A really cool preprint from Joanna Wysocka's lab showing that housekeeping genes use distal enhancers as dosage buffers against TF fluctuations, but only during critical cell fate transitions. Makes so much sense! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Enhancer buffering protects dosage-sensitive housekeeping genes during vulnerable developmental transitions

Housekeeping genes maintain robust expression across cell types despite dynamic transcription factor fluctuations, yet their haploinsufficiency is associated with many tissue-specific developmental di...

biorxiv.org

Woolfe et al, 2026. Decoding the mystery of ultra-conservation in developmental enhancers: a role for nucleosome positioning, DNA structure and transcription factor binding www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... ▶️conserved non-coding elements ... favor nucleosome occupancy at their borders

Excited to announce that this fall I'm starting my lab at the University of South Carolina! Our hybrid wet/dry lab will explore fundamental topics in animal evolution, looking at how different evolutionary processes combine quantitatively [pleiotropic conflicts, mutation bias, etc.].

Jana is an incredible scientist and mentor. I’m excited to see her lab’s work in the coming years, and it has been an absolute privilege to work with her. I highly encourage you to check out her lab!

Jana Helsen@helsenjana.bsky.social · 3w ago

I am starting my lab at the University of Geneva next January! Incredibly excited to soon be joining the MOCEL department as an Asst. Professor. The lab will use evolutionary cell biology to study chromosomes, centromeres & speciation 🧬🔬🌱 Intrigued, want to join or collaborate? 🔗 helsenlab.org

Jana is great. Join her group!

Jana Helsen@helsenjana.bsky.social · 3w ago

I am starting my lab at the University of Geneva next January! Incredibly excited to soon be joining the MOCEL department as an Asst. Professor. The lab will use evolutionary cell biology to study chromosomes, centromeres & speciation 🧬🔬🌱 Intrigued, want to join or collaborate? 🔗 helsenlab.org

Our preprint is now out in @natgenet.nature.com ! doi.org/10.1038/s415... We measured Sox2 promoter bursting dynamics with the SCR enhancer positioned at different distances within a genomic locus devoid of confounding effects in mESC: Main findings in the 🧵 below:

Enhancer control of promoter activity and variability via frequency modulation of clustered transcriptional bursts - Nature Genetics

Tünnermann et al. use live-cell imaging to study promoter activity under the control of an enhancer inserted at different genomic distances. RNA production from the promoter occurs in clusters of tran...

doi.org

Luca Giorgetti lab @FMI@lucagiorgetti.bsky.social · last yr.

Celebrating 10 years of our lab with a new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How does enhancer location within a TAD control transcriptional bursts from a cognate promoter? Experiments by Jana Tünnermann and modelling by Gregory Roth

Thrilled to share that our ENCODE enhancer–gene mapping paper is now out in Nature! An encyclopedia of human enhancer–gene regulatory interactions: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Thread 👇 1/

An encyclopedia of human enhancer–gene regulatory interactions - Nature

An encyclopedia of more than 92 million enhancer–gene regulatory interactions created as part of the ENCODE4 project provides a valuable resource for future studies of gene regulation and human geneti...

nature.com

The @cbank.bsky.social lab is going 🚄 to #MMEE2026 in Cork next week! @ayalopjulio.bsky.social will present Thursday afternoon on hybrid incompatibilities, and @lorhab.bsky.social will present Wednesday afternoon on the repeatability of adaptation (1/3)

Composing a decision letter and deciding on reviewer comments to be addressed/overruled is THE single most important task for which we have editors, IMO. If you get a decision from a journal with zero guidance and a laundry list of unreasonable reviewer demands, the journal editor has FAILED.

📣 #JobAlert The Faculty of Biology of @uni-freiburg.de invites applications for a Professorship (W3) for Bioinformatics and Molecular Genetics. ❗ Application Deadline: 15 August, 2026 🔗 kurzlinks.de/roi8 #Biology #Bioinformatics #MolecularGenetics

Repetitive sequence material shapes the earliest stages of de novo gene evolution in insects https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.07.736878v1

My first work from my postdoctoral research in Andreas Wagner’s lab at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, is now available as a preprint. Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Negative Autoregulation Promotes the Evolution of Strong Environmental Switching

Living systems rely on gene regulatory circuits to respond to environmental change. Such circuits often act as molecular switches: OFF in the absence of a cue, and ON in its presence. We do not know h...

biorxiv.org

During my postdoc I was trying to move to a new area, my supervisor said: you have to go to a conference, it's the only way to learn what they are thinking and what the key questions are. He was completely right. Science is a collective and social human pursuit, not a bunch of pdfs online

Last chance to apply !

Charles Mullon@charlesmullon.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Applications now open for the UNIL Summer School on Modelling for Evolutionary Biology (31 Aug–5 Sep 2026, Lausanne)! For PhD & postdocs interested in formal approaches to evolutionary ecology (incl. social evo, life-history, species interactions). Scholarships available, Pls RP! shorturl.at/fo1GA

Bacteria that evolve antibiotic resistance epigenetically in cows 🐮?!!? If you're at #SMBE2026 , listen to group member Adamandia (Mado) Kapopoulou's ✨flash talk ✨ at 14:20 on Tue (30th) in Session 3 (Lumbye room).

PhD candidate @wachalak.bsky.social from our department will be presenting at #SMBE2026 in Session 15: "Detecting selection and local adaptation on (im)possible systems". Listen to her ✨flash talk✨ "Detecting local adaptation within chromosomal inversions" on Wed the 1st of July at 11:10.

Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution@official-smbe.bsky.social · 2mo ago

#SMBE2026 S15: Detecting selection and local adaptation on (im)possible system 🗓️ Wed Jul 1, 10:20am 🔗 smbe2026.org/programme

I know it seems like a heretical idea, but one way to figure out if a preprint is really interesting (to you) is... to read the preprint. Then, in the spirit of sharing, send a note to authors: a simple kudos or a more detailed question. I do this a dozen times a year. It's awesome. Try it.

Congrats @zacharybailey.bsky.social and all co-authors involved!

Theoretical Ecology and Evolution (THEE) Group@thee-bank-lab.bsky.social · last mo.

Congrats to @zacharybailey.bsky.social on his new preprint which show that phages can stabilize coexistence between competing bacteria cultures🧫🦠, but temperature fluctuations 🌡️ (like this heat wave 🥵 we are currently experiencing in Europe 🌍) can weaken these interactions!

Can we take a moment to appreciate the rendering of transposable elements as mischievous little scamps in this Medeiros et al paper? acsess.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... #PlantScience

📢 We are looking for a Junior Group Leader to join us at @institutcurie.bsky.social! Having joined the department just over a year ago, I can honestly say that it is an exceptionally stimulating and supportive scientific environment, filled with outstanding colleagues — all in the heart of Paris.

The University of Bern's features the "Treasure Chest project", which uses real-world scenarios to teach stats to bio students. Our collaborator Stephan Peischl @spei.bsky.social connects genetics to epidemiology, bringing statistics to life! Article (in DE) in the link below:

Die Schatztruhe macht Statistik lebendig

Das Programm «IMPULS: LEHRE» fördert innovative Lehrprojekte an der Uni Bern. Eines davon ist die «Schatztruhe».

uniaktuell.unibe.ch

Guys, it’s working!!!

Zeke Hausfather@zekehausfather.com · 2mo ago

Global CO2 emissions have plateaued since 2013, leading to a slower growth in atmospheric CO2 than would have otherwise been the case. In a new analysis at The Climate Brink, I've taken look at what would have happened if emissions had continued to grow: www.theclimatebrink....

New paper out in Evolution 🧫🧬 doi.org/10.1093/evol... with a pretty big crew & @stelkens.bsky.social ! Story started over 20 years ago, fun to jump in late and help wrap it up :)

Adaptive Benefits of Hybridization in Saccharomyces Yeast are Constrained by Genomic Background and Depend on Temperature

Abstract. Climate change urges us to better understand and predict evolutionary responses to temperature shifts. Hybridization, by increasing genetic varia

doi.org

#Bugsky 🐙🌿 Shared with me by a fof in SoCal - this is a gynandromorph (both male & female) valley carpenter bee (Xylocopa sonorina). Females are black, males orange, so the extreme color dimorphism really stands out. Per Doug Yanega at UC Riverside, bee gynandromorphs he’s seen are mosaic instead—

🧨 New publication out (I think this one is 🌶️ ): Cerca & @stelkens.bsky.social - "The identity crisis of speciation genomics". academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...

Happy pride month 🏳️‍🌈 PhD candidate, @lorhab.bsky.social from the group was recently on the radio with Radio Bern (RABE) to talk about the network Queer UniBE, an LGBTQ+ organization for staff at the University of Bern (session starts ~19 minutes, German only): rabe.ch/beitrag/20-0... (post 1/2)

«Wir Iraner*innen befinden uns hierzulande in der Schwebe»

6.48

rabe.ch

"intragenic promoters that we found occur more often on the antisense strands of these genes" Wow, cool. The compactness of bacterial genomes continues to amaze me. #MicroSky #Ecoli #microbiology Fig S2C:

Timothy Fuqua@timothyfuqua.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Our study comparing promoter existence and emergence in random vs genomic DNA is finally published!!! TLDR: the E. coli genome has more promoters than random DNA (even in intergenic regions), and promoters emerge ~3x more readily from random DNA than genomic DNA. (1/2)

Our study comparing promoter existence and emergence in random vs genomic DNA is finally published!!! TLDR: the E. coli genome has more promoters than random DNA (even in intergenic regions), and promoters emerge ~3x more readily from random DNA than genomic DNA. (1/2)

De novo promoters emerge more readily from random DNA than from genomic DNA

Promoters emerge three times more readily from random DNA than from genomic DNA.

science.org

Our study comparing promoter existence and emergence in random vs genomic DNA is finally published!!! TLDR: the E. coli genome has more promoters than random DNA (even in intergenic regions), and promoters emerge ~3x more readily from random DNA than genomic DNA. (1/2)

De novo promoters emerge more readily from random DNA than from genomic DNA

Promoters emerge three times more readily from random DNA than from genomic DNA.

science.org

Happy to share that our preprint is now out! We discuss how Synthetic Biology can be used as a powerful tool to answer questions in evolutionary biology. We hope it will be a useful resource for the community! With @3xueying.bsky.social and @hhydrochaerus.bsky.social ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...