identifies cold case victim, leading to her grandma’s arrest

A suspect in the ‘Baby Garnet’ case has been found 27 years later, thanks to one woman’s Ancestry DNA results

independent.co.uk

I couldn't be more thrilled to be part of this amazing lab!

Megan Dennis@mydennis.bsky.social · 2y ago

Hello bluesky friends! I'm excited to introduce myself. I go by (mee-gun) and am a proud #firstgen college grad that grew up in the midwest. My lab @UCDavis studies genetic drivers of human traits, evolution, and diseases, with an emphasis on neurodevelopment and complex variation. 1/10 (buckle up)

I'm delighted to release the first half of my new textbook in human genetics: web.stanford.edu/group/pritch... "An Owner's Guide to the Human Genome: an introduction to human population genetics, variation and disease"

It was an extraordinary meeting full of exciting talks and interesting research!

Adam Phillippy@aphillippy.bsky.social · 2y ago

T2T-F2F 2024 is a wrap! Great to hear about the new discoveries being enabled by complete genomes, and to meet so many new, enthusiastic T2T’ers. Thanks for the great meeting @khmiga.bsky.social @ucscgenomics.bsky.social !! 🎉

ChatGPT has acquired a new procrastination skill.

🚀🚀

bioRxiv Bioinfo@biorxiv-bioinfo.bsky.social · 2y ago

Where the patterns are: repetition-aware compression for colored de Bruijn graphs https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.09.602727v1

🎉🎉🎉

medRxivpreprint@medrxivpreprint.bsky.social · 2y ago

The Great Genotyper: A Graph-Based Method for Population Genotyping of Small and Structural Variants https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.04.24309921v1

I am pleased to announce that I am joining the Dennis Lab as a postdoc. Very excited to be working with @mydennis.bsky.social!