Andy Foote

Jane Goodall, Eminent Primatologist Who Chronicled the Lives of Chimps, Dies at 91

Oof, one of my heroes.

🦴🧬🦴🧬🦴

Abstract submission is now open for the 1st International Conference on Palaeogenomics!

June 23–26 2026, in Stockholm.

Join researchers from across the field for 4 days and >100 talks (+ poster sessions)!

Submit abstracts here 👉
icp2026.palaeogenomics.org/abstracts/

Deadline: Nov 30th

Exciting news!
The next #PopGroup meeting will take place in Lille 🍟, France, 7–9 January 2026 – just 1 hour by train from London, Brussels, and Paris.

This year, PopGroup will also host ALPHY, the annual meeting of Evolutionary Genomics.

More info: populationgeneticsgroup.org.uk

See you there !

I am pleased to share our new review paper detailing killer whale interactions with commercial fisheries in Frontiers in Marine Science!

www.frontiersin.org/journals/mar...

This only happens to you once

We are hiring (Post number 2) - join us as a graduate research assistant to support killer whale research. Collaboration with @samellisq.bsky.social @drwhale.bsky.social Prof Dan Franks (York) start 1st Nov (or ASAP) end 31st Oct 2028. Apps close on 19th Oct.

jobs.exeter.ac.uk/hrpr_webrecr...

This is a rare opportunity to work with an incredible dataset building on over five decades of field studies on the Southern Resident killer whale population, and led by an amazing team.

A killer whale PostDoc! 🤯😍

We are excited to share GPN-Star, a cost-effective, biologically grounded genomic language modeling framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of variant effect prediction tasks relevant to human genetics.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
(1/n)

Strong but diffuse genetic divergence underlies differentiation in an incipient species of marine stickleback https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.19.677379v1

A while back (maybe 3-4 years?) there was a paper on common misconceptions of the genetics of various traits. One of them was eye colour in humans. I have lost this reference and can't find it anywhere. Does anyone recognise what I mean?

We have a new paper out in Molecular Ecology, led by @devinbendixsen.bsky.social ! Reproductive isolation due to divergent ecological selection is accompanied by vast genomic instability in experimentally evolved yeast populations onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Robust and accurate Bayesian inference of genome-wide genealogies for hundreds of genomes - Nature Genetics SINGER is a method for creating ancestral recombination graphs to understand the genealogical history of genomes. The method has increased speed, and thus scalability, without sacrificing accuracy.

SINGER, our ARG inference method, is finally published and freely available online:

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

It was a long journey – 16 months from initial submission to acceptance. Is it just me, or has peer review gotten more arduous lately? 4+ rounds of review isn't so unusual these days...

Whales through a new lens, revisited, Part 2 Here’s my writer’s cut

This substack post by @erichhoyt.bsky.social reflects on the 1975 National Whale Symposium, describing the synthesis emerging around photo-id at that time:
substack.com/home/post/p-...

It's a wonderful read

Still possible to apply to this #post-doc position at CESAB #Montpellier.
Application closing date: September 15th 2025 (12:00 PM CET)
How taking intraspecific diversity and evolutionary processes into account in translocation-based programs.
Please share widely #PopGen #NbS #Biodiversity

Top left: Results of genome-wide association study (GWAS) for sex in E. caeruleum, E. radiosum, and E. spectabile showing sex chromosome turnover has occurred repeatedly. Top right: Phylogeny showing sex chromosome turnover in darters and non-darter percids. Chromosome 9 is the putative ancestral sex chromosome, shared by Perca flavescens and multiple members of the orangethroat darter complex (e.g., E. spectabile, E. pulchellum). Bottom: Schematic depicting repeated turnover of sex chromosomes as a mechanism to resolve mitonuclear conflict and promote speciation.

First pop gen paper from our lab! We find repeated evolutionary turn over of sex chromosomes in darters contributes to reproductive isolation. Turnover may be an escape hatch to resolve mitonuclear conflict & neo sex chromosomes evolved via a rare recessive mutation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Evolutionary success of the turtle ants through extreme trait evolution and symbiosis - Natural History Museum Dr. Corrie Moreau, Cornell University

So excited that @corriemoreau.bsky.social will be giving a tangled banks seminar at NHMO today!! www.nhm.uio.no/english/rese... join us (also on zoom!)

OOSC 2025 - Online survey for Session 10-14 - The marine connectivity science and tools we need for the ocean we want This questionnaire has been created to reach out to experts with roles and contributions to the management and/or conservation of the ocean and its resources. It explores the existing challenges and p...

Hi marine biologist folks #MarBiol 🦪🐙🪸🐟🦈🦀🦐🌱🦭🌊 Please give us 5 minutes of your time to fill this online survey on marine connectivity policy - The marine connectivity science and tools we need for the ocean we want #MarCo #MarEvol

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

If you are in Oslo join us tomorrow!

Are you interested in doing a PhD in Copenhagen? Interested in studying Neanderthals and Denisovans which live on in our genomes?
Than you are more than welcome to apply to join my group starting Jan 2026 :)

candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

Please reach out if you have any questions!

Why do males and females often differ in traits?
The expected answer: selection.
But our new paper in GENETICS shows that genetic drift alone can generate sexual dimorphism — even when male & female optima are the same

Shameless promotion from #isba11 - I'll be hiring PhDs to start early 2026 (plus postdocs starting later), using #adna to study livestock and pathogen coevolution, particularly looking at inbreeding and immune gene evolution!

Contact me at kevin[at]palaeome.org, full ad to come. Please share!

With #eseb2025 coming to a close, it is time to start making plans for 2026. Interested in the interface of evolution 🧬 and ecology 🌳? Come to our #ExE conference hosted by @uniexecec.bsky.social in beautiful #Cornwall. Leave your email address at tinyurl.com/EvolxEcol to join our mailing list!

New paper out in #ES&T where we show that killifish exposure to crude oil has impacts (on embryo/larval development and transcriptome) that propagate to their offspring and to their grand-offspring. pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....
@acs.org

I'm looking to recruit a PhD student to study patterns of local adaptation and introgression across the spruce hybrid zone in the Rockies near Calgary. Projects can include field work, bioinformatics, pop gen theory, or comparison to plant/ conifer species
yeamanlab.weebly.com/uploads/5/7/...

Complex patterns of hitchhiking mutation load among stickleback populations Positive selection causes beneficial alleles to rapidly rise to high frequency in a population. This can cause linked genetic variation to " hitchhike " , and thereby also rise in frequency. This link...

Jana Nickel will be talking about hitchhiking mutation load in threespine stickleback population Iin the Evolution of Small Populations Symposium at #ESEB2025 today 15:15-15:30. Read the preprint here: doi: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

🎤 Symposium: Evolution in Small Populations
I’ll be speaking on Evolutionary legacies of population collapse
🗓 Thursday, 11:00–13:15, Room 115

Looking forward to this #ESEB2025 week!

@hologenomics.bsky.social

When populations evolve different strategies to defend against a recently acquired parasite (e.g., tolerance, resistance), what sets of gene expression responses are conserved, or diverge? Using a vaccination experiment with #stickleback @laurenfuess.bsky.social reports some fun results...

On my way to #ESEB2025 ! I’ll share some new results showing bi-directional introgression of structural variants, which cause resistance to different insecticides, between native and invasive agricultural pests 🐛 Monday 10:30am, S05 rooms 120-121