Toño Urban Aragon

✨Thrilled to share that the first chapter of my Ph.D. thesis is NOW OUT in Science Advances! ✨🥳🎉 🧬. This couldn't have been possible without the support of everyone involved
@genscapelab.bsky.social, @nirajrai.bsky.social, ‪@cdelafc.bsky.social‬, @jaurban2204.bsky.social, @mootspoints.bsky.social

Come and check @eshabandyopadhyay.bsky.social super cool project now live in Science Advances! Glad to have contributed a bit into this fun project!

The History of the Panmictic Population Concept and Its Legacy in Contemporary Population Genetics ABSTRACT The panmictic population concept is at the heart of population, evolutionary and conservation genetics. However, in nature, true panmictic populations are vanishingly rare. As an idea conce...

🚨 New paper klaxon! 🚨

The History of the Panmictic Population Concept and Its Legacy in Contemporary Population Genetics

Quite niche admittedly, one for the historians of evolutionary thought, and population geneticists.

doi.org/10.1111/ahg....

Our newest special issue is now live! Check it out to discover more about diverse and beautiful Fungi🍄🍄‍🟫🍄 On the cover: the fly agaric, Amanita muscaria, releasing its spores in the early morning light. www.cell.com/current-biol...

@mashaals.bsky.social the youtube link is not working

Come and check out @jaurban2204.bsky.social's PhD project now live in Current Biology!!!

Thrilled to see the latest work from the lab (@genscapelab.bsky.social) out in Current Biology! Congratulations @jaurban2204.bsky.social ! 🎉

Grateful to have had the chance to contribute to this effort.

Very special thanks to the Adivasi and Sinhalese individuals involved in this study!!! They are a pivotal part of this study, and we'll engage with them again in outreach activities soon! [6/n]
Special note: Some of the supplementary links are still being fixed by the journal!

This was a true-collaborative effort involving teams from Sri Lanka, India, and the United States. Many thanks to my PI Maanasa Raghavan, co-authors @eshabandyopadhyay.bsky.social , PhD, Anjana Welikala and other co-authors!! [5/n]

Finally, our genomic analysis infers drastic founder events and long-term low effective population sizes for the Adivasis, likely as the result of their hunter-gatherer lifestyle and historical events, such as forced relocations and habitat fragmentation [4/n].

We also find that the Adivasi individuals have higher levels of an Asian hunter-gatherer ancestry than the Sinhalese and other Sri Lankan populations, such as the Sri Lankan Tamils sampled in the UK (1000 Genomes Project). [3/n]

We identify that both Sinhalese and Adivasi share genetic ancestries with other populations from mainland South Asia (i.e., populations belonging to the Modern South Asian genetic cline). [2/n]

Population histories of the Indigenous Adivasi and Sinhalese from Sri Lanka using whole genomes Sri Lanka is home to diverse ethnic groups with different genetic histories. Urban Aragon et al. find that despite close genetic affinities, Indigenous Adivasi have more hunter-gatherer ancestry and l...

Delighted to share that one of my major PhD projects has been published today in Current Biology.

In this paper, we look into the genetic population structure and demographic histories of two populations in Sri Lanka: the Sinhalese and Adivasi [1/n]. www.cell.com/current-biol...

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 >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...

This was a large collaborative piece of work with the lead efforts by student @maggiesteiner.bsky.social and former postdoc Dan Rice. It's well-timed for Maggie especially as she is defending her thesis on Monday!

Excited for our publication on how the geographic scale of a sample affects the discovery of rare, deleterious variants to be out this week. With a mix of theory, simulation, and data analysis, we show when samples are narrow vs broad, the number of variants discovered and their frequencies change