Dmitri Petrov

Exceedingly low genetic diversity in snow leopards due to persistently small population size | PNAS Snow leopards (Panthera uncia) serve as an umbrella species whose conservation benefits their high-elevation Asian habitat. Their numbers are belie...

Very excited to share that our work assessing the genomic diversity of snow leopards has come out today in PNAS! Spoiler alert - they have the lowest genetic diversity of all big cats!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...
@petrovadmitri.bsky.social @elliecat.bsky.social

The world's snow leopards are very similar genetically—findings suggest that doesn't bode well for their future There are relatively few snow leopards in the world, and it has likely been that way for a long time, a new study indicates.

Snow leopards show very low genetic diversity, a factor that may limit their ability to adapt to environmental changes and increase their risk of extinction. doi.org/g953dp

Snow leopards’ low genetic diversity puts future at risk A Stanford-led study reveals that snow leopards are the most genetically similar to each other among big cats, making them particularly vulnerable to drastic changes like the warming climate.

Snow leopards have the lowest genetic diversity of all big cats–a dubious distinction once held by cheetahs. It increases their risk of extinction in a warming climate. #Stanford-led #research #snowleopards @kasolari.bsky.social @petrovadmitri.bsky.social
news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

What’s the expected GC equilibrium from mutation alone?

It's official! We are moving to Stowers!
Very exciting opportunity to expand our studies of insect-plant interactions. We have many opportunities available in biochemistry, development, behavior, genetics, evolution, genomics, AI, and even pest control. Interested in any of these things? Reach out!

High-accuracy SNV calling for bacterial isolates using deep learning with AccuSNV Accurate detection of mutations within bacterial species is critical for fundamental studies of microbial evolution, reconstructing transmission events, and identifying antimicrobial resistance mutati...

Precisely calling mutations across hundreds of bacterial isolates has been hard, requiring manual filtering and expertise.

Until now, using AccuSNV.

Herui Liao trained an ML model based on our previous meticulously called SNVs.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I will sign

Now hiring a computational postdoc (evolutionary genomics, molecular evolution) in my lab at Emory University.
If you’re interested in population genetics, fitness landscapes, and viral evolution — get in touch.
faculty-emory.icims.com/jobs/151181/...

What we show here is that beneficial dominance reversal does operate for alleles of large effect in real natural systems under fluctuating selection and we argue that it should be common for many such systems. Hope this helps. n/n

This helps bc it protect the polymorphism if one of the selective epochs lasts an unusually long period of time driving the deleterious allele to loss. So this mechanism allows for maintenance of diversity without requiring fine-tuning of the length and magnitude of the selective epochs 4/n

The key insight by theorists - see e.g. PMID: 29087300 and PMID: 30695026 and PMID: 38471544 and refs within - is that in fluct environments, dominance reversal like this should stabilize polymorphism, bc whichever allele is deleterious, it's always recessive and lost slowly from the population 3/n

Second, here, unlike the case of classic heterozygote advantage, one of the alleles is always unconditionally deleterious and the fitness of the heterozygote is in-between the two homozygotes. However, at each environmental state its fitness is closer to the fitter homozygote. 2/n

I think its is quite different. First we always look at fitness, not any specific trait. Fitness is indeed multidimensional in the trait space and the dominance reversal can be generated through shifts in which traits matter in different epochs. But this is not required 1/n

Beneficial reversal of dominance maintains a large-effect resistance polymorphism under fluctuating insecticide selection - Nature Ecology & Evolution Measuring selection and dominance in fitness of the insecticide-resistant Ace alleles in Drosophila melanogaster, the authors show evidence for beneficial reversal of dominance, a mechanism that can s...

How do populations maintain an evolutionary memory? I am happy to share that our work with Dmitri Petrov @petrovadmitri.bsky.social, Paul Schmidt, and colleagues on dominance reversal and stabilization of insecticide resistance in changing environments over time is now published at Nature EE.

Very excited to see this work in press! I think there is a reason to believe that this is a common means of stabilizing large-effect polymorphisms in general and might be an important reason for why diploidy is so common. news.stanford.edu/stories/2025...

One of the things I am most proud of in my career is helping to start PEQG and then run the first three PEQGs. So stoked it’s going strong.

Homepage - Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics Conference Visit our website to learn more.

Save the date! #PEQG26 June 9-12 2026 in Asilomar, CA. Happens only every 2yrs, but is my favorite conference. Full website coming soon, and registration and abstract submission opens November 14, but I'm allowed to tease that keynotes will be @jnovembre.bsky.social @jennytung.bsky.social and me!

Agreed. Maybe also some Reddit style upvoting? And one needs to register with a real name to do any voting or commenting.

What do you all think of an idea to create a paper viewer that allows people to annotate published papers publicly and add suggested missing citations. Do you think it would improve scholarship or create a horrible mess? Or both?

MBE - Footprints of Worldwide Adaptation in Structured Populations of Drosophila melanogaster Through the Expanded DEST 2.0 Genomic Resource

@jcbnunez.bsky.social et al. present an expanded release of the community-generated resource Drosophila Evolution over Space and Time (DEST 2.0), and showcase it by studying the species' demographic history and signatures of adaptation.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf132

#evobio #molbio #drosophila

An immense effort with contributions from many authors:
@gonzalezlabbcn.bsky.social
@geneticament.bsky.social
@petrovadmitri.bsky.social
@mgda76.bsky.social
@rawwiberg.bsky.social
@juliabeets.bsky.social
@paucarazo.bsky.social
...and many others...

⬇️ Please tag yourself or other authors below

Welcome: Tim Coorens EMBL-EBI’s newest Research Group Leader is investigating how somatic mutations reveal the hidden histories of human cells.

Welcome @timcoorens.bsky.social ‪ ‬🇳🇱, our new Research Group Leader.

Find out how Tim’s group is exploring using large-scale single-cell and spatial data to trace cell lineages, understand cancer origins, and uncover how mutations drive disease.

www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/p...
🖥️🧬

You had me at the “asymptotic test is cool”😎

Interesting thread on a scientist using AI/feeling used by AI.

A PR company working for Colossal Biosciences is sending AI generated pieces to respected science journalists & asking them to publish the articles under their own names. This is so dodgy & just goes to show our critical expert scientific commentary is working. Sci comm failure 101 for Colossal.

What a great idea!

Do you have my address?:)

Protein language models reveal evolutionary constraints on synonymous codon choice Evolution has shaped the genetic code, with subtle pressures leading to preferences for some synonymous codons over others. Codons are translated at different speeds by the ribosome, imposing constrai...

This preprint from Helen Sakharova is one of the coolest things to come out of my lab: “Protein language models reveal evolutionary constraints on synonymous codon choice.” Codon choice is a big puzzle in how information is encoded in genomes, and we have a new angle. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We’re growing @arcadiascience.com & are on the lookout for talent to run new pilot projects contributing to our broader goals. Seeking computational + wet lab fluency to iterate independently on new projects. If you’re a creative scientist w/ ambitious ideas, apply!

jobs.lever.co/arcadiascien...

📣 New paper alert! Just out in Cell Reports! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40644298/
Thrilled to share that we have discovered a brand-new anti-phage defense system! Bacteria have evolved various defense strategies (CRISPR etc) to counter phage attacks. We found a new one - fascinating and dramatic
⚔️🦠❄️🔬