Dominik Kusy

What makes PhD students happy? Good supervision Supervisors who invest in positive mentoring relationships with their PhD candidates also reap the benefits for their own research.

"...researchers who invest time in their students tend to lead more-productive, more-collaborative groups and attract stronger future students than those who do not." "Time spent with the next generation of scientists is an investment."
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Open position for PostDoc with background in (insect) genomics for our Insect Symbiosis Lab in České Budějovice! bucek-lab.org/join_us/

One month later first instar larvae are hatching. 🤩

Sex-biased Migration and Demographic History of the Big European Firefly Lampyris noctiluca Abstract. Differential dispersion between the sexes can impact the colonization process and demographic history of a species. Here, we explored the demogra

This work shows the first overview on the population genetics and demographic history of the big European firefly, **Lampyris noctiluca**. Feeling very happy this work is out :) academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Phosphaenus hemipterus - one of only 3 firefly species in Czech Republic with both sexes flightless! Was lucky enough to find pupae a while back and now they're already mating in my setup. Fingers crossed for eggs!

Inference of Cross-Species Gene Flow Using Genomic Data Depends on the Methods: Case Study of Gene Flow in Drosophila Abstract. Analysis of genomic data in the past two decades has highlighted the prevalence of introgression as an important evolutionary force in both plant

Urgent need for improving the statistical properties of summary methods and the computational efficiency of likelihood methods for inferring #gene flow using #genomic sequence data academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

Friends from department of Entomology at National museum in Prague are again organising "Immature Beetles Meeting". I highly recomend this meeting to all the researchers and lovers of Coleoptera larvae. #Coleoptera docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Possible game-changer.

Unraveling the genetics of underwater caddisfly silk Hundreds of thousands of arthropod species use silk to capture prey, build protective structures, or anchor eggs. While most silk-producers are terrestrial, caddisflies construct silken capture nets a...

Our review on caddisfly silk genetics is out in @cp-trendsgenetics.bsky.social. We’re excited about new developments in the field and we were stoked to have the chance to cover them in a review. We hope it is useful resource for people interested! www.cell.com/trends/genet...

New paper out 📝✨

"k-mer approaches for biodiversity genomics"

We discuss k-mer spectra, sex determination, allopolyploid subgenome separation, among other topics - and offer a large tutorial list

Link to paper:
genome.cshlp.org/content/earl...

Link to all tutorials:
github.com/KamilSJaron/...

WASTER: Practical de novo phylogenomics from low-coverage short reads The advent of affordable whole-genome sequencing has spurred numerous large-scale projects aimed at inferring the tree of life, yet achieving a complete species-level phylogeny remains a distant goal ...

WASTER’s ability to accurately estimate trees from low-coverage sequencing data without relying on assembly and alignment will lead to substantially reduced sequencing and computational costs in phylogenomic projects. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #genomics #evolution #phylogeny

The joint evolution of separate sexes and sexual dimorphism Abstract. Dioecious plants are frequently sexually dimorphic. Such dimorphism, which reflects responses to selection acting in opposite directions for male

1/7 Very happy to share our latest paper on the joint evolution of separate sexes and sexual dimorphism in @jevbio.bsky.social, led by @thomaslesaffre.bsky.social and in collaboration with John Pannell at @dee-unil.bsky.social

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/jeb/voae136

The strain on scientific publishing Abstract. Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published. The total number of articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science has grown exponentially in recent years; ...

The strain on scientific publishing direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... #academia #research #science #publishing #peerreview

Researcher: "We let the data speak for itself."

Earlier that day:

🚨New paper out🚨 Very excited about this one as it showcases the evolution of the extraordinary morphological diversity of stick insects 🌿➡️ @pnas.org

pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Unicore enables scalable and accurate phylogenetic reconstruction with structural core genes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.22.629535v1 🧬🖥️🧪 https://github.com/steineggerlab/unicore

Many academics point to bioRxiv as “the one thing improving science publishing”.

If so, the one thing you all can do is persuade colleagues to submit and make this a norm. 1/2

New preprint by butterfly wizard
@lucalivraghi.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We mapped optix (again?!) as the switch gene of a natural polymorphism, this time controlling silver patches of a mountain butterfly. Gorgeous RNAi validation, evidence of selective sweeps, introgression

New paper with @snaildit.bsky.social❗

You can use paralogs to reduce long-branch attraction!
This will be especially helpful when there are no extant taxa that can be sampled to break up these branches.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our Lampyris sardiniae colony celebrates 20 years in 2024, and slowly approaching generation 27! 🎄 Best early Christmas gift ever - just received the original founder pair and F1 generation specimens preserved in alcohol from 20 years ago! 🧬✨

An image showing a range of fossil scorpions, arranged by age. These are lovely fossils, ranging from scorpions in rocks, through ones dissolved out of rocks or resolved using CT scans, to photos of more recent scorpions in Amber. If you want the full details: (A) Palaeophonus caledonicus Hunter, 1886 (Dick Institute, Kilmarnock, UK) from the mid-Silurian (Llandovery to Wenlock) of Lesmahagow, Scotland, UK, image courtesy of Lyndsay C. Jess, and by permission of East Ayrshire Council/East Ayrshire Leisure Trust, and a reconstruction from Pocock (1901). (B) mid-Silurian Eramoscorpius brucensis Waddington, Rudkin & Dunlop, 2015 from Canada. (C) Proscorpius osborni Whitfield (1885b), Yale Peabody Museum (YPM IP 545850); photo by Jessica Utrup 2019. (D) Lower Devonian Waeringoscorpio hefteri Størmer (1970, image source Poschmann et al., 2008). (E) Pulmonoscorpius kirktonensis from the Lower Carboniferous of the UK (courtesy of Andrew Jeram). (F) Compsoscorpius buthiformis from the Upper Carboniferous of the UK (left: courtesy of Lorenzo Prendini, AMNH; right: Legg et al., 2012). (G) Carboniferous taxon Cyclophthalmus senior from the Yale Peabody Museum collections (YPM IP 029827), photo by Jessica Utrup 2013. (H) Mesophonus perornatus from from the Triassic of the UK (courtesy of Lorenzo Prendini, AMNH). (I) Protoischnurus axelrodorum from the Cretaceous Crato Formation, Brazil (courtesy of Christian Neumann, Berlin). (J) Centruroides knodeli from Neogene Dominican amber (courtesy of Wilson Lourenço, Paris). (K) Tityus azari from Neogene Dominican Amber (courtesy of Wilson Lourenço, Paris).

For #FossilFriday have you ever considered the scorpion fossil record? This is surprisingly rich, but how we categorize these animals transcends being a hot mess. It's a spicy disaster. My colleague Jason and I wrote a paper on it which came out today:

peerj.com/articles/185...

⚒️🧪🦀🦑 #evosky

I highly recomend.

OrthoDB and BUSCO update: annotation of orthologs with wider sampling of genomes Abstract. OrthoDB (https://www.orthodb.org) offers evolutionary and functional annotations of orthologous genes in the widest sampling of eukaryotes, proka

OrthoDB and BUSCO update: annotation of orthologs with wider sampling of genomes academic.oup.com/nar/advance-... #jcampubs