Miya Qiaowei Pan

Application details see: www.phd.tuebingen.mpg.de/3849/Apply-t...

Details of the projects see: www.phd.tuebingen.mpg.de/14722/phdpro...

Excited to share that I’m starting a research group at MPI for Biology Tübingen — and we’re recruiting PhD students!

We are offering two fully funded PhD positions on sex determination and development in Hymenoptera 🐜🐝.

Please share with prospective students who might be interested.

How do new centromeres evolve while staying compatible with the division machinery?

Discover it in our new Nature paper! We show centromeres transition gradually via a mix of drift, selection, and sex, reaching new states that still work with the kinetochore.

👉 doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09779-1

***Super cool-project alert***⚠️ Come work with @dirkmetzler.bsky.social and me in trying to understand how transcriptional noise evolves in a phylogenetic context 🧬 Deadline 15th Dec 2025 (Project funded by @dfg.de @gevol.bsky.social)

Team fish - we need your help! We are trying to build a database of all the fish chromosome-scale genomes where sex chromosomes have been identified. Have you build one or some? Do you know someone who has? Can you post the link in the comments? Please spread the word and repost! Thank you!

Defensive fungal symbiosis on insect hindlegs Dinidorid stinkbugs were reported to possess a conspicuous tympanal organ on female hindlegs. In this study, we show that this organ is specialized to retain microbial symbionts rather than to perceiv...

"When the female bugs lay their eggs, they rub the cultivated hyphae across the egg mass. The hyphae grow to envelope the eggs and physically exclude attentive parasitoid wasps until the bugs hatch."

#fungi #symbiosis

Convergent evolution of a conserved molecular network underlies parenting and sociality - Nature Reviews Genetics Kay et al. review evidence that parental care, and more complex social behaviour based on parental care, evolved in multiple species through the repeated co-option of members of a pleiotropic molecula...

Parental care, and more complex cooperative systems of care, have independently evolved in hundreds of animal lineages. In an article published today, we explore how these behaviors evolve 𝘢𝘵 𝘢 𝘮𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘳 𝘭𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘭l shorturl.at/g5OPw /1

Job alert🚨📢! Join us as Director of the SIB Centre for Pathogen Bioinformatics, on a topic where global collaboration is particularly important, in a highly stimulating environment. This is a research infrastructure leadership position.

Apply or spread the word!

apply.refline.ch/499599/0346/...

Molecular mechanisms of selfish elements and strategies Certain genes, chromosomes, organelles, or entire sets of chromosomes can bias their transmission to the next generation, propagating themselves at the expense of the rest of the genome. Referred to …

(1/9) Join us in Bern, Switzerland (8–11 Feb 2026) for our EMBO Workshop on Molecular Mechanisms of Selfish Elements and Strategies!

Organized with Tanja Schwander, Laura Ross (@laurarossevo.bsky.social) and Axel Imhof.

meetings.embo.org/event/26-sel...

#EMBOselfishElements #EMBOevents

New preprint from the lab: A reference brain for the clonal raider ant.
With this resource, which is based on 40 individual brains, you can register and compare all kinds of samples in a common space. It comes with lots of detailed protocols and a user-friendly GUI.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Large model of a green caterpillar, the back of which is covered by dozens of white cocoons. Wasps can be seen emerging from some of the cocoons.

Spookiest decoration at the "Zoo Goes Boo" event at the John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids? Giant model of parasitoid wasps hatching from cocoons affixed to their caterpillar host.

Poster with QR code linking to the position

I'm very excited to announce that UNC Biology has 6 faculty positions open this year! The first is for an Asst Professor who studies organismal resilience using an integrative approach 1/n
unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

Induction of menstruation in mice reveals the regulation of menstrual shedding During menstruation, an inner layer of the endometrium is selectively shed, while an outer, progenitor-containing layer is preserved to support repeated regeneration. Progress in understanding this co...

I’m thrilled to share my postdoc work and the first paper from the McKinley Lab! 🎉
@karalmckinley.bsky.social
We built the first transgenic model of menstruation in mice.
We used it to uncover how the endometrium organizes and sheds during menstruation. 🧪
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🧵

🐜🥛 Des scientifiques ont « ressuscité » une ancienne recette des Balkans et de Turquie : le yaourt aux fourmis ! Leur étude, publiée dans la revue iScience, révèle que les #fourmis rousses (Formica spp.) possèdent un ensemble de ferments permettant de transformer le lait en yaourt 😆

Beyond Wolbachia—Can a small molecule control insect reproduction? Kaur et al. demonstrate reduced histone acetylation as a key mechanism underpinning Wolbachia’s paternal-effect embryonic lethality trait in Drosophila melanogaster. Recapitulation of this trait by in...

#Wolbachia has puzzled scientists with its power to rewire insect reproduction. What if I tell you that we found one of the keys Wolbachia use to rewire its host AND a small molecule inhibitor uses this key to mimic what this microbe has mastered for millions of years.

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Super cool work on the evolution of NOD-like receptor genes in fungi 🍄‍🟫 🤩 by @loreament.bsky.social

@AntCommunity 🐜 🐜 Chengyuan Liu found a Camponotus ant colony where all sexual larvae have red spots of various sizes, but worker larvae don’t. Any idea what this is?🤔 Video in the comment.

Assistant/Associate Professor in Structural Biology, Biophysics or Biological Imaging

www.biozentrum.unibas.ch/open-positio...

#biozentrum #University #Basel #Professor #Structural #Biology #Biophysics #Biological #Imaging

Our department of Plant Molecular Biology at the University of Lausanne @unil.bsky.social is recruiting a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the field of Plant-Organism Interactions 🌱🐛🦠🍄! Application before November 30, 2025. See the official job ad for more details: tinyurl.com/mtxdcz6p

Bioinformatician / Data Scientist (m/f/d) Bioinformatician / Data scientist position in the Aztekin Lab focusing on Structural Regeneration and support the working group together with the other members

🚀 Looking for a Bioinformatician / Data Scientist to join our crew and explore regeneration through single-cell genomics & evolutionary biology! @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social
📩 Questions? Contact us ✉️
🔗 Apply here: www.mpg.de/25243280/bio...

Figure 1. Diversity of male-killing (MK) endosymbionts across arthropods.

"Striking diversity of male-killing symbionts and their mechanisms"
by Hiroshi Arai (@haraipapilio.bsky.social), Daisuke Kageyama (@daisukekageyama.bsky.social) & co

"Why [and how] do maternally inherited endosymbionts kill male hosts?"

Find out here:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Lediga jobb vid Stockholms universitet Jobb

We have several open positions in my group, funded from the ERC Grant on the Early Sequestered Germline of Fungi. We search broadly for applicants at both PhD and master-level, with a dedicated interest in fungal evolutionary biology. Please forward and RT!
Find the positions here: su.varbi.com

🌎👩‍🔬 For 15+ years biology has accumulated petabytes (million gigabytes) of🧬DNA sequencing data🧬 from the far reaches of our planet.🦠🍄🌵

Logan now democratizes efficient access to the world’s most comprehensive genetics dataset. Free and open.

doi.org/10.1101/2024...

The Origin and Diversification of Mitochondria Moving beyond the simplistic view of mitochondria as the power house of the cell, Roger et al. present the immense diversity of mitochondria and mitochondrial functions across eukaryotes, and bring th...

Feeling mitochondrially challenged lately?

Here are two classic reviews on #mitochondria that should help.

www.cell.com/current-biol...

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Transcriptional Interference Gates Monogenic Odorant Receptor Expression in Ants Communication is crucial to social life, and in ants, it is mediated primarily through olfaction. Ants have more odorant receptor (OR) genes than any other group of insects, generated through tandem d...

If you’re interested in ants, olfaction, gene regulation, or all of the above, here’s a new preprint from the lab for you. It describes an unorthodox mechanism of transcriptional interference by which ant olfactory sensory neurons produce a single functional receptor.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Wonderful (and humble) essay on mentorship by Brandon Gaut, on occasion of Brandon receiving the inaugural Mentorship Award of @genetics-gsa.bsky.social. I hope this will be widely read!

academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

What to do when wasps crash your picnic – a scientist’s guide to dining safely with these insects Did you know wasps switch from ham to jam foraging during the late summer?

It's a bumper-wasp year: here are my top tips on how to dine alongside wasps, without getting stung.

GET INVOLVED! Tell us what wasps want at YOUR picnic: www.sumnerlab.co.uk/wasp-picnic-...

theconversation.com/what-to-do-w...

@uclcber.bsky.social @uclnews.bsky.social @uk.theconversation.com

Excited to share our new paper in #MolEcol on sex chromosome evolution in African killifish! 🐟 A great collaboration with @alexandrsember.bsky.social . We uncovered ≥4 sex chromosome turnovers across Nothobranchius spp. using cytogenetics & genomics.
👉 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Evolution and functioning of an X–A balance sex-determining system in hops - Nature Plants On the basis of the whole-genome sequences of cultivated and wild hops, this study describes the evolution of sex chromosomes, including degeneration and dosage compensation, and identifies a candidat...

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