Charlotte Wright

Two evergreen bagworms feeding

One abbot's bagworm hanging out

Pre-print and weird repro thread time!

I've posted here about scale insects a lot, but ~half of my research is on Lepidoptera. My lab is developing bagworm moths (Psychidae) as models for comparative genomics.

You probably know them like you see in the pics below: caterpillars that make cases.

How many types of butterfly can you recognise?

1000 species of butterfly and moth have been genetically sequenced, as part of a project to map the genome of all 11,665 species in Europe, co-led by Darwin Research Fellow Dr Charlotte Wright.

www.darwin.cam.ac.uk/news/sequenc...

Helixer: ab initio prediction of primary eukaryotic gene models combining deep learning and a hidden Markov model - Nature Methods By leveraging both deep learning and hidden Markov models, Helixer achieves broad taxonomic coverage for ab initio gene annotation of eukaryotic genomes from fungi, plants, vertebrates and invertebrat...

We all wish peer review to be rapid and professional: doesn’t always go like that. But I am relieved to finally see Helixer by @alisandra-denton.bsky.social and team published in Nature Method. Congratulations! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Project Psyche: reference genomes for all Lepidoptera in Europe Project Psyche is a transnational initiative to generate and study chromosome-level reference genomes of all ~11 000 species of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) found in Europe. Here, we describe t...

I'm very excited that our paper on Project Psyche is now published! 🦋🧬

Over the last two years we've built an incredible community & already made huge progress. Read about this & how @projectpsyche.bsky.social will drive exciting and collaborative science here:

www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

This project, led by Leonardo Dapporto & Mariagrazia Porter @ the Uni of Florence, will uncover if visual preferences influence the species we notice, study & protect. By completing the survey, you will help to refine conservation priorities & identify flagship species for public awareness 🦋🌏 (2/2)

Unveiling - Home

We need your help! If you have a few minutes, please fill out a very short survey about your preferences on butterflies and art - all responses are welcome! www.unveiling.eu

This is part of a project that aims to understand how the beauty of butterflies influences conservation: Unveiling (1/2)

How do new centromeres evolve while staying compatible with the division machinery?

Discover it in our new Nature paper! We show centromeres transition gradually via a mix of drift, selection, and sex, reaching new states that still work with the kinetochore.

👉 doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09779-1

Happy to present TOGA2, developed by Yury Malovichko @ymalovichko.bsky.social, the faster, memory-efficient & more accurate TOGA1 successor (github.com/hillerlab/TO...). And annotations, orthologs & gene loss/dup data generated with 4 references for 883 placental mammal and with 5 refs for 676 ...

Revised evolutionary relationships within Brachycera and the early origin of bicoid in flies Mulhair et al. uncover a functional bicoid in non-cyclorrhaphan flies, pushing the gene's origin back by ∼20 million years. Reassessing the Diptera phylogeny using the largest dataset to date permits ...

Latest work out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social

We find the fly development gene bicoid is much older than previously thought (~20 million yrs older!) 🪰🧬

To pinpoint its origins we tackled the Diptera phylogeny, providing some resolution (many open questions remain).

🔗 tinyurl.com/2vyuevpy

Do you use genomic data to study Lepidoptera in Europe? Do you want to visit a lab to learn a new skill or build a new collaboration? If so, you should apply for a short term scientific mission! These are small grants to fund research exchanges as part of our Lep10K COST action. All info below!

It's out, Minos transgenesis in the pantry moth by
@donyaniyaz.bsky.social
@lucalivraghi.bsky.social

High efficient, glowing eye and silk gland markers

peerj.com/articles/202...
@peerj.bsky.social

What a remarkable discovery! In SW Turkey a new species of Lycaenid was discovered, Rapala suleymani sp.n., of a genus that was only known from the eastern palearctic & indomalayan realms, it's closest relative flies 7000km away! doi.org/10.31184/M00...

The @10klepgenomes.bsky.social COST action enabled fifty experts to work together in Italy to achieve this remarkable feat. The genomes generated by Project Psyche will help the @ebpgenome.bsky.social to reach the ambitious aim of sequencing all species on Earth.

A fantastic writeup by Glenn Zorpette from @spectrum.ieee.org. Glenn joined us in Italy where we collectively sampled hundreds of new species for @projectpsyche.bsky.social. Shoutout to Luigi Avantaggiato for the spectacular photos and @costprogramme.bsky.social funding for bringing groups together.

It is so nice to finally see the first paper of my PhD published! It was possible thanks to invaluable contributions of Andrea Chiocchio, @mariaheikkila.bsky.social, @jadrankarota.bsky.social, Lauri Kaila, and @lepphylo.bsky.social.

Claire Merot opens the afternoon session at the #biodiversity25 with a presentation about the structural genetic diversity across the tree of life. Structural variants (SVs) are in order de magnitude higher than SNPs. TEs accounts for many SVs. SVs are different across different lineages.

New preprint! We unexpectedly discovered that some Caenorhabditis species delete parts of their somatic genome early in development, which fragments their chromosomes and eliminates key germline genes. Multiple lines of evidence suggest this bizarre process was present in the ancestors of C. elegans

Programmed DNA elimination was present in the last common ancestor of Caenorhabditis nematodes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.23.681605v1

Really nice paper from @tiff-ki.bsky.social & co. shows no overall decline in butterfly species richness in Sulawesi over 166 yrs, but changing communities with endemics & forest specialists declining. Short-term trends unreliable measures of long term. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... 🌏

Front cover of the European Butterfly Red List, showing Polyommatus humedasae. The report can be downloaded at https://www.bc-europe.eu/webpage.php?name=red-list-butterflies-2025

The new European Butterfly Red List is published today, with worrying findings. Over 1/4 (28%) of Europe’s 442 species are threatened with extinction or are close to being so. The situation is far worse for our 148 endemic species, 40% are now threatened or nearly so www.bc-europe.eu/webpage.php?...

Jakub Tetla preparing a database of butterflies that will be used in the study, based on museum collections.

🚀 Second STSM of 10kLepGenomes!
Jakub Tetla (Jagiellonian Univ., Poland) visited @jadrankarota.bsky.social (Lund, Sweden) from 24–26 Sept 2025.
The goal was to integrate museum collections with phylogenomics to study West Palearctic tiger moths.

#10kLepGenomes #Lepidoptera #Museomics

Photo of Mark Blaxter, Joana Meier & Charlotte Wright with butterfly nets and wings!

A huge butterfly-themed cake and cupcakes

A butterfly mobile made by colouring butterflies on paper cutouts

Many members of the Tree of Life programme making paper butterflies for the mobile

This week we celebrated reaching 1000 lepidopteran genomes in the Tree of Life (ToL) programme @ the @sangerinstitute.bsky.social with butterfly crafts and cake! Many of these genomes were sequenced by the wonderful ToL teams as part of @projectpsyche.bsky.social & the Darwin Tree of Life project 🦋🧬

Sperm sequencing reveals extensive positive selection in the male germline - Nature A combination of whole-genome NanoSeq with deep whole-exome and targeted NanoSeq is used to accurately characterize mutation rates and genes under positive selection in sperm cells.

Now published! Our paper on:
(1) Accurate sequencing of sperm at scale
(2) Positive selection of spermatogenesis driver mutations across the exome
(3) Offspring disease risks from male reproductive aging
[1/n]
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

As forests are cut down, butterflies are losing their colours The insects’ brilliant hues evolved in lush ecosystems to help them survive. Now they are becoming more muted to adapt to degraded landscapes – and they are not the only things dulling down

Today´s Guardian has an article about our study on butterfly colors, where we compare butterfly colors in native forest to those in eucalyptus plantations. This is study is a partnership between labs from Denmark, Spain, and Brazil.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Retrocopy formation and domestication shape genome evolution in sloths and other xenarthrans Xenarthrans, comprising sloths, anteaters, and armadillos, represent one of the most morphologically and physiologically specialised mammalian clades, yet the genomic basis of their adaptations remain...

Preprint Alert! 🦥
We produced complete genomes for 2 Xenarthra and placed them in a mammalian comparative framework. We found that Xenarthra harbour the largest number of retrocopies in mammals! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Project Psyche is featured in a new article out now on @spectrum.ieee.org! Check it out to get an insight into the efforts of @ebpgenome.bsky.social and the milestones achieved during the fieldtrip of #ProjectPsyche and @10klepgenomes.bsky.social to the Italian Alps 🦋

Phylogenomic Discordance: Patterns, Processes, and Solutions Phylogenomics, the study of evolutionary relationships using genomic data, has revolutionized our understanding of the Tree of Life. As a field, phylogenomics h

If you're interested in understanding discordance in phylogenomic analyses, the @evojlinnsoc.bsky.social's special issue 'Phylogenomic Discordance: Patterns, Processes, and Solutions' is for you!

tinyurl.com/v2eces3s

I'll be sharing a few articles a week until we're through the issue! (1/n)🧪

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 !

k-mer-based diversity scales with population size proxies more than nucleotide diversity in a meta-analysis of 98 plant species Abstract. A key prediction of neutral theory is that the level of genetic diversity in a population should scale with population size. However, as was note

k-mer-based diversity scales with population size proxies more than nucleotide diversity in a meta-analysis of 98 plant species.

academic.oup.com/evlett/artic...

Wood tiger moth on leaf. Photo: Juhani Maamela.

Funded PhD position available 🎉 Come and work with me in Helsinki to uncover the pathways producing colourful tiger moth wings. Lots of options for genomics, CRISPR, fieldwork, behaviour experiments… Email with questions! jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki...