Pleasure giving a recap of a wonderful PopGroup conference, and the opportunity to talk about my research.
🔥

Avoid disappointment, and make sure to secure your tickets to this brilliant evening. Drinks reception with Rosemary and Peter Grant will follow the talks.

Peter and Rosemary Grant conducting research

Join Peter Grant FLS FRS & Rosemary Grant FRS on Wed 4 March as they discuss their landmark research on Darwin’s finches and how new species form. Peter and Rosemary are renowned evolutionary biologists, having studied these finches on the Galápagos islands since 1973.

buff.ly/ZbYnmf2

Professor Gail Taylor, Dean of the UCL Faculty of Life Sciences, was a Coordinating Lead Author for the United Nations Environment Programme’s Seventh Global Environment Outlook (GEO-7), which was published on 9 December. Find out more: www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science...

#GEO7 #UNEP #UNEA7

Huge shoutout to the amazing instructor squad @kaplipa.bsky.social , @sabifo4.bsky.social , Tomas Flouri & @zihengyang.bsky.social for smashing another epic #Phylogenomics course! 🚀

Massive thanks to everyone who joined us this week — go crush your data and rock those projects! 💥🔥

So grateful to be back for another year! 💫 Big thanks to all the participants who joined us on this phylogenomics journey. We hope you find these resources helpful for your analyses, best of luck! 💻🧬

Why does the trade-off persist?
Because both competition and colonization hinge on the same surface molecule. The O-antigen is a case of antagonistic pleiotropy – you can’t optimize one function without hurting the other.

(6/n)

What surprised us: this trade-off isn’t transient.
Using herbarium samples up to 200 years old, we show that the same genetic variants have persisted across 10⁵–10⁶ generations, with no evidence of widespread escape via recombination.
Natural selection keeps circling the same solutions.

(5/n)

Our new collaborative work led by @taliamycota.bsky.social
Jiajun Cui & Emma Caullireau between my lab @ucllifesciences.bsky.social @cloeucl.bsky.social & the Karasov Lab (tkarasovlab.org) @uofubiology.bsky.social
and collaborators: @plantricia.bsky.social et al.

tinyurl.com/5yx2wmz5

(1/n)

A fan letter from Australia for my book. Made my day.

It's a bit "we've been inundated with a letter from North Wales. From a Mrs Trellis...."

Gene annotations matter for downstream analyses: different structural gene-annotation pipelines yield markedly different orthology calls. We compare four strategies across species and argue for standards & QC before inference. Work led by @silviaprietob.bsky.social. Paper: doi.org/10.1093/bioi...

YouTube video by Dwarkesh Patel Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable

Watch Prof. Nick Lane on the Dwarkesh podcast, talking about the principles that govern life on Earth and potentially across the Universe.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GMW...

On measures of influence and discordance in phylogenomic analyses Abstract. As models are approximate descriptions of real biological processes, and data are collected often with errors and contamination, sensitivity or r

Special Issue on Phylogenomic Discordance in the Evolutionary Journal of the Linnean Society. REVIEW PAPER from Ziheng Yang👉 doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Genomic Data Reveals Cryptic Diversity in the Soda Lake Cichlid Oreochromis amphimelas The cichlid fishes of East Africa are renowned for their rapid and species-rich adaptive radiation; however, some lineages have not undergone extensive diversification, and it is plausible that these...

NEW PAPER! Genomic Data Reveals Cryptic Diversity in the Soda Lake Cichlid Oreochromis amphimelas doi.org/10.1002/ece3...

Persisting at the Edge of Ecological Collapse: The Impact of Urbanization on Fish and Amphibian Communities From Lake Xochimilco Freshwater ecosystems are globally threatened by habitat loss, pollution, and invasive species, all of which are particularly acute in urban areas. To assess the impacts of urbanization on freshwater....

NEW PAPER- Persisting at the Edge of Ecological Collapse: The Impact of Urbanization on Fish and Amphibian Communities From Lake Xochimilco, in Environmental DNA dx.doi.org/10.1002/edn3...

Is the deuterostome clade an artifact? There is a long-standing consensus that the animal phyla closest to our own phylum of Chordata are the Echinodermata and Hemichordata. These three phy…

Fresh off the presses in @currentbiology.bsky.social : Is the deuterostome clade an artefact? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We (yours truly, Paschalis Natsidis, Laura Piovani and co-leads Paschalia Kapli and @maxjtelford.bsky.social) set out to try to answer this question.

Why? (1/12)

A primer by Sergio Latorre @smlatorreo.bsky.social tinyurl.com/ye8zwcrc on the paper by Jigisha et al. "Popgen and molecular epidemiology of wheat powdery mildew" @plosbiology.org tinyurl.com/357nkey8 @ucllifesciences.bsky.social @cloeucl.bsky.social

New publication! Sherlock, MB, Wilkinson M, Maddock ST, Nussbaum RA, Day JJ, Streicher JW (2025) Submerged corridors of ancient gene flow in an island amphibian. Molecular Ecology. DOI: 10.1111/mec.17742.

An elusive worm: the salinella is shrouded in mystery A 19th-century zoologist found the ‘little salt dweller’, which could be a portal to the past – if only we could locate it again

"For someone interested in the beginnings of the animal kingdom, Salinella is a kind of time machine": Prof @maxjtelford.bsky.social @ucllifesciences.bsky.social writes in @theguardian.com about his hunt for a highly elusive worm that may shed light on the origin of all animals

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

Expressions of interest are invited for Research Career Development Fellowships in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment. Find out more:

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...