Mike Barker

Go to a granite outcrop and look closely, you may just find the tiny Adders Tongue Fern #Ophioglossum lusitanicum! Throwing up their specialised fertile frond these ferns are an unusual group, needing a symbiotic relationship with fungi to grow from spore to spore forming mature plant!

The Budke Lab in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee (http://jmbudke.github.io/) is seeking a Post-Doctoral Research Associate to work on an NSF-funded project. This project is investigating morphological evolution in a phylogenetic context using moss plants as the experimental system. The research responsibilities will include (1) assembling morphological datasets using the literature and herbarium specimens, (2) compiling DNA sequence datasets from publicly available resources and laboratory-based methods using herbarium specimens, and (3) combining these data to analyze the evolution of morphological structures across a phylogeny. Opportunities will also be available to develop novel research questions focusing on the functional morphology, physiology, and evolution of the parent-offspring relationship in mosses. Supervising and mentoring undergraduate researchers in both the laboratory and herbarium will be required. An additional aim of this project is to build awareness of and appreciation for plants and botanical natural history collections. As part of the team, the postdoc will participate in hands-on outreach events, such as Darwin Day. The postdoc will also co-lead a May-term course for undergraduate students on collections-based research. Apply by 17 August 2025 for full consideration.

Looking for a #postdoc position in evolutionary biology?
Come join the Budke Lab @utknoxville.bsky.social! Read more about the lab jmbudke.github.io & apply here fa-ewlq-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...
Please share widely. Thanks!
#Postdocposition #PostdocOpportunity

Know an Evolutionary Genomicist looking for a faculty position? Join us in EEB @utknoxville.bsky.social Position is open for studying any organism, but personally I have some botany bias. 🌱 Apply before Sept 19 for full consideration. apply.interfolio.com/170735 Please share widely. Thanks!

My first first author manuscript has posted! I’m very excited to share SWIF-TE with yall. It is a fast, memory efficient tool to identify novel TE insertions from short-read data. 🧬 #TEworldwide #transposons

Ancient hybridization underlies tuberization and radiation of the potato lineage Genomic and functional analyses reveal that the potato lineage originated from a homoploid interspecific hybridization event between the Tomato and Etuberosum lineages 8–9 million years ago. The alter...

The hybrid origin of potato tuberization.

From: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

My department @utoronto.ca (www.utm.utoronto.ca/biology/) is hiring a molecular biologist in any field (e.g., ecology, evolutionary biology, etc.). Please encourage any excellent finishing PhD students, postdocs or assistant professor to apply here:
jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Mississa...

Six maps of the two Level I ecoregions used in this study (the Great Plains, in pink, and the North American Deserts, in blue), showing visualizations of the predictions made using the gradient boosting machine (GBM) classifier, where points represent populations of Helianthus annuus. Each facet represents populations where a given proportion of genotypes was correctly predicted, arranged in descending order—all genotypes correctly predicted, four out of five, three out of four, two out of three, one out of two, and one out of four.

A new interpretable #MachineLearning approach to identify plant traits associated with #PlantAdaptation to divergent ecoregions

New in #AppsPlantSci by Sambadi Majumder & Chase Mason (@plantevoecophys.bsky.social)

bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... #ecophysiology #Helianthus #botany

A drawing of three wheat plants of different sizes, each with a stylized chromosome above it. The smallest wheat plant has one copy of a given gene; the middle plant has two copies of that gene; and the largest plant has three copies, which are represented by the clearer bands. The illustration was created by Milena Trabert with input from Freja Lindstedt.

Check out this new #AJB essay!

When numbers matter: Rethinking the role of gene duplication on short evolutionary timescales

By Freja Lindstedt, Qiujie Zhou & Pascal Milesi

doi.org/10.1002/ajb2...

#botany #plantscience #adaptation #evolution

Caulanthus amplexicaulis var. barbarae circular plastid genome map.

Plastomic studies inform the mechanisms of edaphic adaptation in North American species in the tribe #Thelypodieae (#Brassicaceae)

New #AJB research by Kasuni Daundasekara, Elyssa Garza & Alan Pepper

doi.org/10.1002/ajb2...

#botany #plantscience #evolution #hybridization

Flowers of species in a subalpine meadow in southwestern Colorado for which the authors associated floral traits with temperature of the floral microenvironment.

🌼🎨 From the upcoming #AJB Special Issue: “Paradigm Shifts in #Flower Color." 🎨🌼

Floral shape & color impact heat accumulation & thermal stability of the floral microenvironment in a subalpine #meadow

By Jennifer Apland, Katherine Riddle & Matthew Koski

doi.org/10.1002/ajb2...
#botany #pollination

Since I finally decided to properly move to Bluesky, I'm archiving here the link to my JMS prize talk from the Evolution 2024 in Montreal. Even after one year I feel very honored and grateful for the opportunity ❤️👇
youtu.be/ZCxufrteETA?...

JSCBB Biotech Building in Boulder, CO

Are you bravely deciding to do a postdoc in the US? And also interested in some combination of genomics, immunology, and transposons? If so, consider applying to my lab at the BioFrontiers Institute in Boulder, Colorado!

jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta...

🧪🧬 #TESky #interferosky

Conservation and divergence of UVR8-COP1/SPA-HY5 signaling in UV-B responses of Marchantia polymorpha Ultraviolet-B radiation (UV-B) poses a major challenge to all forms of plant life. The liverwort Marchantia polymorpha (Marchantia) serves as a key model organism to study signaling pathways and to in...

New preprint! 😁 We uncover how early land plants evolved UV-B tolerance by dissecting the UVR8 pathway in Marchantia polymorpha. Conserved yet rewired—evolutionary plasticity revealed. 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #PlantScience #UVB #Evolution

When I got the offer to write a dispatch for Current Biology, I hesitated. Then I realised it’s the perfect chance to introduce people to the Bulgarian seer Baba Vanga! And that was reason enough to make it happen. 🧵 👇
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Denying that we may be experiencing the start of the Sixth Mass Extinction paves the way for it to happen Arguing that we are not currently experiencing a Sixth Mass Extinction, or at least playing down its possibility, gives support to those who would happily allow it to happen. Wiens and Saban [1], in a...

the current rate of extinction, as estimated by ourselves and others, whom we cited, and across diverse major taxa, we may well be headed in the direction of a new mass extinction event
www.cell.com/trends/ecolo... 🌐🧪

The Conover Lab is open!

I am so excited to join a group of talented, caring, and creative folks at the @danforthcenter.bsky.social, all in service of improving the human condition through plant science.

🎉 I'm thrilled to share that I’ll be joining the University of Arizona as an Assistant Professor starting January 2026!

I’ll be recruiting PhD students, lab technicians, and postdocs—so if you're interested in host-microbe interactions, I’d love to hear from you!

‘This is bull——”: National Science Foundation employees protest HUD's takeover Dozens of National Science Foundation employees crowded the agency’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, Wednesday to protest the news that the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, w...

Another day testing the limits of resilience.

The Alexandria NSF building was designed for the NSF merit review process (gold standard), complete with a floor devoted to panels.

Now we aren’t allowed to have in person panels.

The loss of US science leadership will haunt this country for decades.

🧵1/n
Estimating mutation rates using k-mers is fast—but what happens when repeats dominate the genome?

In a new preprint, Haonan Wu, Antonio Blanca, and myself propose a *repeat-aware* estimator that's accurate even in centromeres.

Longevity in plants impacts phylogenetic and population dynamics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.20.660758v1

"National Science Foundation Surprise: Employees Being Relocated to Accommodate Secretary of HUD’s Palatial New Office"

Here's the official union statement on the HUD takeover.

Small correction that's not included in the screenshot: "Correction: currently 1,833 NSF employees work in the NSF headquarters building."

NEW: NSF will be kicked out of their building. Announcement will be made tomorrow by HUD Sec. and Governor of VA. HUD will take over the NSF building over the next two years.

NSF staffer: "There is no planning for NSF, no identified future location, appropriation for a new building or a move."

In about a week we (Biological Sciences @ Monash Uni in Melbourne, Australia) will be opening a search for 3 (!!!) permanent academic positions (40% research, 40% teaching, 20% service) at Lecturer/Senior Lecturer. 1 Genomics, 2 Ecology. Please share, email me, DM, follow, send carrier pigeons…

A bibliography for the 2025 IDEA plenary The recording of my talk for the 2025 IDEA plenary is now posted over on the Evolution meeting YouTube channel (there’s a bunch of dead air at the start of the recording; the action starts a …

The recording of my IDEA talk is up on the #Evol2025 YouTube channel, and I've thrown that together with a PDF copy of the slide deck and a bibliography: lab.jbyoder.org/2025/06/21/a...

Book cover: Ferns, by Fay-Wei Li and Jacob Suissa. White cover with a variety of gorgeous fern fronds in shades of green and purplish-brown.

Pages for New Zealand tree fern, with a short piece of text and an illustration of the otherworldly tree fern - a tall trunk with a rosette of fronds at the top

Look what came! This is just beautiful - from Jacob Suissa and Fay-Wei Li (Check your local bookshop, or https://amzn.to/45s1YBJ)

k-mer-based diversity scales with population size proxies more than nucleotide diversity in a meta-analysis of 98 plant species Abstract. A key prediction of neutral theory is that the level of genetic diversity in a population should scale with population size. However, as was note

Hey, Miles' @milesroberts.bsky.social beautiful paper showing that sequence diversity missed by standard methods contributes to Lewontin's paradox is officially published in @evolletters.bsky.social. academic.oup.com/evlett/advan...

A new paper in Nature Ecol & Evol by
@rosafernandez.bsky.social et al. shows a #punctuated burst of genome evolution in #annelids as they transitioned from marine to land and freshwater habitats.

Bimodal centromeres in pentaploid dogroses shed light on their unique meiosis - Nature Insights into the dogrose genome and centromeres explain their ability to achieve stable sexual reproduction.

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I am very excited to announce our🌹NEW PAPER OUT IN 𝑁𝐴𝑇𝑈𝑅𝐸!🌹
𝐃𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐒𝐔𝐑𝐕𝐈𝐕𝐄: Bimodal centromeres in pentaploid dogroses shed light on their unique meiosis
With the Ritz and Kovařík labs we show a potential role for centromeres on 𝘙𝘰𝘴𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘢 bizarre reproduction!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Please pass along - postdoc position! with our working group on #FunctionalTraits and rarity. This is part of the FREE (Functional Rarity in Ecology and Evolution) working group led by Cyrille Violle in Montpellier France 🧪🌐🌾 emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...

Asymptotic Enumeration of Normal and Hybridization Networks via Tree Decoration - Bulletin of Mathematical Biology Phylogenetic networks provide a more general description of evolutionary relationships than rooted phylogenetic trees. One way to produce a phylogenetic network is to randomly place k arcs between the...

Here is a recent #BulletinMathBio paper by Michael Fuchs, Mike Steel, and Qiang Zhang on Asymptotic Enumeration of Normal and Hybridization Networks via Tree Decoration.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...
🧪