Ozgur Taskent

Genomic architecture of egg mimicry and its consequences for speciation in parasitic cuckoos Host-parasite arms races facilitate rapid evolution and can fuel speciation. Cuculus cuckoos are deceptive egg mimics that exhibit a broad diversity of counterfeit egg phenotypes, representing host-ad...

Our new @science.org paper is out! Cuckoos and hosts are locked in a coevolutionary arms race over egg mimicry.

But how are these egg types inherited, and could this drive speciation? We sequenced hundreds of genomes to find out!

doi.org/10.1126/scie...

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The latest issue of #G3journal features work from @trstngnthr.bsky.social, @amygoldberg.bsky.social, @jgschraiber.bsky.social, where they benchmarked methods for estimating ancestry proportions under mapping bias and present adjusted genotype-likelihoods to mitigate its impact. buff.ly/9ET69CA

Simple scaling laws control the genetic architectures of human complex traits Genome-wide association studies have revealed that the genetic architectures of complex traits vary widely. This study shows that differences in architectures of highly polygenic traits arise mainly f...

Why do complex traits differ in their genetic architecture?
In our new PLOS Biology paper, we will try to convince you that two simple scaling laws drive differences in the number, effect sizes and frequencies of causal variants affecting complex traits.

Thread:
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

I wonder if that could be a reason why they detected so few signals of soft sweeps.

The persistence and loss of hard selective sweeps amid ancient human admixture The extent to which human adaptations have persisted throughout history despite strong eroding demographic events such as admixture, genetic drift, and fluctuations in selection pressures remains unkn...

great study (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...), but what they considered weak selection (s=[0.005-0.05]) translates to 2Nes=[100-1000], for which their model has low power of detection, and which is in the range of strong selection here: academic.oup.com/mbe/article/....

Have been looking forward to seeing this come out. The fundamental population problem is: what is a population?

Antiviral reverse transcriptases reveal the evolutionary origin of telomerase https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.16.682844v1

The persistence and loss of hard selective sweeps amid ancient human admixture https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.14.682443v1

Finally, someone has solved a real problem with AI! No more having to take a paper in the format for a journal that rejected you, and reformat it for a new journal. Well done!! formatmypaper.com

Heritability and target size underlie differences between trait architectures: examples for three traits. Top: Height (blue) and platelet crit (red) have the same heritability per site h2/L, but height has a much higher mutational target size L. This results in many more hits for height (1533) than for platelet crit (648) (2 left panels). However, the marginal distributions of effect sizes, MAFs, and z-scores of hits are nearly identical for the two traits (3 right panels). Middle: Height (blue) and FEV1 (gold) differ in h2/L, but have similar L. Consequently, the joint distribution of z-scores and MAFs of their hits are markedly different (2 left panels), as are the marginal distributions of hit effect sizes, MAFs and z-scores (right). Bottom: After scaling by their respective , and imposing the more stringent scaled significance threshold (corresponding to FEV1) for both traits, the joint distribution of z-scores and MAFs of their hits (2 left panels) and the corresponding marginal distributions (3 right panels) are highly similar.

Genetic architectures of #ComplexTraits vary widely. @yuvalsim.bsky.social @jkpritch.bsky.social @gs2747.bsky.social &co show these diffs arise from mutational target size & heritability per site; when controlled for, all tested traits have similar architectures @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/47mZXqT

Inference of complex demographic history using composite likelihood based on whole-genome genealogies Accurate parametric inference on complex demographic models is a continuing challenge in population genetics. Ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs) provide richer information than simple population ge...

Excited to preprint our latest work (w/ Drew DeHaas, Zhibai Jia, Leo Speidel) on using ARGs for demographic inference. w/ applications using data from 1000 Genomes Project. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Comprehensive gene heritability estimation reveals the genetic architecture of rare coding variants underlying complex traits https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.07.681018v1

Independent genomic trajectories shape adaptation to life on land across animal lineages How animals repeatedly adapted to life on land is a central question in evolutionary biology. While terrestrialisation occurred independently across animal phyla, it remains unclear whether shared gen...

How did animals repeatedly conquer land? 🌊➡️⛰️ We analysed ~1,000 gene repertoires (24M genes!) from all animal phyla to uncover how this happened. Work led by @gemmaeling.bsky.social & Klara Eleftheriadi, both first coauthors of this titanic effort!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A photo of the Matterhorn rising above an Alpine landscape. The colours are a little washed out, but do not appear artificially tinted

Ahead of tomorrow’s #NobelPrize announcement, I went on a deep dive in search of the most obscure physics Nobel Prizes in history. That means it's time for a thread on...🧵

PHYSICS NOBEL PRIZES YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF – PART 1

(1/n)

such terror!

Karahantepe'de İlk Defa İnsan Yüzlü Dikilitaş Bulundu - Arkeofili 12.000 yıl öncesinden bir yüz: Karahantepe’de ilk kez insan yüzü taşıyan T-dikilitaş ortaya çıktı. Peki bu ne anlama geliyor?

Karahantepe’de İlk Defa İnsan Yüzlü Dikilitaş Bulundu

arkeofili.com/karahanteped...

The Length of Haplotype Blocks and Signals of Structural Variation in Reconstructed Genealogies Abstract. Recent breakthroughs have enabled the accurate inference of large-scale genealogies. Through modelling the impact of recombination on the correla

Delighted that our paper about the distribution of genomic spans of clades/edges in genealogies (ARGs), and using this for detecting inversions and other SVs (and other phenomena that cause local disruption of recombination) is out in MBE academic.oup.com/mbe/article/... (1/n)

Accurate and efficient phylogenetic inference through end-to-end deep learning https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.30.679045v1

Population genomic scan of endogenous retrovirus insertions revealed cryptic drivers of selective sweep in wild house mouse genomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.23.678169v1

Generative continuous time model reveals epistatic signatures in protein evolution https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.17.676821v1

Within-family heritability estimates for behavioural and disease phenotypes from 500,000 sibling pairs of diverse ancestries Quantification of the direct effect of genetic variation on human behavioural traits is important for understanding between-individual variation in socio-economic and health outcomes but estimates of ...

Massive sibling regression study finds that human traits are largely environmentally driven (average heritability = 0.3)

Yapay zekanın ‘godfather’ı Geoffrey Hinton: Bu teknoloji birkaç kişiyi çok daha zengin, çoğu insanı daha yoksul hale getirecek Gazete Oksijen

Yapay zekanın ‘godfather’ı Geoffrey Hinton: Bu teknoloji birkaç kişiyi çok daha zengin, çoğu insanı daha yoksul hale getirecek - gazeteoksijen.com/financial-ti...

Beneficial reversal of dominance maintains a large-effect resistance polymorphism under fluctuating insecticide selection - Nature Ecology & Evolution Measuring selection and dominance in fitness of the insecticide-resistant Ace alleles in Drosophila melanogaster, the authors show evidence for beneficial reversal of dominance, a mechanism that can s...

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

Kenya’s Turkana people genetically adapted to live in harsh environment, study suggests Research which began with conversations round a campfire and went on to examine 7m gene variants shows how people survive with little water and a meat-rich diet

Kenya’s Turkana people genetically adapted to live in harsh environment, study suggests

Conference title: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin, and image of Lewontin in Black and White with intense expression in front of a chalkboard holding up a fist, When and Where Friday, October 10, 2025 11:30 am to Sunday, October 12, 2025 2:00 pm Music Room (218) Goldring Student Centre 150 Charles St W, Toronto, ON M5S 1K5 | and online via Zoom

I'm excited to share with you all a conference I'm planning Oct. 10-12: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin.

It will be hybrid in Toronto and on zoom, so please join us however you can! Register for zoom link here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...

The common ancestor of primates was found in a cold climate within North America

One of the most-viewed PNAS articles in the last week is “The radiation and geographic expansion of primates through diverse climates.” Explore the article here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

For more trending articles, visit ow.ly/Me2U50SkLRZ.

The ability of flavin-deficient erythrocytes from study participants in Ferrara, Italy, to support parasite proliferation.

A study of residents of Ferrara, Italy, where malaria was once endemic, and Huye, Rwanda, where it still is endemic, found a small proportion of people genetically deficient in flavins—a deficiency that protects red blood cells from malaria. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A host organelle integrates stolen chloroplasts for animal photosynthesis Sea slugs steal foreign chloroplasts and store them in specialized organelles that facilitate photosynthesis and eventual digestion to mediate starvation resistance.

www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

A host organelle (in sea slugs) integrates stolen chloroplasts for animal photosynthesis

When large-effect damaging alleles enter small populations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.11.675554v1

Genome-wide selection on transposable elements in maize https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.16.676665v1