Joe Hanly

🦋✂️🧬 🧪 New preprint! Led by @donyaniyaz.bsky.social CRISPR‑Cas9 knockouts of ABCG transporters across butterflies & moths reveal how pigment pathways shape color during development. #CRISPR #Lepidoptera #pigmentation
Feedback welcome 👩‍🔬
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It's only February but I think I might be able to call this my top paper of 2026 already.

Amazing peppered moth story from Saccheri lab - same locus, but different structural variants, underly parallel evolution of industrial melanism in the UK and across continental Europe.

(Image credit to @lucalivraghi.bsky.social

Heliconius erato demophoon sat on a pink, yellow and white lantana flower. The left side of the butterfly is white, while the right side is the usual black and red, but with some white clonal patches.

New preprint form me and the McMillan lab at STRI and Martin lab at GWU, digging into scale cell type specification and differentiation in Heliconius wings, with some insights on the lncRNA gene ivory.

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

Comments/suggestions welcome!

It's ivory all the way down

New pre-print with some updates on ivory:miR193 in a highly polymorphic moth.

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

We mapped ivory (again!?) this time controlling aspects of camouflage in Anticarsia gemmatalis. Mapping, SVs, Expression and Function.

Comments/suggestions welcome!

It's ivory all the way down.

screenshot. Text reads "errors in author template: Author #10 has a nonstandard string (ñ) in field Last Name

eyerolling at biorxiv

We have a postdoc position available. Please forward to anyone who may be interested.

Me when trying to submit sequences to SRA

reading about organisms that aren’t your specialty is like

margins of the quorbus eplungulate, ploobular processes bent posteriorly towards the foobulum

define term “eplungulate”
- lacking plungae. synonym: thubulous

something something stupid Canadian wolf bird

screenshot from the website ecoevojobs.net: 1) is McGill a town ?!? 2) it's a really good school.

day made by EcoEvoJobs

New paper with @smishra677.bsky.social!

How many different trees can be generated by just one duplication event? It turns out A WHOLE LOT, if you consider the coalescent process.

1/

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

following on from that, when you use single cell data, you should bear in mind the different biases of snRNAseq vs scRNAseq - this lnc effect being one, also different expectations about intron/exon ratios in read mapping (which in my experience can be huge). 3/3

So imho, we THOUGHT they were rarer than they are because of recovery bias. That gets exponentially more complex when you consider that a bunch of lncRNAs will be cell type specific, biasing it even further. /2

One realisation I had while looking at the lncRNA ivory in single nucleus data: lncRNAs are generally nuclear, so in bulk RNAseq they are depleted because the nuclei make up a small volume of what gets extracted. In single nucleus RNAseq you will thus massively enrich any such transcripts. 1/

Cellular Traffic.

Just finished the Discworld City Watch series and am full of the happysad feeling of closing an amazing book. If you’re in need some escapism and silliness right now, but also could do with a deeply moral take on the beauty and horror of the human condition, I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

On my way to PopGroup #PGG59 - talking on Friday, with some updates on our favourite Lepidopteran wing pattern hotspot locus.

Pint jar filled with blue dry beans.

A few years ago, through luck and vibes, I managed to produce this blue colored bean variety.

This was an early step in trying to answer the question, [paraphrased] "Why isn't blue as common as red in beans, even though they're both anthocyanins and the plant has the genes for both?"

Hypotheses of stripe pattern homology between nymphalids and hesperiids. (A) Current summary of the nymphalid ground plan, mainly based on the terminology of Schwanwitsch (Nijhout, 1991; Schwanwitsch, 1924) and including recent updates by Otaki and Mazo-Vargas et al. (Mazo-Vargas et al., 2017; Otaki, 2012; Otaki, 2021; Schwanwitsch, 1956). Discalis elements (D1 and D2); CSS, central symmetry system (cyan); BoSS, border ocelli symmetry system (magenta); Oc, forewing border ocelli; pPf and dPf, proximal and distal parafocal elements; MBS, marginal band system (green). Colored vignettes denote vein intersection landmarks. Magenta square, junction between R and M vein trunks; yellow dot, M1-M2 junction; red star, junction between discal crossvein and M3; blue cross, M3-Cu2 junction; green triangle, Cu1-Cu2 junction. Rectangles feature the name of marker genes. (B) Ventral wing patterns of the nymphalid Prepona eugenes with ground plan annotations proposed by Schwanwitsch, 1956 (left: reproduction of published drawings; right: equivalent annotations as color overlays). (C) Phylogenetic relationship between Papilionoidae families. (D) Ventral wing patterns of the hesperiid P. sidae annotated as in panel A, and highlighting the inferred CSS predicted by Schwanwitsch, 1956 (left panel). According to this author, the CSS marks a grey pattern in forewings, and a dislocated white stripe pattern in hindwings, suggesting uncoupling of pattern and color state in fore/hindwings in skippers. The forewing CSS is markedly dislocated along the Cu1 vein (arrowhead).

#WntA is a crucial marker of stripe elements early in development for the Nymphalidae butterfly family. @jasminealqassar.bsky.social & co explore if WntA has maintained its role in stripe elements over 95 million years of evolution in the Hesperiidae family of butterflies. doi.org/10.1242/bio....

¿Conoces casos de hormigas adheridas a otros animales?

@adsalbert.bsky.social está recogiendo datos de este tipo de interacciones.

A colorful legacy of hybridization in wood-warblers includes frequent sharing of carotenoid genes among species and genera Introgression between species can shape evolutionary trajectories in important ways. This study of the entire family of the colorful wood-warblers (Parulidae) uses whole-genome sequencing to reveal fr...

It's been a good few weeks for cool bird genomcis - incl this, on warblers sharing colour genes through hybridisation (with evidence of between-genus introgression journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Fantastic people and environment, wanna join? 👀

i knew finnish people were tall, but wow

A colorful legacy of hybridization in wood-warblers includes frequent sharing of carotenoid genes among species and genera Introgression between species can shape evolutionary trajectories in important ways. This study of the entire family of the colorful wood-warblers (Parulidae) uses whole-genome sequencing to reveal fr...

New paper out. If you like colorful birds, hybridization, and phylogenetics, read on! 🧵https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003501

I’m still in a bunch of immigration subreddits from when I was going thru the Green Card process. It’s transitioned from questions about form filing and wait times to people saying their family members have been taken by ICE and can’t be located.