The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt University

An integrative chemical and genomic similarity approach linking fungal secondary metabolites and biosynthetic gene clusters Fungi are well known to biosynthesize structurally complex secondary metabolites (SMs) with diverse bioactivities. These fungal SMs are frequently produced by biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs).…

Read in our latest issue a paper by @rokaslab.bsky.social & co. from @vanderbilt.edu & @uncg.edu describing an integrative chemical & genomic similarity approach to link fungal secondary metabolites & biosynthetic gene clusters #natprod #secmet

Find it in full here🔽

Abstracts due for the July Evolution and Medicine Conference in Kiel, Germany! Early discounted registration is also open

Dear friends and fans of evolutionary biology & medicine (#EvMed), deadlines for the 2026 meeting in Kiel Germany are coming up. Looks to be excellent!

March 1, 2026: Abstract submission deadline and travel award decisions

April 1, 2026: Abstract decisions

open.substack.com/pub/evmedrev...

My quote of the day

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

Charles Darwin

Why teach evolution? | National Center for Science Education Biology is the science of life, and it is arguably the most challenging of all the sciences. Not only does biology build upon the principles of chemistry and physics, it also adds new layers of complexity requiring an entirely different form of scientific analysis.

As we count down to #DarwinDay, we're re-visiting some great pieces on why we teach evolution! "Evolution isn't just a story about where we came from. It's an epic at the center of life itself." https://ncse.ngo/why-teach-evolution-1

Discovery of additional ancient genome duplications in yeasts Whole-genome duplication (WGD) has had profound macroevolutionary impacts on diverse lineages,1,2 preceding adaptive radiations in vertebrates,3,4,5 t…

With the @rokaslab.bsky.social, three novel whole genome duplication (WGD) events were discovered in the Saccharomycotina yeast species in the Dipodascales
clade. Before now, only four WGD events were known in fungi. This work suggests WGD may be underreported.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A bacterial gene acquired by parasitoid wasps contributes to venom secretion against host defence - The EMBO Journal Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is an important source of gene innovation in prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms. Several genes acquired by hosts of parasitoid wasps via HGT have been reported to prot...

Excited to share a new piece of work in @embojournal.org

Parasitoid wasps hijack a bacterial gene that governs venoms against host. Coauthors include @rokaslab.bsky.social and others.

Read more from: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Discovery of additional ancient genome duplications in yeasts Whole-genome duplication (WGD) has had profound macroevolutionary impacts on diverse lineages,1,2 preceding adaptive radiations in vertebrates,3,4,5 t…

Excited to announce our latest publication in reporting evidence for three (3!) new whole genome duplications (WGDs) in yeasts. Scientists have often wondered why WGD is so rare in fungi, it turns out we may just not have been looking hard enough! 🧪 🍄 🧬
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

If you participated in a yeast meeting in 2025, reach out to me about publishing your work from that meeting!

a group of people are standing next to each other in front of a wall . ALT: a group of people are standing next to each other in front of a wall .

How much do growth morphologies in the Saccharomycotina subphylum vary? 🤔 With the @rokaslab.bsky.social, integrated datasets of 1,051 species were examined to assess filamentation evol. history and variation. ML models predicted morphologies with 70% accuracy.
academic.oup.com/femsyr/advan...

Cover of Evolutionary Studies Magazine Fall 2025 issue featuring a black Darwin's finch with a large beak perched on green succulent vegetation. The magazine title and ESI logo appear in white text at top left. Cover stories listed include 'Kate Snyder: Evolution & Birds', 'The Evolution of Exercise in Horses', and 'The Scopes Monkey Trial Centennial Symposium'.

🎉 Fall 2025 Evolutionary Studies - the Magazine is live!
Horses that ignore genetic stop signs, humans adapting to extreme deserts, the #evolution of birdsong, and our Friend of Darwin award.
Read it: https://loom.ly/cACR5HY
#science

📣 #EMBOEvoEco returns in 2026 to uncover the mechanistic foundations of ecological and evolutionary change!

Keynote lectures will spotlight the ecology and evolution of symbiosis.

Submit your abstract for the EMBO Workshop: https://s.embl.org/eae26-01-bl!

Are you a scientist studying population, evolutionary, or quantitative genetics in Drosophila, mice, mammals, maize, humans, Arabidopsis, Zebrafish, yeast, plants, worms, or other model organisms? 🪰🐁🌽👤🐟🍺🌱🪱

#PEGQ26 is the conference for you! Submit an abstract: buff.ly/ue9xUSY

#PopGen #Evo

We made a new lager beer! "Indomitus" for wild and untamed. Brewed with a wild yeast strain from Patagonia! This is the result of a super fun collaboration (and lots of hard work) with Francisco Cubillos in Chile (@fcocubillosr.bsky.social) and Andrés Furukawa at the Nils Oscar Brewery in Sweden.

Dive into the latest Special Issue of #GENETICS, spotlighting cutting-edge experimental and computational methods shaping the future of genetics research. These papers showcase what’s possible when method development leads the way. Read more: buff.ly/eKVzqHq

Flier for conference with list of name of speakers and discussion leaders, Title for conference "Evolutionary Perspectives of Metabolic, Cellular and Genomic Diversity in Fungi", 50th Anniversary Conference Chairs: Bridget Barker & Elaine Bignell. held June 20-21 GRS, June 21-26, GRC. URL https://www.grc.org/cellular-and-molecular-fungal-biology-conference/2026/ and list of speakers names.

2026 is the 50th anniversary of the Cellular and Molecular Fungal Biology GRC. It will be June 21-26, 2026. Consider attending this is a great meeting if you work in the fungal biology field at genetic / genomic / molecular scale. www.grc.org/cellular-and... 🍄🧬🖥️

Microbial Evolution: Impacts on Human Health Call for Papers A defining characteristic of infectious diseases is that they evolve. The consequences of this evolution are among the most pressing medical issues facing humanity, including emerging pandemics, antibiotic resistance, and the success or failure of vaccines. Pathogen evolution profoundly influences virulence, transmission, and responses to a broad array of human interventions. While the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens have historically been challenging to study, large-scale genomic sequencing, novel computational tools, and experimental methods are rapidly changing the field. We encourage submissions on the broad topic of the evolution of infectious diseases. This Special Issue aims to feature research that blends evolutionary approaches to understanding pathogen heterogeneity and ongoing genetic change in clinical samples and models of human infection. It also seeks to highlight opportunities to design treatment and prevention strategies that remain effective in the face of ongoing pathogen evolution. Submission – open until January 31, 2027 Guest editors Robert Woods, MD PhD, University of Michigan Camilo Barbosa, PhD, University of Michigan Silvie Huijben, PhD, Arizona State University

🚨Call for papers🚨
Microbial Evolution: Impacts on Human Health
in the society journal Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health

Guest Editors: Bob Woods, Silvie Huijben & Camilo Barbosa
EIC: me

This will be great, please submit and share!
academic.oup.com/emph/pages/m...

Last work of the lab showing that Repeated losses of self-fertility shaped heterozygosity and polyploidy in yeast evolution | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Independent origins of spicules reconcile paleontological and molecular evidence of sponge evolutionary history Sponges have a cryptic Ediacaran history because ancestral sponges were soft-bodied and had low fossilization potential.

Sponges are notoriously difficult to understand in evolutionary biology terms. I think this paper is a big step forward : www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Group photo of faculty, trainees, alumni, and staff from the Evolutionary Studies Initiative standing together at the ESI Retreat. The group is arranged in several rows inside an industrial event space with exposed beams and wood floors, smiling toward the camera. A holiday wreath hangs on the wall behind them, and tables with notebooks and coffee cups are visible in the foreground. The photo captures a large, interdisciplinary academic community gathered for a full-day retreat.

Last week, faculty, trainees, alumni and friends gathered for our annual retreat. It was a day of talks, trivia and conversation spanning #evolution, medicine, ecology, and genomics. A great reminder of the interdisciplinary community that makes ESI work. More retreat highlights soon…

Gene-specific selective sweeps are pervasive across human gut microbiomes - Nature Development and application of the integrated linkage disequilibrium score (iLDS) reveals both selective pressures impacting the human gut microbiome and the mechanisms by which gut bacteria adapt to ...

Grateful to share our paper on gene-specific selective sweeps in human gut microbiomes, now out in Nature! It has been a joy to work with @rwolff.bsky.social, whose insights and hard work made this possible.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our raxtax tool for taxonomic classification is published: it is 2.7–100 times faster than competing tools but equally accurate - raxtax has increasing speedups with growing query and reference sequence numbers compared to existing tools: academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

Comparative genomics reveals multipartite genomes undergoing loss in the fungal endosymbiotic genus Mycetohabitans Abstract. Endosymbiotic bacteria extensively impact phenotypes of their eukaryotic hosts, while experiencing dramatic changes to their own genome as they b

We are excited to present the accepted paper on the Mycetohabitans pangenome now in @genomebiolevol.bsky.social! 🧬🦠

Thanks to @bhuwanabbot.bsky.social
for leading and collaborators:
@raw937.bsky.social @andrabuchan.bsky.social

academic.oup.com/gbe/advance-...

Just a few days left to apply to the PhD position in our group. It focuses on selfish genes in #fungi and how they might affect the spread of giant #TEs called Starships.

Did you miss of Friend of Darwin and Friend of the Planet Awards webinar last week? No worries, we have you covered. It's up on our youtube page now, so you can watch at your leisure. https://youtu.be/XV56GYpLmX4?si=7v58y5BlefZ16EnX

The Macroevolution of Filamentation Morphology Across the Saccharomycotina Yeast Subphylum Saccharomycotina yeasts are a highly diverse and widely distributed subphylum of ascomycete fungi that exhibit diversity in their asexual growth morphologies; the human commensal yeast Candida albican...

New preprint with @rokaslab.bsky.social! We used genomic, metabolic, environmental, and phenotypic data sets from 1,154 Saccharomycotina strains to asses filamentation variability and predict filamentation types across the subphylum. 🧩
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Flyer for the event. Text: 2025 Friend of Darwin and Friend of the Planet Awards. December 4 at 6:00 ET. Register for this virtual event to receive a link. Imagery: Headshots and group photos of each of the recipients: Katie Hinde, Evolutionary Studies at Vanderbilt, Randolph M. Nesse, John Toohey-Morales, The CLEO Institute, and Kim Cobb.

Join us online tomorrow, Thursday, December 4 at 6 PM ET as we honor this year's Friend of Darwin and Friend of the Planet recipients! The event is free and open to the public. To register - us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
#celebrate #sciencesky #edusky #evobio #climatesky #ecosky #webinar

🚨Last chance! Submit an abstract to #Fungal26 by tomorrow, December 4: buff.ly/1AMwJhf

They can cover an array of topics including #ComparativeGenomics #FunctionalGenomics #Pathogenic #GeneRegulation #CellBiology #Biochemistry #Metabolism #FungalEcology #Evo #DevelopmentalBio #PopGen and more.

The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine A quiet policy change means the government is making fewer bets on long-term science.

Essential reading if you care about the health of scientific inquiry in the US

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Reminder! Our Friend of Darwin and Friend of the Planet webinar is coming up this Thurs., 12/4! Join us virtually as we celebrate 2025's award recipients. This online event is free and will include a Q&A after brief comments from the winners. Register - us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
#soundscience

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