Christopher Wheat

Hybrid Day Meeting | Organismal resilience in a rapidly changing world Join us at the Linnean Society for a one-day symposium focused on the mechanisms and consequences of variation in organismal resilience

Today we're spotlighting @chriswheat.bsky.social, who is speaking at our hybrid symposium on Organismal Resilience on 20 November.

His lab primarily works on butterflies (not wheat!), using diverse methods to answer fundamental questions in ecology & evolutionary biology.

buff.ly/hYT14pa

Day 2 of Popgen is also where I say “Please look at your kinship matrix.”Probably the best summary of pop structure there is, identifies problems or weird stuff in the data, and avoids pitfalls of structure-like plots and PCA.

Identifying opportunities & challenges, & conducting stakeholder mapping, the goal is to ensure relevance & widespread adoption of best practices: fostering trust & confidence in #genomics research to meet stakeholder needs in #biodiversity conservation. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Moose are bigger than you think

Trump freezes $200 million in UCLA science and medical research funding, citing antisemitism The Trump administration has frozen roughly $200 million in National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and other federal agency-funded research at UCLA, citing allegations the school d...

Suspension of all grants to UCLA www.latimes.com/california/s...

Genome sequencing of butterflies resolves centuries-old conundrum When conditions are just right, organisms can undergo rapid bursts of diversification, and what starts out as one species can end up as an entire family tree in the evolutionary equivalent of the blin...

Many thanks to great collaborators, including researchers from @sangerinstitute.bsky.social, @camzoology.bsky.social, Ikiam, Ecuador, Uni Campinas, Br, UNMSM, Peru, @floridamuseum.bsky.social, @cnrs.fr

Some media releases:
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/geno...
www.sanger.ac.uk/news_item/re...

Huge thanks and congrats to @siluwang.bsky.social and Anne Yoder for organising this amazing special issue. It has been fun contributing and interacting with Silu, Anne and the authors of the other manuscripts, including in a Zoom "tea break" where we presented our projects to each other.

GitHub - mol-evol/gcua: GCUA - General Codon Usage Analysis (v2.0) GCUA - General Codon Usage Analysis (v2.0). Contribute to mol-evol/gcua development by creating an account on GitHub.

GCUA has been updated to v2.5.1. It has some nice visualisations and the menu system got overhauled. It will do some parallelisations- particularly when reading in big files and if the dataset is big, then it only holds codon counts in memory, not sequences. See here: github.com/mol-evol/gcua

First field trip of the #WG2 has come to an end! We will share some of the most relevant moments of this fantastic week! Stay tuned 🦋🧬

Transgenic Plodia larvae expressing the very bright mBaoJin (mStayGold variant) in its silk glands.

Also some gorgeous 3xP3:mCherry staining of larval ocelli and glia.

(see revised preprint) by pantry moth wizards
@donyaniyaz.bsky.social & @lucalivraghi.bsky.social doi.org/10.1101/2025...

📖Published📖

Passive infrared sensors, used in camera traps, are ineffective for detecting insects. This study proposes an alternative: ultra-lightweight convolutional neural networks running on low-powered hardware to detect insects in a continuous stream of captured images 📸 🌍 🧪

buff.ly/2FnUbw5

You’ll always wonder what the loci under your peaks are … if you got the money, always WGS

5 papers all computational biologists should read 🧵

1. A Quick Guide to Organizing Computational Biology Projects
journals.plos.org/ploscompbio...

No, AlphaFold has not completely solved protein folding Biology is hard. Yes, even for AI.

AlphaFold is great, but contrary to public opinion it has not completely solved the protein folding problem. Much work remains to be done.
clauswilke.substack.com/p/no-alphafo...

I haven’t read the article yet, but this is exactly what I think. As a membrane protein structural biologist, I still have a job and will likely for a while.

The cellular substrate of evolutionary novelty Joseph Parker and Matt Pennell propose gene expression programs — sets of co-expressed transcripts that collectively encode cellular subfunctions — as fundamental entities from which novel organismal ...

Useful perspective incorporating GRNs & gene modules into theory of evolutionary novelty

Parker & Pennell emphasise gene modules, not individual genes, as fundamental units of phenotypic evolution

Provides a needed evolutionary lens for analysing scRNAseq & cell types

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

SEB Annual Conference 2025

Are you attending #SEBconference 2025? Come and see us at booth #8 to learn more about our extensive range of journals, including Society for Experimental Biology's @jxbotany.bsky.social and @conphysjournal.bsky.social‬.

Accounting for population structure and data quality in demographic inference with linkage disequilibrium methods - Nature Communications Accurate estimation of effective population size is critical for understanding population history but is often confounded by structure and data quality. Here, the authors show that GONE2 and currentNe...

I haven’t read the paper yet, but this looks interesting! www.nature.com/articles/s41... #PopGen

Amazing thread by @vdbijl.bsky.social about the story of this paper. And it is a beast of a paper, combining thousands of fish, computer-aided vision, convoluted neural nets, quantitative genetics, GWAS, sex chromosomes, genomics and sexual selection. There is something here for nearly everyone.

Congrats, very glad they didn’t stab you!

Some personal news, to be filed under “things I did not see coming”…. 1/n

Awesome to see this out. Well done!!!! Crazy complexity!!

Photo of guppy males from lab population, each showing a unique combination of black and orange ornaments. Photo by Wouter van der Bijl.

🚨 Super exited to see our paper on the inheritance and genetic basis of guppy color variation come out in @natecoevo.nature.com‬ rdcu.be/eugWV

Guppy males have enormous variation in color patterns, with many combinations of ornamental spots and stripes. But where does all this variation come from?

The status, threats and conservation of Critically Endangered species - Nature Reviews Biodiversity Species classified as Critically Endangered are at greatest risk of extinction, and their preservation and recovery are crucial to meeting global biodiversity aims. This Review assesses the geographic...

New paper reviewing the world's 10,443 Critically Endangered species: their status, distribution threats and the actions needed for their recovery
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Wellcome Connecting Science hybrid conference Understanding Life: Using Large-scale Biodiversity Reference Genomes Conference dates: 27-29 October 2025 Location: Hinxton Hall Conference Centre, Wellcome Genome Campus, UK and online Bursary and abstract deadline: 14 July Registration deadlines In person: 29 September Virtual: 20 October

Present your insights from studies into #eukaryotic genomes at our #Biodiversity25 conference! 📈

🗓️ 27-29 October 2025
Submit by 14 July 📩

We encourage submissions showcasing best practices for applying new methods and resources to analyse #biodiversity genomes at scale 🌳🧬

📎 bit.ly/4j3vAZ9

Nice. So … question. High gene expression .. when and where? How much does that matter?

So happy to see our work published in MBE after a helpful and constructive journey with Editors and Reviewers!! #wildpopulation #nonmodels #E-Ranticorrelation #evolutionaryresearch #Aptenodytes #largepenguins

While helping out on a cool genomics project recently, I came to realise I’d been taught a pretty big inaccuracy about the events that occur at fertilization. I suspect that almost everyone reading this has the same misapprehension, so let’s do some learning together: 1/

Two take-homes for me from this excellent convo: (1) I'll be covering HWE, tho still not sure to what extent/form, and (2) we as a community really ought to think about how to de-Mendelize genetics teaching in college. If anyone has made inroads in that direction, I'd love to see your materials!

The aim of this proposal is to place population genomic insights into a comparative framework to gain fundamental insights into the determinants of evolutionary outcomes. The project will work within LepEU, the European Lepidopteran Population Genomics Consortium (https://lepeu.github.io/). LepEU provides access to field samples from European populations of diverse species. Chromosome-scale reference genomes are provided by Project Psyche (https://www.projectpsyche.org/). Networking during the postdoc will be facilitated by participation in the 10kLepGenomes COST Action (https://10klepgenomes.eu/). Existing datasets await analysis, while additional samples need DNA extraction and submission for sequencing. Functional validation capability (CRISPR/Cas9 gene manipulations) is also available to test emergent hypotheses of allele-to-phenotype impacts. Personal research interests of the postdoc will be important to determine the exact project, as the project has a generous sequencing budget.

The successful applicant should have a PhD (obtained within 6 years of the application deadline) in a suitable subject area, such as evolutionary biology or population genomics. A strong interest in population genomics, local adaptation, comparative analyses, and experience working with genomic-scale data is essential. The candidate must have a documented publication record demonstrating relevant skills. Experience working with bioinformatic pipelines (e.g., Snakemake), or working with butterflies is welcome but not essential. The net salary is 28,000 SEK/month (~2,430 Euro, not subject to Swedish income tax) and comes directly from the Carl-Trygger Foundation stipend, which is paid out directly to the postdoc. Only PhD candidates acquired outside of the host department can apply. Currently, the lab of Prof. Wheat consists of 3 postdoctoral researchers, while the Dept. of Zoology provides a vibrant and excellent research environment of active, dynamic researchers. Applications should include: i) a succinct description of research interests and experience, detailing your contribution to any relevant publications (max 1 page), ii) why you are the ideal candidate for this position in the lab (max 1 page); iii) a CV including a list of publications, and iv) the name and contact information of two personal references. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis with a deadline of 23 August 2025. The project is planned to start on 1 October, but flexibility in the starting date can be provided for a suitable candidate. Please contact Prof. Wheat for additional information.

🚨Postdoc opportunity🚨: LepEU postdoc: comparative population genomics of European scale adaptation in butterflies

2 year, full-time PD in my group, Stockholm Univ.

Applications assed on rolling basis, deadline: 23 August 2025. Planned start 1 Oct.

Details:
christopherwheatlab.wordpress.com