Luisa F. Pallares

Excited to see our FML Research Group Leader
@luisapallares.bsky.social
in the latest Max Planck Research! 🎉
The article follows her journey from Colombia to Germany and her work on how genes and environment shape complex traits using fruit flies.

Read the full story: www.mpg.de/26180374/W00...

Leipzig U and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) have an open faculty position (W2) in evolutionary population genetics! This position is tenured and comes with generous core funding. We are eager to welcome a new colleague! Deadline March 11.
www.uni-leipzig.de/en/newsdetai...

Image from a lecture by Nick Barton, one of the coauthors, from this site: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTvFal-zh1M

Beyond Mendel. FINALLY.

Brilliant, thought-provoking read! This new perspective argues that our obsession with single genes and clean knock-outs is holding us back. Couldn't agree more, and I hope Reviewer #2 reads this.

academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

There is a week left to apply for two available positions in my lab @ipbhalle.bsky.social

- PhD: ipb-halle.mhm.jobs/12-phd-posit...

- Postdoc: ipb-halle.mhm.jobs/13-postdocto...
Earliest start date: 01/05/2026.

We are interested in plant immune receptor biochemistry and evolution. Please share!

Disentangling variational bias: the roles of development, mutation, and selection The extraordinary diversity and adaptive fit of organisms to their environment depends fundamentally on the availability of variation. While most population genetic frameworks assumes that random muta...

Thrilled to share my recent perspective piece with
@diogromelo.bsky.social
and
@evodaveo.bsky.social
on the empirical measurement of developmental bias in a GP map and its conceptual links with other quant gen variational properties.

www.cell.com/trends/genet...

Some of us know how sweet procrastination can be! If you feel the same, good news:

The abstract deadline for the EMBO Workshop has been extended to March 19!

Don’t miss the opportunity to present your work June 2–5 2026 in Oeiras, Portugal!

Did you know that most knockouts in Arabidopsis actually do have phenotypes and aren't some redundancy situation? All you have to do is measure in multiple tissues in multiple environments and then the phenotypes show up. Redundancy was an assumption never tested.

Kick-off meeting of our GreenRobust cluster of excellence last week. Exciting times ahead for plant sciences by bringing together an extraordinary bunch of enthusiastic scientists and human beings!

We recommend a read of the new MBE editorial on how society journals work towards protecting the scientific record.

Publishing in society journals, such as @molbioevol.bsky.social or @genomebiolevol.bsky.social, promotes transparent science that benefits the research community.

Join us at the #SEBconference Florence 2026 to discuss #Plant Robustness! 🌱🔥

@kaspervangelderen.bsky.social and I are organising the P12 session "Plant robustness from molecules to ecosystems" with the support of @greenrobust.de

Check the program and submit your abstract by March 6th! 👇

An exciting opportunity in our department at UCL. Are you working on human (evolutionary) genomics, the genetics of complex traits or related questions? Then have a look at the advert.

UCL is a big, stimulating and collegiate place to work, right in the centre of London.

We're #hiring a new Insect Husbandry Technician (f/m/d) from 50% in Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg. Apply today or share this post with your network:

jobs.tue.mpg.de/en/programs/...

Thanks, Jesse! Yeah, we're doing the same here 🤔

That's frustrating. Specially because one could use the same argument for genetic regulation of the mean. I think organisms experience different microenvironments all the time, but how they deal with them is, at least in part, geno-dependent. Think developmental noise in symmetric structures.

You're right here, we could find plenty of examples of 'microenvironments' each species experiences, not necesarily more or less than the other... I guess I was thinking more in the sense of a plant which grows continuosly vs a relative static adult as a fly.

Ah! I hadn't seen this paper - it's brilliant, and extremely relevant for us now, as we are attempting something similar with higher order phenotypes (non molecular). Thanks for sharing!

(3/3) What do you mean with results of space biology data?

(2/3) So, we are thinking an active -but selective- mechanism is making transcription more accurate? more precise? This is mindblowing to me, because explaining an increase in variance can be done more easily, than a reduction...

(1/3) Hi Alexa, this gets more interesting because these developmental pathways not only remain robust (i.e. don't have variance changes) BUT they become less variable (i.e. significant reduction in variability compared to control conditions)

(2/2) Would you imagine there is more microenvironmental variation in Arabidopsis? or instead that plants are more sensitive to microenvironmental variation than flies?

(1/2) Hi Dan, yes, this is interesting. We also find tons of veQTL in non-stress conditions (~14% of genes with at least one veQTL), but not nearly as much as you did (~95% of genes).

Tons of questions regarding phenotypic variability/variance/robustness/noise remain unanswered, so, stay tuned! But for now, I leave you with the preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Despite our intuition, theory had already predicted that high phenotypic noise (high-variability alleles) might not always be detrimental [P.S. more on this in our next pre-print 😉]

BUT, things don't end up there🥁... Although it seems that we don't want to mess up too much with the degree of trancriptional noise of genes, a closer look suggests that, when noise-alleles exist, it is low-noise alleles that tend to be detrimental, specially under stressful conditions 🤯

Main finding #3: Variance-regulating loci (veQTL) seem to be subject to different selection pressures than the better known mean-regulating loci (eQTL) - What does this mean!? We think that overall, veQTL are under stronger 💪 negative selection than eQTL.

Main finding #2: Transcriptional variability is genetically regulated, we find widespread variance-eQTLs. However, the are only detected in stressful conditions. Yes, you are right (and Waddington too!) stress unmasks cryptic genetic variation🧬, but not only for mean, but for variance!

Main finding #1: Stressful environments result in an increase in transcriptional variance in almost all genes (!) - except for key developmental pathways that remain highly robust 🤯 What is maintaining this selective buffering? We don't know! Ideas?

In this work, led by wonderful PhD student @jphippstan.bsky.social, we collected thousands of Drosophila 🪰 transcriptomes and genomes before and after exposure to environmental perturbation and quantified how stress reshaped transcriptional variability and its genetic architecture. We find...

Have you ever wondered 🤔... Does phenotypic variance respond to environmental perturbation? Does it have a genetic basis? Are mean and variance regulating loci exposed to different selection pressures? These and more questions are explored in our new preprint 🔥

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

So excited to share this manuscript led by the inimitable Cara Brand, who discovered that Topoisomerase II evolution causes hybrid female lethality in Drosophila.

Congrats to Cara, @nickbr0wn.bsky.social, Anirban, and
@buszczaklab.bsky.social!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...