Tyler Kent

@tylervkent.bsky.social

Postdoc @ University of Chicago Ecology & Evolution Evolutionary genomics mostly

"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 · 6d 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...

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Beyond providing insight into the centromere paradox, this work demonstrates that complete chromosome reconstruction is now possible from wild-caught flies, opening new opportunities for population, functional, and quantitative genomics in Drosophila. Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A conserved architectural domain shapes centromere evolution in Drosophila

Centromeres ensure faithful chromosome segregation despite being embedded within rapidly evolving repetitive DNA, a contradiction known as the centromere paradox. While centromere identity is defined ...

biorxiv.org

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

Avocados come in 2 varieties - A-types start each day female and switch to male midday. B-types do the reverse. In work just published from the last chapter of my PhD, we show this system evolved 40+million yrs ago and is regulated by alleles of 1 transcription factor www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Balanced polymorphism in a floral transcription factor underlies the ancient rhythm of daily sex alternation in avocado | PNAS

In avocado and certain wild relatives in Lauraceae, a highly synchronized daily rhythm of floral sex timing promotes cross-pollination between two ...

pnas.org

We are deeply saddened to share that Michael Freeling passed away on 7/20/2026 after a year-long battle with cancer. Our deepest condolences go to his family, friends, colleagues, and the many students he inspired. We will share additional memorial information soon.

We are very sorry to share the sad news that Michael Freeling passed away on 7/20/2026 after a year long battle with esophageal cancer.  Mike was a long-time faculty member in the Plant and Microbiology Department at University of California-Berkeley, a groundbreaking plant geneticist, and an inspiring teacher and mentor to over two dozen Ph.D. students, four dozen postdocs, and countless undergraduates. He was best known for pioneering work on maize anaerobic metabolism and gene regulation, transposon biology, developmental genetics of the maize ligule, and the discovery of biased gene retention following whole-genome duplications in plants. Mike was hired by UC-Berkeley as an assistant professor straight out of graduate school in 1973, and he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1979 and to full professor in 1984. He was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1980, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1994, and won the McClintock Prize for Plant Genetics and Genome Studies in 2017. Mike taught genetics, comparative genomics and scientific reasoning to our graduate students, and he also taught a popular genetics course for non-majors that had various titles over the years but was affectionately known as “Genetics for Poets.”  Our deepest condolences go out to his family, friends and many colleagues.

How do transposons jump when they’re released from host control? I babysat two chromosomes for 2 years, making sure they are ok without most piRNAs. Here’s what we found & excited to share my 1st postdoc paper: “piRNA loss unleashes episodic transposition bursts” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

piRNA loss unleashes episodic transposition bursts

In Metazoa, transposon expression is suppressed by the piRNA pathway, and disruption of this pathway leads to rampant transposon expression. However, it remains unclear whether increased transposon ex...

biorxiv.org

Hey team - it’s looking very likely that I’ll be hiring not one but two four year postdocs! We’re a fun lab with tons of theoretical and applied pop gen projects - broadly in polyploid, conservation, and human evo. Competitive salary, sunny San Diego! Do share with your about to defend grads!

I am incredibly thrilled to announce that I will be starting as an Assistant Prof at Yale EEB in January 2027!! 🎉🎊 Stay tuned for student and postdoc openings, and please feel free to reach out to me if you are interested in eco-evo, range dynamics, species interactions, and global change! 🌐🌱🦠🧬

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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

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