Rob Denton

Sex chromosome stability and turnover across vertebrates: a developmental gene regulatory network perspective Sex chromosomes have evolved repeatedly across the Tree of Life, yet their evolutionary fates differ strikingly among lineages. In mammals and birds, highly degenerated Y/W chromosomes have remained s...

🚀 New lab preprint on #SexChromosomeTurnover is out on @arxiv.bsky.social

Huge congrats to lab thesis student for submitting his PhD @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social fellowship: big milestone and fingers crossed 🤞 and to all students for the submissions🤞🤞

More to come soon… 🐸🧬

arxiv.org/abs/2602.23624

So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).

for summarising values over groups in plots, I think that generally ridgeplots are superior to box plots and violin plots...
#rstats #statistics #dataviz

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets: The administration has not yet released funding Congress allocated to multiple research agencies, so they cannot provide it to funded entities/people - including NIH and NASA. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Humbled by Evolution Understanding the history and diversity of life inspires awe and wonder.

1. I’m quite happy with this popular piece that Lee Dugatkin and I wrote recently. For the next two weeks it’s free to read on the American Scientist website.

The National Science Foundation’s entire budget is $10 billion.

My department at CSU Northridge is hiring a vertebrate functional morphologist! We've got a great EEB group, and we're looking for someone to carry forward a tradition of enriching organismal courses and community-engaged research. App review starts March 15

csucareers.calstate.edu/mob/cw/en-us...

Trump said to select Thiel protégé as NSF director

President Donald Trump is planning to nominate a libertarian protégé of billionaire Peter Thiel with no research experience to be the next National Science Foundation director, according to reports today in the New York Times and elsewhere. 1/7

Selection-driven color variation in the aposematic strawberry poison frog, Oophaga pumilio Aguilar-Gómez et al. use exome sequencing of 347 strawberry poison frogs to uncover the genetic basis of color variation. They identify that kit, ttc39b, and bco1 underlie blue-red, yellow-red, and gr...

The last chapter of my PhD is finally out !!!! In the same species, on neighboring islands, we see radically different warning colors emerge. Evolution in action:
Selection-driven color variation in the aposematic strawberry poison frog, Oophaga pumilio: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

Wishing past Rob had the foresight and audacity to clear my schedule so I could watch all Olympic hockey.

Spreading lab good news, in no particular order:

-Student in the lab got named to the Top 100 students at Ball State, wow!
-Started a brand new, five-year NSF grant to conduct a dream project
-Lab dominated the department chili cookoff, taking 1st & 3rd for vegetarian chili and 1st for dessert item

Hey genomics colleagues: are they any software programs you wish still worked on your modern OS? I’m trying to get a list of dead software that lost support and fell out of fashion, not due to method but due to software support. #genomics #evosky #evolbio #popgen #Evolution

A line curve showing number of awards for fiscal year 2026 compared to fiscal years 2021-2025 across NSF. The fiscal year 2026 curve lies well below curves for other fiscal years.

NSF Update

Funding curve overall. A little bit of progress in the past week, but only a little bit.

Now by Directorate...

1/11

it's the AI PRFB now 🙃

Molecular Biology and Evolution | February 2026

The February cover of Molecular Biology and Evolution features the work of Ward et al. on the evolution of SERPINA snake venom inhibitors in rodents.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf290

🖌️ Rajani Arora

#evobio #molbio

If you recruit great, creative students, this kind of stuff just appears on whiteboards and makes everyone happy.

Milton. You gonna tell us which ones? 🙃

Some TEMNOSPONDYLI, from the video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YULv... I recently dedicated to this lineage of tetrapods 🐸 This poster is now also available at mariolanzas.redbubble. com for prints and other items 🐸 #temnospondyli #paleoart #amphibians #beastoflesotho #prehistoricanimals

A comic graphical abstract by illustrator Rush Dhillon showing two wood warblers and their spider prey. The graphs illustrate the read abundance of these spiders in the warbler's fecal samples.

I could give you a great summary of our new warbler diet paper… but if a picture says a thousand words, this awesome graphical abstract by @rushstudio.bsky.social tells the whole story. 🦉🧪
academic.oup.com/auk/article/...

NSF building on Eisenhower Av. HUD now owns.

Destroying the NSF mural in the foyer. Of the Eisenhower building.

The National Science Foundation sign on our Eisenhower Av building is now gone.

The NSF mural in the foyer is removed and torn off in sheets.

We were supposed to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the agency in May 2025. That never happened.

The Murphy Lab did our annual retreat this week. This year's theme was using AI (what it's good and bad for). I wanted to be open-minded to make sure we are not missing something we should be using it for, so we did a few exercises to test, and had presentations.

Size of Life From an amoeba to a blue whale

and the winner of the "2025 best thing on Internet" has just arrived
neal.fun/size-of-life/

@carlbergstrom.com

Special Issue: CONSERVATION GENOMICS ‐ MAKING A DIFFERENCE: Molecular Ecology: Vol 34, No 23 Molecular Ecology is an international journal for research using molecular genetic techniques to address questions in ecology, evolution, behavior and conservation.

New special issue in Molecular Ecology on Conservation Genomics #popGen #evolution 🧪🧬🖥️ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/1365294x...

I’ll miss the dog park the most. My pictures don’t do justice to how nice this view is.

Figure from linked scientific paper that shows predicted teaching scores across faculty age. The predicted scores for men are highest near the mean age of faculty and decline at the extremes. The predicted scores for women are inverted, with women demonstrating higher teaching scores when relatively young or old.

(2/2) I love showing students this figure (from www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...), which models teaching scores across instructor age. I am approaching my highest peak of positive bias, essentially on a different scale compared to my female colleagues.

list of peer-reviewed papers that can be extracted

list of peer-reviewed papers that can be extracted

Happy "teaching evaluations reveal" to those that celebrate. I think it is important to talk to students honestly about evals and break down some of the numerous studies that show that teaching evals A) don't actually measure achievement of learning outcomes and B) are largely discriminatory (1/2)

No molecular evidence for Muller's ratchet in mitochondrial genomes Muller's ratchet predicts that non-recombining genomes can accumulate deleterious mutations, though molecular evidence for it is rare. Previous studies have tried to detect ratchet-like behavior in mi...

Have you ever wondered: just how strong *is* the evidence for Muller's ratchet on mtDNA?

Well, wonder no more!

(Project led by Yu Mo, with @smishra677.bsky.social and @yadirapga.bsky.social)

"No molecular evidence for Muller's ratchet in mitochondrial genomes"
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Boxing up the NSF at Eisenhower Av for the forced relocation. Boxes have “Details Matter” signage.

NSF

- Forced reorg

- POs down ~ 40% (DRP, most rotators not renewed, retirements)

- Forced move (and we have to pack and clean) to a building with no furniture, little to no conference space for panels, inadequate 🛜, …)

I personally love the boxes they gave us for packing.
“Details matter” 🙃