Linley Sherin

Pleiotropy increases with gene age in six model multicellular eukaryotes Abstract. Fundamental traits of genes, including function, length, and Guanine-Cytosine (GC) content, all vary with gene age. Pleiotropy, where a single ge

Pleiotropy increases with gene age in six model multicellular eukaryotes
doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Now in @evolletters.bsky.social by Reese Martin and Ann T Tate

Quantitative Genetics in Natural Populations Phenotypes evolve under natural selection if, and only if, they are genetically variable. While evolutionary ecologists have long studied natural sele…

Myself and Alastair Wilson wrote an updated version of our 2016 primer to quantitative genetics in the wild: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti.... Happy to share a copy if interested. It is also on research gate

Congratulations Maria !!

Sex or growth? Life must continually balance these strategies. We forced yeast to choose and captured the trade-off in real time. Evolution rewired existing regulators and fixed them through genetic assimilation, creating specialists for sex at the cost of growth. https://www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2025.09.26.678705v1 Thrilled to finally share this seven-year story—a journey that began during my postdoc in Sophie’s lab and continued for four more years as I built my own lab in Shenzhen.

Sex or growth? Life must continually balance these strategies. We forced yeast to choose and captured the trade-off in real time. Evolution rewired existing regulators and fixed them through genetic assimilation, creating specialists for sex at the cost of growth.
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

📢 NEW GENOME ALERT

In #G3journal, @squarehare.bsky.social, @judithmank.bsky.social, and team generated a genome assembly of the Amazon guppy, Poecilia bifurca and showed how this species shares sex chromosomes with related species, albeit with substantial Y chromosome degeneration. buff.ly/lM7etkw

Hybridogenesis as an intermediate step between sexual reproduction and parthenogenesis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.19.677091v1

🚀 Check out our new review article “From Tiny Exons to Big Insights: The Expanding Field of #Microexons” now out in Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics!

doi.org/10.1146/annu...

Special thanks to @mirimiam.bsky.social, @crg.eu and @upf.edu!

Come join us in Vancouver !

The evolution of reversible plasticity in stable environments Abstract. Reversible plasticity, i.e., the ability to deconstruct phenotypic specializations based on environmental conditions, is widespread in nature. De

The evolution of reversible plasticity in stable environments
doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Now in @evolletters.bsky.social by Nicole Walasek et al.

"The main fates after gene duplication are gene loss, redundancy, subfunctionalization and neofunctionalization".

In our new review, @fedemantica.bsky.social and I argue we are missing the most prevalent one: specialization. And the same applies to alternative splicing! 1/7

tinyurl.com/45k7kbmp

Our paper showing that variation in transcription factor binding sites underlies the majority of additive genetic variance for phenotypic variation in maize is finally out!

Sadly they didn't use our suggested cover image below (made by the inimitable Andi Kur).

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

MHC Diversity Across Time and Space The article discusses the importance of genetic diversity, particularly in the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) loci, in maintaining evolution and protecting against infectious disease. We revi....

Delighted to announce our last review piece on MHC variation in space and time doi.org/10.1002/ece3.... Thanks to @Mette Lillie and Kayla King. Enjoy reading!

Defective splicing of Y-chromosome-linked gigantic genes underlies hybrid male sterility in Drosophila https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.22.655455v1

Cas13d-mediated isoform-specific RNA knockdown with a unified computational and experimental toolbox - Nature Communications The majority of human genes can produce multiple isoforms, but studying their functional relevance requires tools to target specific isoforms. Here, the authors develop a CRISPR-based exon-exon juncti...

Excited for this to be out officially! It was a great team effort and has a lot of useful tidbits for studying isoform function. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Escape from X inactivation drives sex differences and female trait variation X chromosome inactivation (XCI) partially balances gene dosage between sexes, yet expression from the inactive X (Xi) is variable across genes. In this study, we investigate whether gene-level Xi expr...

1/13 In a new preprint, we (with @xliaoyi.bsky.social‬ in the ‪@arbelharpak.bsky.social‬ lab) find that expression from the “inactivated” X (Xi) is consequential for both female-male differences in gene expression and variation among females in disease and physiology: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Protein language models reveal evolutionary constraints on synonymous codon choice Evolution has shaped the genetic code, with subtle pressures leading to preferences for some synonymous codons over others. Codons are translated at different speeds by the ribosome, imposing constrai...

This preprint from Helen Sakharova is one of the coolest things to come out of my lab: “Protein language models reveal evolutionary constraints on synonymous codon choice.” Codon choice is a big puzzle in how information is encoded in genomes, and we have a new angle. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to finally have the pre-print up for this work on evolutionary rescue from my PhD at UBC!

Previous theoretical work on the effects of negative density-dependent growth on evolutionary rescue has uncovered inconsistent results, leading to an incomplete understanding of its influence.

So happy to share that our paper on guppy colour pattern is out in @natecoevo.nature.com !

Click below for the 🧵 from first author and guppy phenotyping king @vdbijl.bsky.social

Recent studies have revealed unexpected Y chromosome diversity and suggest that the Y may play a big role in evolution. @vdbijl.bsky.social and I wrote this perspective for
@evolletters.bsky.social with a few suggestions and requests. academic.oup.com/evlett/advan... Figs by www.jacelyndesigns.com