Kristján Moore (Kris)🔸

YouTube video by Microvisum Ciliates Euplotes

Can't believe I'd never heard of Euplotes before today: single-celled organisms who scurry around on little "legs"! Around 50 μm long, so ~1000x smaller than a tardigrade. This one has a kind of horseshoe crab habitus, flattened and with a "carapace". Incredible.

youtu.be/uJF30emkWt8?...

The big tech companies are reversing the intellectual and political gains of the Enlightenment and returning us to a New Dark Ages of ignorance, rage and superstition - it's the most important story of our time
jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-o...

Supervised mode after all just fixes some rows of the Q matrix to 1s and 0s and doesn't actually fix allele frequencies - P still gets updated given the whole data. Projection mode does literally fix (rather, overfit) the P matrix to the ref data, generally with poor results in my experience.

Indeed. But the inferred allele frequencies for a component (as given in the .P file) can get pulled away from the frequencies observed in its training pop and towards the freqs in the test samples if this allows better likelihood over the whole data, which can happen if test n >> training n.

Agree that different reference data is clearly warranted here, but if test n >> training n you would still likely see this kind of behaviour.

What I mean is that of the 5 superpopulations in 1000G, AMR has the lowest sample count. I have seen myself when test n >> training n that ADMIXTURE can basically give up on describing the ancestry of smaller training pops and instead use their maximised components to explain test sample variation.

Seems they used all 3,502 1000G individuals split by superpopulation as training samples. AMR is the smallest superpop. If test samples >> training samples (perhaps the case here?), it's easiest for ADMIXTURE to sacrifice the smallest training pop's ancestry component to describe test set ancestry

Something deeply strange happened to the ADMIXTURE run here! The American component, and to some extent the European one, seem to have been co-opted to describe Arab variation. Very little real indigenous American ancestry here, as indicated by e.g. mitochondrial haplogroup counts.

Kristin Tsuo, @genetisaur.bsky.social, & Mark Daly just wrote the best proteomics paper I've read.

They convincingly show how smoking and alcohol (aka, the environment) dramatically influences proteomics data.

Some 🤯 results
1) proteomics predicts frequency (5a) & quanity (5b) of alcohol consumed

Ancient skeletons’ genes reveal origin of the Slavic people DNA connects modern Slavs to a wave of migration following the fall of the Roman Empire

A study led by @zhofmanova.bsky.social @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social used ancient DNA to investigate the spread of Slavic language and culture 1,500 years ago. “This wasn’t a migration of elites, or a few male warriors,” 1 co-author says. “This was the migration of an entire population.” @science.org

Are you interested in doing a PhD in Copenhagen? Interested in studying Neanderthals and Denisovans which live on in our genomes?
Than you are more than welcome to apply to join my group starting Jan 2026 :)

candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

Please reach out if you have any questions!

Beneath the surface of the sum When genetic interactions matter and when they don't

I wrote about gene-gene interactions (epistasis) and the implications for heritability, trait definitions, natural selection, and therapeutic interventions. Biology is clearly full of causal interactions, so why don't we see them in the data? A 🧵:

**Please repost** If you're enjoying Paper Skygest -- our personalized feed of academic content on Bluesky -- we'd appreciate you reposting this! We’ve found that the most effective way for us to reach new users and communities is through users sharing it with their network

High resolution analysis of population structure using rare variants https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.18.665597v1

Youths buried in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries carried West African DNA Despite bearing remarkably far-flung genetic origins, a girl and young man were buried just like their peers

Even if individuals with recent African ancestry, such as these, were relatively rare in medieval NW Europe, we can probably expect many more such discoveries as increasing numbers of ancient and historical genomes are sequenced.

www.science.org/content/arti...

Exclusive: Medical journal rejects Kennedy's call for retraction of vaccine study An influential U.S. medical journal is rejecting a call from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to retract a large Danish study that found that aluminum ingredients in vaccines do not increase health risks for children, the journal's editor told Reuters.

Always good when senior USSR officials lie about independent European scientific research and call for its retraction.

Oh wait sorry, I meant US.

www.reuters.com/business/hea...

Whole-genome sequencing of 490,640 UK Biobank participants Nature - A study reports whole-genome sequences for 490,640 participants from the UK Biobank and combines these data with phenotypic data to provide new insights into the relationship between human...

Our study of WGS of all UK biobank participants published in final form
rdcu.be/ezAyi

Benchmarking Imputed Low Coverage Genomes in a Human Population Genetics Context Ongoing advances in population genomic methodologies have recently enabled the study of millions of loci across hundreds of genomes at a relatively low cost, by leveraging a combination of low-covera...

Benchmarking Imputed Low Coverage Genomes in a Human Population Genetics Context onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Characteristics of papers and authors affecting risk of irreproducible results*. Higher risk associated with high-ranked universities, perhaps also dilettante last authors and glam journals.

*in Drosophila immunity, according to a mostly subjective, literature-based reproducibility measure.

Frustrating. Well, at least I can feel like I've done *something* to dissuade people from this line of research.

Sent a cold email in March to a young researcher and entrepreneur warning him that the "short-sleep gene" studies he was basing his work on were bogus.

Very relieved that it eventually had the intended result. Shocking amounts of time and resources are still being wasted on candidate gene results.

Sequence diversity lost in early pregnancy - Nature Around 1 in 136 pregnancies is lost due to a pathogenic small sequence variant genotype in the fetus.

Our paper @hakonjon.bsky.social (missing other colleagues from Bluesky!), Sequence diversity lost in early pregnancy, was published in Nature (@nature.com) today

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Medieval samples from around there!), but some present-day French also have it, as well as a Medieval Brittany sample. While those observations might be explained by migrating Britons/Bretons, it's notable that an especially clear example is labelled Normandy pre-Roman IA and also carries R-L21.

Interesting to see the Irish/Scottish-like outliers! Though I think there are other places they could be from. Many Bronze and Iron Age samples around Belgium also show this Irish-like drift. I'm not sure how long this kind of ancestry persisted in the region (would be great to get more Iron to

Hoppuðu upp í einkaþotu til að vera komnir til Íslands á undan mér „Þetta er ósköp einfalt, ég var boðaður á fund og sagt að ég væri rekinn,“ sagði Kári Stefánsson, sem staddur var í Kaliforníu þegar náðist í hann. „Síðan var ég skilinn eftir inni í herbergi, stjórne...

Kári Stefánsson, founder and CEO of deCODE Genetics, the Icelandic company wholly owned by Amgen but operated largely independently, has been fired.

www.mbl.is/frettir/innl...

I am recruiting a quantitative/computational postdoc to my group at UCLA. This is a great opportunity to work on foundational theory, methods, and software in statistical genetics. Link to apply: recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF10275. Please repost!

Check out our ancient DNA paper on the maritime Punic civilization! 🦴🧬🌊

We find that their Levantine Phoenician cultural ancestors contributed surprisingly little ancestry to Punic sites in the central and western Mediterranean! (1/4)

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

#aDNA #PopGen #Punic #Phoenician

I have no idea why this is leading on @theguardian.com website

The substance here is

1. Some adults provided written consent for their health data to be shared with researchers for the good of science

2. UK Biobank facilitated this

3. Some researchers are Chinese

Link 1: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Link 2: academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

And carefully evaluating so many protocols should help us get even better palaeoproteomic results in the future. Very excited to see how the method develops and what it will tell us about all those fascinating hominin bones of uncertain affinity that we can't realistically get DNA from.