Charlotte Wright

Programmed meiotic errors facilitate dichotomous sperm production in the silkworm, Bombyx mori The goal of meiosis is typically to produce haploid gametes (eggs or sperm). Failure to do so is catastrophic for fertility and offspring health. However, Lepidopteran (moths and butterflies) males pr...

So excited to share this preprint from the Rosin lab in collaboration with the Hawley lab and @eelcotromer.bsky.social on moth spermatogenesis! We investigate the meiotic errors that occur during the formation of apyrene sperm (that have no DNA) in silkworms!

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

First field trip of the #WG2 has come to an end! We will share some of the most relevant moments of this fantastic week! Stay tuned 🦋🧬

@10klepgenomes.bsky.social First WG2 meeting is over. It was an intense week full of light trapping and sample preparations for @projectpsyche.bsky.social, lectures and meeting wonderful people 🤩🦋💡🔬

Smattered with smashing photos and a moth-trapping timelapse, I sure hope you enjoy the visual spectacle that is this blog as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Will you be thinking about hydrogen cyanide synthesis pathways the next time you see a Six-spot Burnet?

📹 @charlottewright.bsky.social

Our paper on myxozoan genomes is out now in G3! See thread below for a brief recap (slight change of title from the preprint, same content).

Thank you also to @arunsethuraman.bsky.social for handling the manuscript and @joannamasel.bsky.social for helpful comments.

academic.oup.com/g3journal/ad...

Midweek at #lepgencrete conference we take a half-day excursion. This time we went to the beach, and had dinner at a hillside taverna.

*Rapid chromosome evolution in butterflies and the potential of Project Psyche for lepidopteran genomics*
Charlotte Wright, Wellcome Sanger Institute #lepgencrete

Holocentric chroms thought to facilitate rapid karyotype rearrangement. But analysis of >100 genomes shows primarily conservation.

The 12th international Workshop on molecular biology and genetics of the Lepidoptera REGISTRATION NOW OPEN We are delighted to invite you to join us at the Orthodox Academy of Crete, set just outside the lovely Cretan village Kolymbari, for a stimulating and enriching event. With 150 ...

We are just starting sessions at the 2025 Workshop on Lepidopteran genetics in Kolymbari, Crete, Greece. During the week, researchers from around the world (Europe, Americas, China & Japan, etc) present research on moths and butterflies.
events.gwdg.de/event/880/
#lepgencrete

This course with @marcelauliano.bsky.social and @ferreiranunesjoao.bsky.social ‬will introduce the audience to a spectrum of methods which are present in a usual assembly workflow, starting from raw data and finishing with a fully assembled genome @pacbio.bsky.social

Check it out shorturl.at/UEmOH

A red flower on a green stem withe the words: BHL Call for support now open overlayed.

📢 The #BiodiversityHeritageLibrary is entering a bold new chapter – and we need your help! Today we release our official Call for Support. We’re seeking new hosts for BHL’s staff, infrastructure, and services. Learn more: blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2025/06/tran... #BHLTransition #ILoveBHL

50% decline in the European Grassland Butterfly Indicator since 1991 www.naturetoday.com/intl/en/natu... @savebutterflies.bsky.social

Gene loss associated with plasticity-first evolution in Heliconius butterflies Phenotypic plasticity occurs when a genotype can produce more than one phenotype under different environmental conditions. Genetic accommodation allows plastic phenotypes to be tuned to new environmen...

Very excited about this paper led by Erika Castro. She has shown that Heliconius were ancestrally plastic in how they acquired their cyanogens, but some species have lost the ability to biosynthesise toxins, and have lost genes involved www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is outrageously cool

The authors managed to nullify the geomagnetic field around bogong moths but allowed them to see a typical starry night sky and the moths could *still* navigate the correct direction of migration 🤯
🧪🌏

How did evolution drive massive genome contraction during oceanic island colonization? A new paper from our lab.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Proud to have authored this review with brilliant people. Hope we inspire more attempts to sequence the #protist genomes that are within reach! Huge thanks to Alexandra Schoenle for leading. #ProtistsOnSky
authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

It's finally out! This paper took quite a while but I'm so excited to share now! For anyone who studies sex chromosomes, take note: we found a rare "slower X"! (dN/dS_X < dN/dS_Autos) 👀

Headshot of Naomi Pierce. Text: Naomi Pierce, 2025 Society for the Study of Evolution Lifetime Achievement Award.

Congratulations to the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, Dr. Naomi Pierce! www.evolutionsociety.org/news/display...

Exhausted but happy teaching assistants with a very friendly cat

One of the many amazing sunsets in Crete

Teaching phylogenomics continued onto the beach with diagrams in the sand!

Group photo of all participants and the training team.

It was a joy to be a teaching assistant on the EMBO Computational Molecular Evolution course and I'm very glad to have been able to also join the EMBO satellite workshop on Biodiversity Genomics in beautiful Crete!

Struggling to find the tiny microchromosomes in draft bird genome assemblies?

Our new #preprint introducing MicroFinder can help: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧵 below

(1/n)

@sangerinstitute.bsky.social

Participants of the Population Genomics Workshop during a laboratory session

Participants of the Population Genomics Workshop during a laboratory session

(1/3) During the #PopulationGenomics Workshop in Montpellier, participants took part in hands-on lab sessions to extract DNA from butterfly samples they had collected themselves 🧪🦋

Here’s what they accomplished! 👇

Release RAxML-NG v2.0-beta2 · amkozlov/raxml-ng Main new features Adaptive tree search heuristic (Togkousidis 2023) , (Togkousidis 2024) Multiple fast branch support measures Integrated model testing Full Changelog: 1.2.2...2.0-beta2

RAxML-NG v2.0 beta is here

github.com/amkozlov/rax...
Features
1. Difficulty prediction
academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...
2. Adaptive search academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...
3. Early Stop
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
4. Model selection
5. Rapid bootstrapping academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

The impact of ancestral, genetic, and environmental influences on germline de novo mutation rates and spectra - Nature Communications Here the authors analyze de novo mutations in &gt;10,000 parent-offspring trios and find that ancestry and smoking independently associate with mutation rate, but that common genetic variants likely c...

It's finally out people ✅🗞️! Check out the final version of our work exploring factors influencing the germline mutation rate and spectra on ~10,000 WGS family trios 🧬👨‍👩‍👦!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Officially (re-)annoucing the Tree of Sex! Read all about it in JEB below!

Logo of the 10kLepGenomes COST Action. Orange text "10K LEP GENOMES" accompanied by a design that uses the number 10 and the letter "K" to represent a butterfly and DNA.

(1/4) 📣 Exciting news! 📣
The #10KLepGenomes COST Action has opened the first call for Short Term Scientific Missions #STSMs
Keep reading for all the details 👇

Chromatin loops are an ancestral hallmark of the animal regulatory genome - Nature The physical organization of the genome in non-bilaterian animals and their closest&nbsp;unicellular relatives is characterized; comparative analysis shows chromatin looping is a conserved feature of ...

I’m very excited to share our work on the early evolution of animal regulatory genome architecture - the main project of my postdoc, carried out across two wonderful and inspirational labs of @arnausebe.bsky.social and @mamartirenom.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A brilliant time was had at @holocentricity2025.bsky.social in the beautiful Neuchâtel - hopefully the first of many such meetings! Thank you so much to the amazing team of organisers @camillecornet.bsky.social @pescuer.bsky.social @crazychipkali.bsky.social @kaybiodiversity.bsky.social 🌱🕷️🦋🪱

Plenary talk - Chromosomally complete reference genomes for challenging species: overcoming sequencing dropout in bird microchromosomes At this month's ERGA Plenary meeting, taking place on Monday, April 28 at 15:00 CEST, Dr. Thomas Mathers will present his work on a Tree of Life pilot project focused on improving reference genome ass...

🔔 Join the ERGA Plenary this month to hear @tom-mathers.bsky.social from @sangerinstitute.bsky.social discuss his work on improving reference #genomes for challenging species.

📅 28/04 at 15:00 CEST

🔗 www.erga-biodiversity.eu/post/plenary...

#biodiversity #genomics #assemblies #chromosomes #Dtol

Come and join fellow lepidopterists at the 24th European Congress of Lepidopterology in the Czech Republic August 18-23, 2025! Abstract submission deadline April 30, registration deadline May 31. See you :-) sel.entu.cas.cz/important-da...

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!

Not really my announcement to make--I am but a lesser co-author--but IQ-TREE 3 has just been released!

(Most credit to Minh Bui and @roblanfear.bsky.social and their labs)

ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...