Sailing in @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social ready for summer, our study on the iconic Portuguese man o' war 🪼 is out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... We use (epi)genomics to understand a critter that fascinates me since childhood. Massive team effort with @obog.bsky.social, Cummins and Neely groups. 🧵

Glad to see this out at last! Check out Arnau's summary below for all the highlights

Arnau Sebé-Pedrós@arnausebe.bsky.social · 2d ago

Happy to share the final version of our study on the evolution of chromatin states across eukaryotes, out today in @natgenet.nature.com Led by @crisnava.bsky.social and @seanamontgomery.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... Some highlights below

«La violència era, per al franquisme, i és, avui, una funció: la que encareix el preu d’eixir al carrer per als ciutadans. Qui va rebre a Palma i qui ho va veure per la televisió aprenen la mateixa cosa, que és exactament el que s’havia d’aprendre: no t’hi fiques.» www.vilaweb.cat/noticies/per...

Per què pega, la policia?

Diumenge, a Palma, setanta mil persones es van manifestar contra la saturació turística. Ni un sol incident en tot el recorregut: ho admet la policia mateixa en el seu atestat. La de diumenge va ser u...

vilaweb.cat

You see everything is connected. The marine heatwaves off the coasts of Europe make heatwaves on land more intense, which in turn dries out vegetation, which then creates perfect fire weather conditions. Brought to you by the world's refusal to drastically reduce the burning of fossil fuels.

Ongoing marine heatwave in the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea | EU Space Support Office

In late May 2026, several countries in Western Europe faced above-average temperatures. During the same period, large areas of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea also recorded above-average ...

eu-space.europa.eu

Organisms known as “extremophiles” thrive in the most brutal corners of the planet, enduring blistering temperatures, crushing pressures, and even corrosive acid. They also offer a window into life’s deep origins — and a hypothetical peek at alien biology. www.quantamagazine.org/the-organism...

The Organisms That Make Earth’s Harshest Places Home | Quanta Magazine

Extremophiles that thrive in the most unforgiving environments aren’t just biological curiosities. Understanding their resilience has many implications for us.

quantamagazine.org

Excellent preprint combining single-cell transcriptomics, symbiosis biology and evolutionary perspectives to understand coral responses to heat stress. A great example of how single-cell approaches are transforming eukaryotic biology.

Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾@xgrau.bsky.social · 2w ago

I'm happy to share our latest on #coral single-cell biology: a transcriptomic timecourse of heat stress in Stylophora pistillata, from bleaching to recovery 🪸🌊 This project was spearheaded by Shani Levy and carried through in @arnausebe.bsky.social's lab at @crg.eu. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The third chapter in our coral single-cell trilogy is here. After mapping cell type diversity in Stylophora (Levy 2021) and exploring facultative symbiosis in Oculina (Levy 2025), we now uncover cell type-specific responses to heat stress. Find out more in @xgrau.bsky.social's thread below.

Cell-resolved transcriptional responses during heat-induced coral bleaching and recovery

Coral reefs depend on an intracellular symbiosis between cnidarian hosts and photosynthetic dinoflagellates that is disrupted by ocean warming, causing coral bleaching. Yet how these responses are dis...

biorxiv.org

Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾@xgrau.bsky.social · 2w ago

I'm happy to share our latest on #coral single-cell biology: a transcriptomic timecourse of heat stress in Stylophora pistillata, from bleaching to recovery 🪸🌊 This project was spearheaded by Shani Levy and carried through in @arnausebe.bsky.social's lab at @crg.eu. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I'm happy to share our latest on #coral single-cell biology: a transcriptomic timecourse of heat stress in Stylophora pistillata, from bleaching to recovery 🪸🌊 This project was spearheaded by Shani Levy and carried through in @arnausebe.bsky.social's lab at @crg.eu. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Super excited that our paper led by @sandinmm.eurosky.social in PNAS is out! We show that crown-group eukaryotes were already taxonomically and ecologically diverse throughout the Mesoproterozoic, revealing complex communities well before the Neoproterozoic radiation. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Environmental phylogenetics supports a steady diversification of crown eukaryotes starting from the mid-Proterozoic | PNAS

Molecular clock and preservation of early microfossil assemblages suggest that eukaryotes were present and already diverse more than ~1600 million ...

pnas.org

As necessary as it is to put faces and voices to the victims of Fascism, this is too little, too late, and too partial. It comes with neither reparations nor a true reckoning with the murderous ideology that brought this about, and the very real people behind it. www.science.org/content/arti...

Spain’s largest research organization confronts its dark past

Spanish National Research Council, established under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, has published the stories of some 500 researchers and support staff purged after civil war

science.org

Hidden within the rings of ancient trees is an archive stretching back thousands of years. Today’s Essay explores the exciting discoveries dendrochronologists have made through decoding these rings. buff.ly/rmzOhXq

GOOD ARGUMENT: Have a read of this article considering whether OA has run its course - most work is published OA now, at a huge cost. "Should we re-orient our efforts towards the scholarly commons and the promise it holds for non-commercial, community-led publishing? I think so."

Jeff Pooley@jpooley.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"Even though open access was motivated partly by the desire to rein in commercial publishers' profiteering, it has in many ways simply reinforced their dominance" — @samuelmoore.org www.researchprofessionalnews....

Do you work with scRNAseq data in non-model organisms that have less-than-stellar gene annotations? ✨ 🧬 You might be interested in GeneExt, a nifty little tool by @zolotarg.bsky.social in @arnausebe.bsky.social's lab, published in #Bioinformatics earlier this year. #singlecell #transcriptomics

GeneExt: a gene model extension tool for enhanced single-cell RNA-seq analysis

AbstractMotivation. Incomplete gene models negatively impact single-cell gene expression quantification. This is particularly true in non-model species whe

academic.oup.com

Here is some weekend reading for you 👉 www.cell.com/current-biol... Our special green issue, chokeful of reviews and short-format introductory pieces on plant #evolution! 🌱🌿🌵🍃 #Plants

Leaving aside the methodological breakthroughs of this paper for an instant, it will never cease to astound me that angiosperms only appeared in (or around) the Jurassic period.

Integrated analysis of fossils and molecular divergence time estimates a latest Jurassic origin of angiosperms - Nature Plants

Using extensive fossil occurrence data and Bayesian Brownian Bridge modelling, this study derives data-driven calibration densities for molecular clocks and suggests a Late Jurassic origin of flowerin...

nature.com

Ruolin WU@ruolinwu.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Did flowering plants really spend 100 million years hiding from the fossil record? For decades, fossils and molecular clocks seemed to tell completely different stories. This became known as the "Jurassic Gap". What if the problem wasn't the fossil record?

"I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting "reviewers" with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts." More reasons not to publish in Frontiers journals 🧪 #AcademicSky

Michael Okun@michael-okun.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

“In 1979, Douglas Hofstadter speculated that a computer able to beat humans at chess would be so sophisticated that it would sometimes get bored of playing chess and prefer to discuss poetry; […] he was positing that playing chess would require a computer program to have subjective experience. …

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious

Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is absurd—and damning.

theatlantic.com

Much has been written about The Selfish Gene, and few books have been both as influential and as persistently contested. To commemorate its 50th anniversary, here are some brief thoughts in the latest issue of @science.org. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A provocative view of evolution turns 50

The Selfish Gene continues to challenge readers half a century later

science.org

Capolavoro 🎨 alert 🚨! What is the role of gene body methylation in invertebrates? Despite extensive speculation linking it to plasticity and environmental responses, its mechanistic effects and heritability remain unclear. Our take out in @natecoevo.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/

Gene body methylation suppresses intragenic transcription and permits epigenetic inheritance in a cnidarian - Nature Ecology & Evolution

Experiments in the cnidarian Nematostella vectensis show a role of gene body methylation in transposable element suppression and that epigenetic inheritance is constrained by chromatin context and tra...

nature.com

Very happy to announce a big new paper from the lab, led by grad students @smishra677.bsky.social and Laia Pomar-Pallarès (in collaboration with @roblanfear.bsky.social). We introduce a new way to study introgression, with accompanying software (DAFT) 1/n 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

“Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?” From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?

We’re hiring for OrthoFinder! Great role for someone who enjoys scientific software development: Python, data analysis, workflows, Git, scalability, and making tools nicer to use. Comparative genomics or open-source bioinformatics experience would be a lovely bonus. my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

This is awful to hear, describing how Sean Eddy (HMMER, infernal, pfam, rfam) has been defunded. The letter said his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," www.npr.org/2026/05/21/n...

Researchers say the Trump administration is finding new ways to punish science

Even with federal grants largely restored, scientists say the Trump administration is still preventing those funds from reaching them. The consequences, they say, are already becoming clear.

npr.org

GBE is launching a new Methods section dedicated to theoretical advances, methodological innovation, and critical assessments of existing approaches. academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

Editorial 2026

After one year of joint leadership by Laura A. Katz and Maud I. Tenaillon at the helm of Genome Biology and Evolution (GBE), the time has come to take stoc

academic.oup.com

GBE call for conservation #genomics papers and ... "We also encourage the submission of #genome resources for endangered and threatened species" academic.oup.com/gbe/article/... #biodiversity

Editorial 2026

After one year of joint leadership by Laura A. Katz and Maud I. Tenaillon at the helm of Genome Biology and Evolution (GBE), the time has come to take stoc

academic.oup.com

Here are my four GWAS lectures of ~20 minutes each for the International Statistical Genetics Workshop 2026. They're part of the broader workshop curriculum but also work as standalone lectures covering the basics of GWAS from the ground up. Videos are below 👇🏽

Sequence alignments are notoriously prone to error. Our latest preprint offers a new tool for filtering errors out, assesses it and other filtering tools, and recommends new best practice. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @phylowheeler.bsky.social 1/10

Improved gene tree inference from removing alignment errors both from focal genes and when training substitution models

Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) is a key step in phylogenetic analysis, and is prone to error. Unfortunately, algorithms that remove likely alignment errors from MSAs sometimes also remove informati...

biorxiv.org

Is a net growth advantage necessary for #multicellularity? We often assume groups must outperform single cells locally. But @ctarnita & colleagues show that spatial heterogeneity can drive this transition via indirect benefits www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Direct benefits are not necessary for the evolution of multicellularity - Nature Ecology & Evolution

A model for the evolution of multicellularity in a spatially heterogeneous environment shows that indirect mechanisms such as escape from competition and increased environmental exploitation can drive...

nature.com

Des de la CGT es pregunten què passarà quan hi hagi sequera: “A qui tallaran l’aigua, a la gigafactoria de Móra la Nova que ha de funcionar les 24 hores al dia o als agricultors?”

La gigafactoria d’IA de Móra la Nova consumirà l’electricitat de 180.000 llars

Davant del gran consum d'aigua i energia que tindrà el megacentre de dades de Móra la Nova, el GEPEC, Terra Alta Viva, l’Associació Sediments, Terra i pau, la CGT i Ecologistes en Acció han creat la plataforma Aturem la gigafactoria d’IA

directa.cat

Should we measure trait evolution in unit of time or in unit of substitutions? Our new paper in @evolletters.bsky.social looks at this from a theoretical perspective. #Evolution #Phylogenetics DOI: doi.org/10.1093/evle... 🧵 thread below 🧵

Phylograms better fit neutrally evolving traits than chronograms

Many species are characterized by trait differences between each other. For example, the brain size of different primate and human lineages varies. The que

doi.org