Antiviral reverse transcriptases reveal the evolutionary origin of telomerase Defense-associated reverse transcriptases (DRTs) employ diverse and distinctive mechanisms of cDNA synthesis to protect bacteria against viral infection. However, much of DRT family diversity remains ...

1/10 Genome maintenance by telomerase is a fundamental process in nearly all eukaryotes. But where does it come from?

Today, we report the discovery of telomerase homologs in a family of antiviral RTs, revealing an unexpected evolutionary origin in bacteria.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

From genotype to phenotype with 1,086 near telomere-to-telomere yeast genomes Nature - A newly compiled atlas of species-wide structural variants and gene-based and graph pangenomes derived from highly complete assemblies of genomes from 1,086 natural isolates enable...

Incredible new paper from @schacherer.bsky.social et al rdcu.be/eLcTH

How To Reproduce As A Plant

How To Reproduce As A Plant

#Plants #Botany #Angiosperms #Evolution #Reproduction

https://sciencehumor.io/biology-memes/how-to-reproduce-as-a-plant-zfkw

This tiny butterfly has the most chromosomes of any animal on Earth Scientists have confirmed that the Atlas blue butterfly carries the most chromosomes of any animal, with 229 pairs. Unlike duplication, its chromosomes split apart, reshaping its genome in surprising ...

Homie got 229 pairs of chromosomes

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

Collateral mutagenesis funnels multiple sources of DNA damage into a ubiquitous mutational signature Mutations reflect the net effects of myriad types of damage, replication errors, and repair mechanisms, and thus are expected to differ across cell types with distinct exposures to mutagens, division ...

In these dark times, it comes as a rare pleasure to highlight @natanaels.bsky.social ‬ & @marcdemanuel.bsky.social's work on germline and somatic mutations in humans. 1/n
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Out after peer review, collaborative study from Nordborg & Weigel labs with help from many others. Not the largest collection of new Arabidopsis thaliana genomes, but we hopefully put forward some good ideas for how to think about pangenomes and their analysis!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How can England possibly be running out of water? While famously rainswept, climate crisis, population growth and profligacy mean the once unthinkable could be possible

How can England possibly be running out of water? | Water | The Guardian share.google/M8qhPxIx3zIg...

1/ How do animals develop immunity against a newly encountered transposable element from scratch? Our study reveals that the mobility of TEs is their Achilles heel, allowing hosts to develop a powerful small RNA-mediated silencing response.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Rapid polygenic adaptation in a wild population of ash trees under a novel fungal epidemic Rapid evolution through small shifts in allele frequencies at thousands of loci is a long-standing neo-Darwinian prediction but is hard to characterize in the wild. European ash tree (Fraxinus excelsi...

Just out in Science: we demonstrate a micro-evolutionary shift in a single generation, involving thousands of genomic loci, giving younger ash trees more resistance to ash dieback, on average, than their parents
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp2990

Bimodal centromeres in pentaploid dogroses shed light on their unique meiosis - Nature Insights into the dogrose genome and centromeres explain their ability to achieve stable sexual reproduction.

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I am very excited to announce our🌹NEW PAPER OUT IN 𝑁𝐴𝑇𝑈𝑅𝐸!🌹
𝐃𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐒𝐔𝐑𝐕𝐈𝐕𝐄: Bimodal centromeres in pentaploid dogroses shed light on their unique meiosis
With the Ritz and Kovařík labs we show a potential role for centromeres on 𝘙𝘰𝘴𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘢 bizarre reproduction!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Antagonism as a foraging strategy in microbial communities In natural habitats, nutrient availability limits bacterial growth. We discovered that bacteria can overcome this limitation by acquiring nutrients by lysing neighboring cells through contact-dependen...

Thrilled to share our new paper in @science.org describing our discovery that bacteria can switch from competitors to bonafide predators when resources run dry—arming nanoscale “spears” (T6SS) to stab & consume neighbours.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#MicroSKy #Microbiology

Life-history trade-offs explain local adaptation in Arabidopsis thaliana https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.18.654693v1

Excited to share our work on using pathway-specific polygenic scores to discover gene-environment interactions www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

. @pnas.org just published the final version of our manuscript on how generation time and effective population size interact to shape vertebrate germline mutation rates, led by Luke Zhu and Annabel Beichman: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Suppression of plastid-to-nucleus gene transfer by DNA double-strand break repair - Nature Plants Inactivation of double-strand break repair pathways greatly increases the integration of plastid DNA into the nuclear genome of tobacco plants, highlighting the mutagenic potential of organellar DNA a...

New research by @egonzalezduran.bsky.social shows that DSB repair suppresses gene transfer from chloroplasts to nucleus. With DSB repair impaired, transfer rates jump 20× — revealing how plants protect genome stability, with lessons beyond plant biology. Read: nature.com/articles/s41477-025-02005-w

Single-cell transcriptomics reveal how root tissues adapt to soil stress Nature - Single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomic approaches reveal major expression changes in outer root cell types when grown in soil versus gel conditions, and also uncover how...

I'm so very excited to see this out - a single cell and spatial transcriptomic analysis in the rice root reveals mechanisms by which roots can respond to different below-ground growth conditions - including compaction. Congratulations to everyone for persisting in difficult times. rdcu.be/ej8Ui

Awesome new paper by @lucalivraghi.bsky.social et al.
doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...
in @currentbiology.bsky.social
on the evo-devo of a butterfly color variation

enjoy the show!

It’s 🌿International Plant Appreciation Day🌿, so here’s a Corydalis melanochlora from the Hengduan Mountains. I can’t stop praising my favorite alpine flora 🥰
#LetsGoPlants #IamaBotanist

hungry hungry rhinos

Turnover of retroelements and satellite DNA drives centromere reorganization over short evolutionary timescales in Drosophila Centromeres reside in rapidly evolving, repeat-rich genomic regions, despite their essential function in chromosome segregation. This study of centromere evolution over short evolutionary timescales i...

Our new paper on the rapid evolution of centromeres in Drosophila is out! 🚀 Discover how transposable elements and satellite DNAs shape centromere dynamics and drive karyotype evolution over short timescales. @amlarracuente.bsky.social 🌟 Check it out here: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Haploid facultative parthenogenesis in sunflower sexual reproduction - Nature Spontaneous parthenogenesis in sunflower has been used to develop a scalable doubled haploid breeding system.

Nature research paper: Haploid facultative parthenogenesis in sunflower sexual reproduction

https://go.nature.com/4hYpSY3

A structured coalescent model reveals deep ancestral structure shared by all modern humans - Nature Genetics The cobraa model extends the pairwise sequentially Markovian coalescent to identify structured population history by examination of the model transition matrix. Applied to human polymorphism data, cob...

Our paper on ancient human population structure is now published. We find that the ancestors of modern humans lived in multiple populations during the period when Homo sapiens evolved in Africa. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Drosophila follicle showing retrotransposons (pink & yellow) expressed in somatic cells infecting the oocyte

1/ Transposable elements are often called "jumping genes" because they mobilize within genomes. 🧬
But did you know they can also jump 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 cells? 🤯
Our new study reveals how retrotransposons invade the germline directly from somatic cells.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A short thread 🧵👇

Award details | Funding and scholarships for students | University of Exeter

We have a funded PhD position available in Exeter @exeter.ac.uk
Gene Regulation in Brain Development and Disease 🧬
Please share / repost

www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...

Excited to share a couple of new items (links below):
1. Our work on gene-environment interactions in the UKBiobank is up at the American Journal of Human Genetics
2. Our work on modeling ancient human population size history is up at Molecular Biology and Evolution

Beautiful red roses on a pink background with flowing script saying "Roses are red," Violets budding and blooming. "Violets are blue," Hydnora plants opening up looking like terrifying red mouths bursting from the hard sandy soil. "Hydnora are leafless, bizarrely fleshy, and incapable of producing chlorophyll," A splash of cute red and pink hearts. "And so are you. Happy Valentine's Day."

Botany valentine. Another from years past. New one on Monday!

CRISPR targeting of H3K4me3 activates gene expression and unlocks centromeric crossover recombination in Arabidopsis H3K4me3 is a fundamental and highly conserved chromatin mark across eukaryotes, playing a central role in many genome-related processes, including transcription, maintenance of cell identity, DNA dama...

Very excited to share this new preprint from the lab (shorturl.at/l7lNq)! @hendersi.bsky.social si.bsky.social @camplantsci.bsky.social

Really nice work!

Extensive genome evolution distinguishes maize within a stable tribe of grasses Over the last 20 million years, the Andropogoneae tribe of grasses has evolved to dominate 17% of global land area. Domestication of these grasses in the last 10,000 years has yielded our most product...

The consequences of polyploidy are... well, complicated. A deep dive into polyploidy in a massively successful tribe of grasses. A masterpiece led by Michelle Stitzer, representing the work of a lot of folks on the PanAnd project over last 7 years. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The outer ear is a mammalian innovation but where did it come from? In our study in Nature, Mathi Thiruppathy and colleagues find that the outer ear arose from modification of an ancestral gill program first originating in marine invertebrates. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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