Mari Sepp

Vertebrate Genome Evolution. Annual Symposium of the @louisjeantetfdn.bsky.social Foundation in Geneva. Free access on site and on line. Great speakers for a super interesting topic. #SvantePaabo #HenrikKaessmann organisers 🙏 See you there! @biology-unige.bsky.social @genevunige.bsky.social

Simons Foundation Announces Recipients of 2025 Fellows-to-Faculty Awards The Simons Foundation is pleased to announce the 2025 class of Fellows-to-Faculty Fellows.

Announcing our 9 new Fellows-to-Faculty Fellows! These awards help senior postdoctoral researchers with fresh perspectives on autism & neuroscience transition to tenure-track faculty positions: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/simons-foundation-announces-recipients-of-2025-fellows-to-faculty-awards/

👇 !!!

Huge congrats @klehto.bsky.social on this achievement!! Her work has already enriched the @estbiobank.bsky.social and will continue to do so! 💙🖤🤍

🧠 Opportunity for a post-doctoral position on human neurobiology, funded by the @erc.europa.eu!
🧫You want to use human pluripotent stem cell based models to understand the evolution of human cerebellar neurons and disorders, this position is for you!
🔗Apply here: emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...

Congrats, Valentina! Great to see this study out!

🔬 New preprint out!

Thrilled to share our new preprint, where we uncover the molecular diversity and developmental origins of cerebellar astrocytes using multi-omic approaches.

📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#scRNAseq #astrocytes #neuroscience #glia #cerebellum @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social

The Anne West lab at Duke is hiring a postdoc to work on nuclear cell biology in neurogenesis. Please help me spread the word! Applications to west@neuro.duke.edu.

Brain Surfaces of 70 primate species

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To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised!

🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Marsupial single-cell transcriptomics identifies temporal diversity in mammalian developmental programs Menchero et al. generate a single-cell transcriptomic atlas in the opossum and show rapid progression of transcriptional programs in specific tissues relative to morphological landmarks. This shift in...

Thrilled to share that our latest work on marsupial heterochrony is now online at @cp-devcell.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social @lab-turner.bsky.social @crick.ac.uk We used scRNAseq to understand the asynchronous progression of developmental programmes in marsupials www.cell.com/developmenta...

A male-essential miRNA is key for avian sex chromosome dosage compensation - Nature Birds have evolved a unique sex chromosome dosage compensation mechanism involving the male-biased microRNA (miR-2954), which is essential for male survival by regulating the expression of dosage-sens...

Our study on a male-essential microRNA and the evolution of other dosage compensation mechanisms in birds is now out in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Human de novo mutation rates from a four-generation pedigree reference - Nature Analysis of more than 95% of each diploid human genome of a four-generation, twenty-eight-member family using five complementary short-read and long-read sequencing technologies provides a truth set t...

Human de novo mutation rates from a four-generation pedigree reference www.nature.com/articles/s41... - amazingly comprehensive study from Evan Eichler and colleagues

Temporal control of progenitor competence shapes maturation in GABAergic neuron development in mice - Nature Neuroscience Unlike cortical progenitors, ventral telencephalic progenitors retain the ability to generate diverse neuron types during neurogenesis. Here, the authors show that ventral telencephalic progenitor mat...

Now out in @natneuro.nature.com: Temporal control of progenitor competence shapes maturation in GABAergic neuron development in mice. Congrats to first authors @annrosebright.bsky.social, Yana Kotlyarenko, @flo-neuhaus.bsky.social, and thanks to all collaborators!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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🤩 Happy to see my PhD mentor Tõnis Timmusk elected as a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization ‪@embo.org‬. So well-deserved!
An inspiring scientist, supportive mentor, and generous friend! ‪
@taltech.bsky.social‬

Conference Report: Cerebellar Development and Disease at Single-Cell Resolution - The Cerebellum The Cerebellum -

Did the miss the Cerebellum Development and Disease conference last year? Never fear, as we wrote up a conference report! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Excited to share the first 2(!) preprints from the Kebschull Lab. The amazing @hyopilkim.bsky.social developed MAPseq2 & POINTseq and used them to map the dopaminergic cells of VTA and SNc. tl;dr MAPseq2=10x cheaper, 4x better; POINTseq=easy cell type specific barcoding; DA neurons=very cool.

We are delighted to share our new preprint “The evolution of gene regulatory programs controlling gonadal development in primates” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Functional recruitment and connectivity of the cerebellum is associated with the emergence of Theory of Mind in early childhood Nature Communications - The cerebellum is heavily implicated in adult social cognition, but its role in Theory of Mind development remains unclear. Here, the authors show that children’s...

What about the social cerebellum during development we wondered? Here you find some cool insights on this awesome part of the brain! BIG thanks for the great work Katerina Manoli, and support from Charlotte Grosse Wiesmann and Frank van Overwalle 🧠🦋 rdcu.be/epKmZ

Simons Graduate Fellowships in Ecology and Evolution The purpose of these awards is to provide support for students entering U.S.-based Ph.D. programs with a plan to perform research in ecology and evolution. While we will consider all projects in ecolo...

Get the word out far and wide. New opportunity from the Simons Foundation in the Eco-Evo space.

2026 Simons Graduate Fellowship in Ecology and Evolution Awards, due July 31, 2025, only for incoming PhD students who plan to start their PhDs in Fall 2026.

www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons...

Congrats! Looking forward to diving in

Benchmarking cerebellar organoids to model autism spectrum disorder and human brain evolution While cortical organoids have been used to model different facets of neurodevelopmental conditions and human brain evolution, cerebellar organoids have not yet featured so prominently in the same cont...

New preprint alert 📣
#Cerebellum, organoid, autism & brain evolution 🧪 🧫🧠🧬
Collaboration with G. Testa; fruit of years of work by smart students, led by postdoc Davide Aprile. Organoids to understand better the developmental basis of autism (focus: CHD8) & sapiens brain evolution (focus: CADPS2) 🧵

Design principles of cell-state-specific enhancers in hematopoiesis Screen of minimalistic enhancers in blood progenitor cells demonstrates widespread dual activator-repressor function of transcription factors (TFs) and enables the model-guided design of cell-state-sp...

Out in Cell @cp-cell.bsky.social: Design principles of cell-state-specific enhancers in hematopoiesis
🧬🩸 screen of fully synthetic enhancers in blood progenitors
🤖 AI that creates new cell state specific enhancers
🔍 negative synergies between TFs lead to specificity!
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
🧵

Big congrats to our longtime collaborators in the Stefan Pfister and @lenakutscher.bsky.social labs — large-scale chromosomal changes as early tumour-initiating events in Group 3/4 medulloblastoma!

Had the same question :) In our datasets of cerebellum development, Fam210b has the highest expression in granule cell progenitors, in human and mouse.

Check out our latest work on the evolution of animal genome regulation out today in @nature.com. Nicely summarized below by @ianakim.bsky.social.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is a major output from our ERC-StG project Evocellmap @erc.europa.eu at @crg.eu

🎉 This paper has been a long time and a labour of love (and hardship) for multiple group members, but, finally: we MPRA'ed 25k introgressed variants (Denisovan and Neanderthal) segregating at allele frequencies > 0.15 in humans today to evaluate their potential to regulate gene expression.

Dissecting regulatory syntax in human development with scalable multiomics and deep learning Transcription factors (TFs) establish cell identity during development by binding regulatory DNA in a sequence-specific manner, often promoting local chromatin accessibility, and regulating gene expre...

Delighted to share our latest work deciphering the landscape of chromatin accessibility and modeling the DNA sequence syntax rules underlying gene regulation during human fetal development! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Read on for more: 🧵 1/16 #GeneReg 🧬🖥️

Regulatory logic of human cortex evolution by combinatorial perturbations Comparative genomic studies between contemporary and extinct hominins revealed key evolutionary modifications, but their number has hampered a system level investigation of their combined roles in sca...

Delighted to share our new preprint, the outcome of many years of collaborative work with Giuseppe Testa’s group, both at the bench & in front of the computer, probing human brain evolution using organoids. We tried something cool, and learned a lot 🧪🧫🧠🧬
[follow 🧵]
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What an elegant study - uncovering the regulatory basis of an evolutionary adaptation