New preprint on the effect of ancient admixture / structure on genealogical trees. I introduce a new way of summarising reconstructed genealogies that captures a clear signal of ancient gene flow into the ancestors of modern humans. Feedback welcome!

bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology@biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 3w ago

The distribution of integer partitions in human genome-wide genealogies reflects gene flow from a super-archaic lineage https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.14.738421v1

How do coevolutionary interactions begin in nature, and what are the first steps of reciprocal adaptation? Our preprint investigates these questions in a natural experiment: an introduced cricket (T. oceanicus) and its acoustically hunting parasitoid (O. ochracea) in Hawaii. shorturl.at/7llsA 1/n

Ecological genomics of a novel host-parasitoid arms-race in nature

Novel antagonistic interactions between species are expected to drive especially rapid coevolution. However, little is known about the genomic basis of such coevolution in nature because novel inter-s...

shorturl.at

The June 2026 cover of GBE features our newest Perspective by Brault et al., who propose guidelines and best practices for calculating population genetics summary statistics. 🔗 academic.oup.com/gbe/issue/18/6 #genome #evolution #societyjournal

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

Computing coalescence rates for complex demographies and sampling configurations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.09.717519v1

PREPRINT ALERT! Determinants of chromosomal rearrangements in holocentric Leptidea butterflies www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Massive #chromosome reshuffling in Leptidea #butterflies reveals how satellite DNA, rDNA, and duplications—not #transposons, shape the architecture of #genomeevolution.

diempy: fast and reference-free genome polarisation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.18.706591v1

The genetic architecture of local adaptation is historically contingent https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.01.703099v1

New paper out: “allopatric” Drosophila species aren’t so allopatric after all. We show that most currently allopatric species pairs probably overlapped in the past and exchanged genes at levels similar to sympatric pairs. @evolletters.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/evle... [1/6]

Genomic analyses in Drosophila do not support the classic allopatric model of speciation

Abstract. The allopatric model of speciation has dominated our understanding of speciation biology and biogeography since the Modern Synthesis. It is uncon

doi.org

Hit me up if you'd like to apply to a Data-driven postdoc fellowship with me in Sweden. 2 year salary, excellent community. Deadline March 31. I have a project idea on reference bias vs pangenome, but keen on hearing ideas. Please share broadly. www.scilifelab.se/data-driven/...

DDLS Research School Postdoc call 2026

Call for Academic and Industrial Postdoctoral Fellowships in Data-Driven Life Science 2026 Generic Description of the DDLS Postdoc Program The SciLifeLab and Wallenberg National Program for Data-Drive...

scilifelab.se

I'm excited to share that our preprint is now available on bioRxiv! Our study challenges the widespread use of molecular genetic diversity as a predictor adaptive potential, with important implications for how genetic data is used to inform conservation decisions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Nucleotide diversity is a poor predictor of short-term adaptive potential

A capacity to adapt is essential for a population to avoid extinction in a changing world and is recognised as a global conservation priority. Adaptation requires additive (heritable) genetic variatio...

biorxiv.org

Congratulations to the winners of the 2025 Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament challenges! Among the 9 challenges, we had five winners: @alwaysrong.bsky.social, @adaigle.bsky.social, @andrewhvaughn.bsky.social, @thymelicus.bsky.social, @rgollnisch.bsky.social

We are excited to share our recent work on the surprising robustness of Ancestral Recombination Graph (ARG) inference tools to computational phasing errors, now available on BioRxiv: biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... This work is co-advised by @yundeng.bsky.social and Rasmus Nielsen. 1/7

Robustness of Ancestral Recombination Graph Inference Tools to Phasing Errors

Ancestral Recombination Graphs (ARGs) are fundamental population genetic structures that encode the genealogical history of a sample of haplotypes along the genome. They have recently received substan...

biorxiv.org

Very happy to announce that the next POPGROUP meeting will take place in Lille on 7-9 January ! Follow ‪@popgroup2026.bsky.social for all updates. 📢 Please share widely ! 📢‬

POPGROUP59@popgroup2026.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Exciting news! The next #PopGroup meeting will take place in Lille 🍟, France, 7–9 January 2026 – just 1 hour by train from London, Brussels, and Paris. This year, PopGroup will also host ALPHY, the annual meeting of Evolutionary Genomics. More info: populationgeneticsgroup.org.uk See you there !

🚨New paper out in PNAS🚨 Soil eDNA reflects regionally dominant species rather than local composition of tropical tree communities 🧬🌿🌳🌺🧬 We asked about the spatial scale of biodiversity captured by samples of DNA from tropical soils #Luquillo #eDNA. A short 🧵.... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A model-free method for genealogical inference without phasing and its application for topology weighting https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.22.666161v1

Our new work on estimation of background selection (BGS) is up on bioRxiv. We investigated the problem using simulations and also developed a method for joint inference of BGS, demography and partial selfing from windowed site frequency spectra along the genome. Feedback is welcome. #BGS

bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology@biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · last yr.

Estimating the reduction in genetic diversity from background selection under non-equilibrium demography and partial selfing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.30.662370v1

Our new work on estimation of background selection (BGS) is up on bioRxiv. We investigated the problem using simulations and also developed a method for joint inference of BGS, demography and partial selfing from windowed site frequency spectra along the genome. Feedback is welcome. #BGS

bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology@biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · last yr.

Estimating the reduction in genetic diversity from background selection under non-equilibrium demography and partial selfing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.30.662370v1

#PopGen New preprint of the team on the discovery of a very high rate of polymorphic duplication in a marine bivalve. Imagine looking at the distribution of the allelic coverage fraction at heterozygous calls in an indivdual and getting this distribution 👇 😱😱😱

Speciation genomics in scarce swallowtails Iphiclides podalirius and I . feisthamelii : dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Genomic regions of current low hybridisation mark long-term barriers to gene flow in scarce swallowtail butterflies

Author summary Efforts to understand how new species evolve typically approach the problem through either: 1) investigating patterns of genetic exchange across ‘hybrid zones’ — where closely related s...

dx.plos.org

The 229 chromosomes of the Atlas blue butterfly reveal rules constraining chromosome evolution in Lepidoptera https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.14.642909v1

Likelihoods for a general class of ARGs under the SMC https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.24.639977v1

🚨Registration open🚨 1st - 6th of June, me, Katie Jenike, @rayanchikhi.bsky.social and Gene Myers will run a week long workshop on k-mers for biodiversity genomics organised by @connectingscience.bsky.social at @sangerinstitute.bsky.social. Join us & get equipped to wrestle large genomic datasets!

My and Derek Setter's work on gene flow is now published in the latest issue of Genetics. We show that it is possible to detect past gene flow between two populations by summarising the asymmetry in pop-specific external branch lengths. 1/2 tinyurl.com/5ff8ch9e

Genealogical asymmetry under the isolation with migration model and a two-taxon test for gene flow

Abstract. Methods for detecting gene flow between populations often rely on asymmetry in the average length of particular genealogical branches, with the A

tinyurl.com

A new case of hybrid speciation? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...