Kenny Kim

Molting nauplius

Just saw a video of a molting nauplius posted on reddit. 🤩🦀 #crustmas

www.reddit.com/r/microscopy...

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL OF YOU!🎄✨

Christmas miracle, anyone?

Triops and their moults. #crustmas 🧪🎄

Majority of local insect biomass decline linked to species loss A new study shows that over 90% of insect biomass declines are driven by shrinking species numbers, posing a risk to ecosystem function.

A new study shows that over 90% of insect biomass declines are driven by shrinking species numbers, posing a risk to ecosystem function. www.idiv.de/majority-of-... #biodiversity

😯 🦀 🦀

RegEvol: detection of directional selection in regulatory sequences through phenotypic predictions and phenotype-to-fitness functions www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧬🖥️🧪 github.com/mrrlab/RegEvol

The diversity of lepidopteran spatial orientation strategies – neuronal mechanisms and emerging challenges in a changing world - Journal of Comparative Physiology A The Lepidoptera, butterflies and moths, display an astonishing diversity of spatial orientation strategies essential for survival, reproduction, and ecological success. These spatial orientation strat...

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

@ebablab.bsky.social and I helped a bit in this really informative article by Robin Grob in the el Jundi lab on spatial orientation strategies in Lepidoptera. Have a read :-)

👏👏

Parallel shifts in differential gene expression reveal convergent miniaturization in fishes | PNAS Body size variation in vertebrates is a complex polygenic trait, tightly correlated with numerous aspects of a species’ biology, ecology, and physi...

Why are some species smaller than a paperclip while others grow longer than a school bus? How is body size evolution governed in animals? Out now in @pnas.org we tackle these longstanding questions through a genetic lens using my favorite group of fishes as our model!! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our lab has published a couple of major papers in the past few months, which I would like to highlight in this thread! 🧵

A lot of pressure on the different grant schemes, and pretty much independent of career stage.

Revised evolutionary relationships within Brachycera and the early origin of bicoid in flies Mulhair et al. uncover a functional bicoid in non-cyclorrhaphan flies, pushing the gene's origin back by ∼20 million years. Reassessing the Diptera phylogeny using the largest dataset to date permits ...

Latest work out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social

We find the fly development gene bicoid is much older than previously thought (~20 million yrs older!) 🪰🧬

To pinpoint its origins we tackled the Diptera phylogeny, providing some resolution (many open questions remain).

🔗 tinyurl.com/2vyuevpy

A very nice paper! @naturalselection.bsky.social Congrats!!!👍💪

Reference genome bias in light of species-specific chromosomal reorganization and translocations

And that's how you integrate digital elements into an exhibition. Part of the temporary "China's Dinosaur World" at the Shanghai Natural History Museum, China. Closing this November.

Video source: Shanghai Let's Meet

An array of 9 purple discs on a blue background. Figure from Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt.

A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue.

The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea.

From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt:
arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...

The buff-tip moth (Phalera bucephala) has mastered a very particular kind of camouflage.

When they close their wings up, they resemble a broken twig.

Native to large parts of Europe, there's regional pattern variation that reflects the local tree species. This one best resembles birch twigs?

Predictors of protein evolution in the drosophilid immune system The evolutionary dynamics of immune genes are shaped by diverse selective pressures, yet the relative roles of gene-level traits, functional specialization, and pathway context remain poorly understoo...

Another preprint from @pankajd.bsky.social !
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Heads up: ignore samtools dot org, similarly minimap2 dot com and likely others. It's owned by a known phishing site and while the binaries they offer look valid currently (but note they may be serving us different binaries to others), that could change.

Ie: it's not us (Samtools team)! Be warned

X-Mapper 🦠🧬🧪 - a sequence aligner developed for microbes, now on Bioconda! 🚀
• 11–24× fewer suboptimal alignments (same for human genome)
• 3–579× lower inconsistency
• improves on ~30% of reads aligned to non-target species
github.com/mathjeff/map...
bioconda.github.io/recipes/x-ma...
#microsky

hey bluesky 👋 visa hurdles mean I’m looking for opportunities outside the US. I’m a computational biologist (bacterial + phage genomics, postdoc in Koonin’s group @ NIH). I am interested in teaming up on funding apps. reach out if this resonates!

Three Armadillidium vulgare individuals

Our annotated chromosome(ish)-scale assembly of the genome of the terrestrial isopod Armadillidium vulgare, the common pillbug, is available on NCBI: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/datasets/gen...

Work carried out at Ecologie et Biologie des Interactions (EBI) lab in Poitiers.

⚠️ We’re excited to announce our invited speakers for the #PalAss Annual Meeting! 🎉
🔗 Registration link ⬇️
palass.org/annual-meeti...

#conference #uk #palaeontology #meeting

Ant queen lays eggs that hatch into two species Bizarre discovery of interspecies cloning “almost impossible to believe,” biologists say

“Just when you think you’ve seen it all, social insects reveal another surprise.” https://scim.ag/47sVFyS

Lunar eclipse

Lunar eclipse seen from Switzerland🌒

Captain Haddock looking very frazzled, saying, “What a week, huh?” Tintin leans into the frame and says, “Captain, it’s Wednesday.” Snowy is very excited about the drink he has found.

Our MoultDB project, which combines fossils, phenotypic, and genomic data about arthropod moulting, highlighted on the @sib.swiss Expasy page: www.expasy.org

Like for #ismbeccb2025, I'll be live-posting #ESEB2025 from my Mastodon account, which you can follow there or on the bridging account quoted (the "live" will sometimes be a bit delayed).

I am announcing an open PhD position involving bioinformatics, genomics and machine learning to work on functional prediction of adaptive genetic variation in krill and herring!

www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

Going to #ESEB2025 @eseb.bsky.social ?

Find me in poster session 1 for a chat!

A reminder you/your lab can support FlyBase at Cambridge through the following link. Every bit helps. Please share if you yourself can't donate.

www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...