Yuki Haba

Society for the Study of Evolution Site description

Applications now open for the Graduate Research Excellence Grants! These provide evolutionary biology research funds for early and advanced Master’s and PhD students. Proposals due May 18.
www.evolutionsociety.org/content/soci...

Introgression and parental conflict shape repeated occurrences of postzygotic isolation in Mimulus Postzygotic reproductive isolation is often thought to accumulate as a byproduct of neutral divergence. Yet it frequently evolves rapidly, in line wit…

I am SO THRILLED to share our first fully-lab lab paper!!!!!! Led by @hybridzones.bsky.social & @hagarsoliman.bsky.social, w/ a major assist from @pfschwarz.bsky.social!!!!!!!!!!!!! Read more below, if you're curious (you should be- it's AWESOME!!!!!!!)

link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excited to share this preprint that describes my latest work on using GPUs to accelerate processing of RNA-seq data.

The title says it all: "RNA-seq analysis in seconds using GPUs" now on biorxiv www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... and github github.com/pachterlab/k...

Figure 1 shows they key result

Neurobiology of Social Touch Social touch is a critical component of our daily lives, shaping our interactions with friends and loved ones. Reduced social touch, especially during early life, can have detrimental effects on healt...

Excited to share this review article I wrote.

Neurobiology of Social Touch - www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

The molecular basis of force selectivity by PIEZO2 - Nature PIEZO2 is intrinsically more rigid than PIEZO1, and disparate mechanical stimuli paradoxically evoke opposite conformational and gating responses in each channel.

Very excited to share our new manuscript – published today!

Why are PIEZO1 and PIEZO2 are tuned to transduce different types of mechanical force? I was lucky to work with some extraordinary colleagues to begin to figure out why.

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

An overview of the results below ⬇️ ⬇️

Super excited to have @yukihaba.bsky.social visit Seattle and @uwbiology.bsky.social and give a talk on his mosquito work!

Excited to share our latest work in @nature.com showing shared neural substrates for parenting and prosocial helping behavior. Full text available here: rdcu.be/e6PnY

Thank you so much for having me, @riffelllab.bsky.social! I had a great time presenting our recent work and chatting with you all at the UW Bio. Really appreciated the thoughtful questions and lively discussion.

@annaryba.bsky.social's paper on the neural underpinnings of intraspecific behavioral variation is now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social

Highly recommend! -> Paper identifies neural substrate for variation in promiscuity among Drosophila melanogaster strains🧪

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

So well deserved! Congratulations @ishmailsaboor.bsky.social!

Agouti integrates environmental cues to regulate paternal behaviour - Nature Expression of agouti signalling protein in neurons in the medial preoptic area is increased by group housing and negatively associated with care, and overexpression of Agouti reduces care and enhances...

Why are some males caring toward infants while others are neglectful or abusive? I'm so pleased to share work that my colleagues and I @princeton.edu have just published @nature.com (an explanatory thread to follow!) (1/8)

So excited to share this manuscript led by the inimitable Cara Brand, who discovered that Topoisomerase II evolution causes hybrid female lethality in Drosophila.

Congrats to Cara, @nickbr0wn.bsky.social, Anirban, and
@buszczaklab.bsky.social!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New paper! From Sam Snodgrass and @genomeofforrest.bsky.social, w/ @druncie.bsky.social, @gcbias.bsky.social, and a collaboration with Andres Moreno and @santiagogmm.bsky.social. Can we quantify the impact of humans on maize dispersal?

Plant yourself in a comfy chair and lend me your ear:

1/10

Balanced polymorphism in a floral transcription factor underlies an ancient rhythm of daily sex alternation in avocado In avocado and certain wild relatives in Lauraceae, pollination occurs via a synchronized rhythm of floral sex timing between two hermaphroditic flowering types. A-type plants present female-phase flo...

Did you know there are 2 types of avocado varieties? A-types switch from female to male, B-types male to female, within a single day. This reciprocal sex alternation promotes cross-pollination and has a simple genetic basis. Read more in this recent preprint from the final chapter of my PhD thesis 🥑

All right it’s time for the annual “please tell us about one (or a few if you are ambitious) paper from 2025 that really impressed you and why we should all read it“! Go! If you tell us how it changed your view of the world and what makes it so powerful and consequential It would be excellent.

Wendy Valencia-Montoya and team uncover thermal infrared as one of the most ancient pollination signals uniting plants and animals. From the field to single proteins.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The final version of the clonal raider ant reference brain is now out OA in @currentbiology.bsky.social:

🐜 🧠 🐜 🧠 🐜 🧠 🐜 🧠 🐜 🧠 🐜

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I have a new preprint demonstrating a genome-architecture-aware approach to inferring species trees and introgression landscapes from a small number of genomes. If you are interested in phylogenomics, birds, or hybridization, this is for you! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This has been an intense, crazy week. My plasmid competition paper is finally out and we have a new preprint on Bioarxiv! Plus I'm leaving the US after 10 years here. See you soon America! Hello Zurich!!!

Intracellular competition shapes plasmid population dynamics From populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements, conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-replicating g...

Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Evolutionary genetics meets ecological immunology: insights into the evolution of immune systems Immune genes show remarkably consistent evidence of selection, modification, and diversification across the tree of life. Parasites are a key force in…

Two weeks ago now @jennytung.bsky.social and I published a new review in Current Opinion in Genetics and Development, entitled “Evolutionary genetics meets ecological immunology: insights into the evolution of immune systems.” www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
A thread below...

Ancient origin of an urban underground mosquito Understanding how life is adapting to urban environments represents an important challenge in evolutionary biology. In this work, we investigate a widely cited example of urban adaptation, Culex pipie...

After analyzing the DNA sequences from 357 modern and 22 historic specimens, new research led by @yukihaba.bsky.social and @lindymcbr.bsky.social at @science.org uncovers the true, ancient origin of the "London Underground mosquito."

FERAL: A Video-Understanding System for Direct Video-to-Behavior Mapping Animal behavior unfolds continuously in time, yet quantitative analyses often require segmenting it into discrete, interpretable states. Although manual annotation can achieve this, it remains slow, s...

Our preprint is out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Peter Skovorodnikov and I are excited to present FERAL: a new video-understanding toolkit that maps raw video directly to behavior, no pose estimation required.
It works across species, from lab to field, and even in collective systems. (🧵1/n)

As a longtime fan of cool papers in @currentbiology.bsky.social, I am really thrilled to see this out!

This study sets the stage for understanding the origins of novel (vocal) behaviors.

Big shout out to the main architects of this work @xmikezheng20.bsky.social and @cliffscience.bsky.social

Le moustique du métro londonien n'a pas évolué dans les souterrains Le moustique du métro londonien est-il "né" dans le métro ? Une nouvelle étude parue dans Science révèle que cet insecte nommé Culex pipiens molestus s'est adapté à l'humain et aux espaces confinés au...

Le moustique du métro londonien est-il "né" dans le métro ? Une nouvelle étude parue dans Science révèle que cet insecte s'est adapté à l'humain et aux espaces confinés au Moyen Orient il y a plusieurs millénaires avant de coloniser les souterrains européens.

Expikations 🦟⬇️

Postdoctoral Scientist- Kim and Abdus-Saboor Lab Primary Work Address: Dept of Molecular Biology, Princeton, NJ, 08544 Current HHMI Employees, click here to apply via your Workday account. The Kim Lab at Princeton University and Abdus-Saboor Lab at ...

Come do a joint postdoc with me and @tinakim-neuro.bsky.social, splitting your time between Princeton and Columbia. Come design new activity-dependent labeling enzymes and transcriptional reporters optimized for application in the peripheral nervous system.
hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

SAVE THE DATE: the yearly NY Population Genetics meeting will be back on March 9 2026, generously hosted by the
@simonsfoundation.org. Details to follow. Please RT.

Insertion of an invading retrovirus regulates a novel color trait in swordtail fish For over a century, evolutionary biologists have been motivated to understand the mechanisms through which organisms adapt to their environments. Coloration and pigmentation are remarkably variable wi...

I am so excited to share new work on a TE insertion that regulates iridescence in swordtails, led by fantastic grad student @nadiahaghani.bsky.social and with help from many coauthors! In a time that has been so difficult to navigate, this & other projects have kept my spirits up: shorturl.at/NE65A

An empirical approach to evaluating the prevalence of long-lived balancing selection in humans--and important limitations. Work by @hannahmm.bsky.social

How is functional variation at large-effect loci maintained in natural populations, even as environments change? In a paper led by @mkarag.bsky.social, we tracked known pesticide resistant alleles in outdoor 𝘋. 𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘨𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳 cages & inferred selection and dominance from temporal sequencing data.