Yan Wong

Okay, here are some first reflections on Watson.
Watson's life is a tragedy, really of Shakespearean proportions. He did not, as most bios will tell you, do one great thing when he was young and then collect laurels for it for the next 60 years. His career arc was unlike any in science.

Confounding fuels misinterpretation in human genetics | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences The scientific literature has seen a resurgence of interest in genetic influences on human behaviour and socioeconomic outcomes. Such studies face the central difficulty of distinguishing possible cau...

Full OA paper here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure Franklin was no victim in how the DNA double helix was solved. An overlooked letter and an unpublished news article, both written in 1953, reveal that she was an equal player.

On the event of James Watson's death, I highly recommend this 2023 commentary from @matthewcobb.bsky.social and Nathaniel Comfort with crucial new insights into the discovery of the double helix. (And also check out Cobb's brand new biography of Francis Crick) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review.

This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month.

Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.

Are you asking the right questions? What lions can tell us about entropy and AI

Latest post on how to win at 20 questions, from penguins and probability to entropy and AI: kucharski.substack.com/p/are-you-as...

The Passing of the Tree of Life Web Project The Tree of Life Web Project began its journey almost 40 years ago, and was formally announced in early 1996. It has served thousands of pages of information about the evolutionary tree of life and…

The end of an era: the Tree of Life Web Project is going dark after 3 decades. Anyone interested in communicating phylogeny online should read David's account of goals, history, and future. @bembidion.bsky.social
subulatepalpomere.com/2025/11/02/t...

tskit_arg_visualizer: interactive plotting of ancestral recombination graphs Summary: Ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs) are a complete representation of the genetic relationships between recombining lineages and are of central importance in population genetics. Recent brea...

Excited to share our new preprint for the tskit_arg_visualizer Python package! ARGs can sometimes feel like a black box, so
@yanwong.bsky.social and I have been developing a method to programmatically drawing these graphs.

🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2508.03958

1/6

This is figure 2, which shows the disease signs and trajectory of P. helianthoides exposed to SSWD.

A study in Nature Ecology & Evolution identifies a bacterial species as a cause of sea star wasting disease, which has been responsible for billions of sea star deaths since 2013 and widespread loss of kelp habitats. go.nature.com/46I4kx2 🌊 🧪

Yes, PopGroup is great. Come to that!

I am super happy to see our dog rose's paper featuring the cover of the July 3rd issue of @nature.com

read more here: tinyurl.com/dog-rose

Such a fascinating and well-written thread. Worth reading right to the end.

The tragic landslide in Blatten gives me the excuse to tell you the story of how we found out Ice Ages existed. It's a cool story and the most important bit is rather similar to what's happening now.

Join us for our Anniversary Day and hear from:

Prof Josephine Pemberton (Genetics Society Medal)
Prof Kathy Niakan (Mary Lyon Medal)
Prof Gregory Radick (Haldane Lecture)
Prof Richard Durbin (Genomics keynote)
Rosie Parkin & Eldrian Tho (Student talks)

Registration: genetics.org.uk/events/genet...

This is figure 3, which shows amniote footprints.

A paper in Nature reports the discovery of fossilized claw prints thought to belong to an amniote on a slab of rock from Australia dated to about 356 million years ago, suggesting that the origin of amniotes is earlier than expected. go.nature.com/4jm5XTP #Paleosky 🧪

➡️ This is another situation where we truly need public support. Please reach out and speak up - before it is too late.

Un vent de panique sur les sciences du climat C'est une nouvelle conséquence de la politique de Donald Trump. Les sciences du climat ont froid dans le dos. On savait le président américain climato-sceptique, mais désormais il franchit une nouvell...

"C'est du sabotage"
Le président américain a licencié 800 scientifiques de la NOOA. La directrice du programme sur l'acidification de l'océan mise à la porte sans ménagement. Comme les chercheurs qui surveillent les alertes tsunami...
"C'est de l'obscurantisme"
www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/...

I would benefit from something like that!

We ( @zeniabaek.bsky.social @moicoll.bsky.social and @asgerhobolth.bsky.social ) present a new cool way to visualize the optimal trade off for hmm decoding called Artemis plots!
arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15156
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A complete and dynamic tree of birds - out today in PNAS! Teamwork with @eliotmiller.bsky.social and others at
@birdsoftheworld.bsky.social and Open Tree of Life to put together current relationships across all birds. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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...

This is a very cool article. They did T2T (high depth, low error) sequencing on genomes from FOUR generations of a family. 🧵

"Human de novo mutation rates from a four-generation pedigree reference"

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

Antibody escape drives emergence of diverse spike haplotypes resembling variants of concern in persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections Evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in long-term persistent infections is hypothesised to be a major source of variants of concern (VOC). However, the linkage of intra-host variants into haplotypes that reflect v...

New preprint from Luke Snell from GSTT, Suzanne Pickering in my lab and Rui Galao, my colleague at KCL.

Here we examine in detail the evolution of the SARS CoV-2 spike in persistent infections, and essentially catch a potential variant in the act of developing. 1/n

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

the word alert is in a purple circle ALT: the word alert is in a purple circle

ACTION ITEM-----ACTION ITEM

Implementation of Schedule F

This is what a lot of us have been worried about.

This allows for many civil service positions to replaced with political appointees. This could include NIH institute directors and even POs.

BUT THERE IS A COMMENT PERIOD...

1/n

The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature. 2. Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events. 3. Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research (gene altering and organism supercharging) at inadequate biosafety levels. 4. Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with COVID-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market. 5. By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t.

The White House has turned COVID.gov from a public health resource into a politically charged platform promoting the lab-leak theory and attacking specific scientists and the pandemic response in general. Let’s fact check its 5 headline claims… 🧵

Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions - rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking steps to make sure students can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope others follow suit.

The molecular evolutionary basis of species formation - Nature Reviews Genetics Recently, several new speciation genes have been identified that have contributed to our understanding of the molecular details of the evolution of hybrid dysfunction. This Progress article describes ...

With @hybridzones.bsky.social & @jenncoughlan.bsky.social, we have been working on an update to Daven Presgraves' influential 2010 review on hybrid incompatibilities (shorturl.at/cJndf). The preprint is available here (shorturl.at/DTC48) with an updated table of almost 100 incompatibilities!

This is really neat work. Congratulations

Sex decreases the pleiotropic costs of local adaptation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.28.646016v1

Amazing stuff! Congratulations on getting this out. Such a lot of new things to look at.

A phylogeny of the 7 ape genomes that have now been completed from "T2T", with Homer Simpson representing mankind.

A project five years in the making, we've now published complete "T2T" genomes for six additional ape species! It turns out that finishing (and analyzing) six genomes is slightly more work than one... doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Iguanas rafted more than 8,000 km from North America to Fiji: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

#biogeography #phylogenetics #genomics #ecology #evolution