Henry North

So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).

Amazing peppered moth story from Saccheri lab - same locus, but different structural variants, underly parallel evolution of industrial melanism in the UK and across continental Europe.

Heliconius erato demophoon sat on a pink, yellow and white lantana flower. The left side of the butterfly is white, while the right side is the usual black and red, but with some white clonal patches.

New preprint form me and the McMillan lab at STRI and Martin lab at GWU, digging into scale cell type specification and differentiation in Heliconius wings, with some insights on the lncRNA gene ivory.

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

Comments/suggestions welcome!

Are you a computational postdoc or even in the last year of your PhD and you want to set up your own lab? Want to work in one of the most multi-disciplinary and multi-national institutions in the world? Want to be a leader in understanding biology - molecules up? Apply below!

seminar announcement with photos of speakers and talk titles

The integration of speciation seminar series is restarting, with the first session coming up on *Tuesday March 3rd @ 5pm CET*, featuring two talks by @naturalselection.bsky.social and @andreaestandia.bsky.social + career Q&A with @markravinet.bsky.social as part of the ECR in Speciation theme.

New pre-print with some updates on ivory:miR193 in a highly polymorphic moth.

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

We mapped ivory (again!?) this time controlling aspects of camouflage in Anticarsia gemmatalis. Mapping, SVs, Expression and Function.

Comments/suggestions welcome!

Efficient Estimation of Nucleotide Diversity and Divergence Using Callable Loci (and More) Abstract. The increasing scale of population genomic datasets presents computational challenges in estimating summary statistics such as nucleotide diversi

@cademirch.bsky.social @erikenbody.bsky.social TB Sackton & @russcd.bsky.social introduce Callable Loci And More (clam), a tool that leverages callable loci to accurately estimate population genetic statistics (π, dxy, and FST).

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf282

#evobio #molbio #compbio

@pratikkatte.bsky.social and I just released Lorax 🌲, a tool for interactive exploration of biobank-scale ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs).

If you’ve ever wanted to scroll across the ancestries of thousands of genomes… this is for you.

Evolution, genomics and conservation of butterflies and moths - Nature Reviews Biodiversity Butterflies and moths are key indicators of functioning and healthy ecosystems around the world. This Review describes the evolutionary history of the order Lepidoptera and tracks shifts in researcher...

Now online! In this review, we cover four major topics on butterflies and moths: their evolutionary history and diversification dynamics, genomics, global diversity patterns, and conservation 🦋🌏 (1/8) @natrevbiodiv.nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

I'm hiring a technician! www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

An 80% role in a 4-yr BBSRC project and hopefully beyond. Looking for someone to support the @socialfluids.bsky.social 🧪our ants 🐜 and our projects.

Looking for someone kind + conscientious + reliable who takes pride in a job well done.

Interactive exploration of biobank-scale ancestral recombination graphs with Lorax. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.19.706861v1

Selection-driven color variation in the aposematic strawberry poison frog, Oophaga pumilio Aguilar-Gómez et al. use exome sequencing of 347 strawberry poison frogs to uncover the genetic basis of color variation. They identify that kit, ttc39b, and bco1 underlie blue-red, yellow-red, and gr...

The last chapter of my PhD is finally out !!!! In the same species, on neighboring islands, we see radically different warning colors emerge. Evolution in action:
Selection-driven color variation in the aposematic strawberry poison frog, Oophaga pumilio: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

Calibrating and documenting host-switching and evolution of incompatibility loci for two closely related Wolbachia clades https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.13.705778v1

A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life. RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but their large size and structural ...

How could a simple self-replicating system emerge at the origins of life? RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but existing ones are so large that their self-replication seems impossible. Could they be smaller?

Excited to share our latest work in @science.org on a new small polymerase.
1/n

Aspergillus fumigatus - 29.9 crossovers per homologous chromosome pair! That makes about 1500 recombination map units per chromosome....

It was great to start the week off by welcoming the second cohort of budding curators to the Project Psyche Genome Curation Workshop! Over the next two weeks they will become experts in piecing together genomes and will use these skills to curate some Project Psyche genomes! 🔎🧬

Estimating Organism Abundance Using Within‐Sample Haplotype Frequencies of eDNA Data Environmental DNA (eDNA) provides powerful insights into species presence and community composition but remains limited in its capacity to infer species abundance or population structure. Here, we sh...

🧬 My haplotype paper is out!

We show that deviations between within-sample and population-level haplotype frequencies can be used to estimate how many individuals contributed to an eDNA sample.

No tissue references needed, just metabarcoding data and some population genetics.

#eDNA #PopGen

On March 3rd @ 5pm CET, we are re-starting the Integration of speciation seminar series! The first 3 sessions feature talks by *Early-Career Researchers*, and include a Q&A with an established PI about their career path.

Sign up to get the link: speciation-network.pages.ist.ac.at/seminar-seri...

Determinants of mutation load in birds Abstract. Many mutations have detrimental effects. The mutation load in a population depends on the efficacy of purifying selection in removing deleterious

@jochenwolflab.bsky.social
Where do potentially harmful mutations accumulate? We have an answer in birds. Congratulations Fidel for wonderful paper!

doi.org/10.1093/gene...

Davis Summer Population Genomics Program Want to learn population genetics? Please fill out this form to indicate your potential interest in a 2-week intensive online summer population genetics course taught by Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra and Graham...

Fun news! @gcbias.bsky.social and I are teaching a 2-week online population genetics workshop this summer to raise money for the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis. We're trying to gauge interest -- please fill this out if you might be interested! And please share broadly!

New paper by my lab! PhD student @fallonmeng.bsky.social set out to use whole genome sequencing of Spotted Lanternfly from China & the US to better understand the invasion... and discovered that adapting to the city may be the key to their invasive success!
royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

A new preprint with Beatriz Vicoso, where we highlight that a common observation in molecular evolution—X chromosomes adapting faster than autosomes—doesn't quite add up. So we tested a new theory (www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...) in fruit flies, mice and humans...

Assessing Ancient DNA Sampling Strategies for Natural Selection Inference in Humans Using Allele Frequency Time Series Data Abstract. The increased availability of genomic data from ancient humans allows estimating the strength of natural selection at a given locus using time se

Interested in using aDNA time-series datasets to estimate selection?

Our study "Assessing Ancient DNA Sampling Strategies for Natural Selection Inference in Humans Using Allele Frequency Time Series Data" is now out in GBE! doi.org/10.1093/gbe/... @genomebiolevol.bsky.social @cegamorim.bsky.social

New preprint from our big collaborative evolution experiment in 9 whole lakes in Alaska, written by McGill grad student @lucaseckert.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
What happens if you put a mixture of multiple source populations together to complete & evolve in multiple new lakes?

The genetic architecture of local adaptation is historically contingent https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.01.703099v1

In #GENETICS, @hildeschneemann.bsky.social and John Welch introduce a simple fitness landscape model to predict hybrid fitness with arbitrary ploidy and an arbitrary number of hybridizing lineages using data from #maize and rye. buff.ly/E24fZsM

I am looking for a PhD student to join my new Socio-Eco-Evo group, hosted in Katie Peichel's Evolutionary Ecology Division @ University of Bern. We're offering a fully funded 4-year position, studying social plasticity and behavioral adaptation among stickleback in Greenland. Please share around!

This Flower Is Really a Fungus in Disguise In Guyanese savannas, a fungus infects grasslike plants, sterilizes them and produces bizarre all-fungal “flower” doppelgängers

This fungus infects plants, hijacks them, and makes its own fake flowers where the real ones should be www.scientificamerican.com/article/this...

Structural genomics sheds light on protein functions and remote homologs across the insect tree of life - Cell Research Cell Research - Structural genomics sheds light on protein functions and remote homologs across the insect tree of life

A phylogeny of 4'854 #insects --- with structural #genomics shedding light on protein functions & remote homologs www.nature.com/articles/s41... #biodiversity

I'll be talking about the use of genomic data for inferring and forecasting the spread of invasive pests 🐛 in conversation with Renata Retkute, who uses epidemiological models to tackle the same problem.
This Friday at 13:30, David Attenborough Building & online
www.tickettailor.com/events/globa...