Dr. Arun Sethuraman

Okay I’m kinda embarrassed to be posting this but I’ve received a lot of ‘hate’ messages about my last post about thanking your admin/janitors. Yikes. Yes I’m too poor to do more than $20, yes I’m too ‘rich’ to do more. Folks - it’s not the $. Just be nice please. Wow.

Your annual reminder to send a small thank you note to your administrative staff and janitors this season. Kthnxbai.

Welcome aboard! Looking forward to another awesome year of working with these phenomenal colleagues at @genetics-gsa.bsky.social!

Causal modelling of gene effects from regulators to programs to traits - Nature Approaches combining genetic association and Perturb-seq data that link genetic variants to functional programs to traits are described.

GWAS has been an incredible discovery tool for human genetics: it regularly identifies *causal* links from 1000s of SNPs to any given trait. But mechanistic interpretation is usually difficult.

Our latest work on causal models for this is out yesterday:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A short🧵:

Ancestry, admixture, and pathogens in contemporaneous Neolithic farmers and foragers on the Island of Gotland Two archaeological cultural complexes coexisted on Gotland for over 500 years, between ~3300 and 2800 calBCE, i.e. the Neolithic Funnelbeaker culture (FBC), and the Pitted ware culture (PWC). The ance...

Oh, look! My friends around Magdalena Fraser & Federico Sanchez-Quinto et al have a new study analyzing more high-coverage Neolithic #aDNA genomes from the Baltic island of Gotland (including pathogens!!!) 👀 🧪 🏺

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

I’m so speechless at this meaningless cruelty and disrespect for the best of our citizens who often had to QUIT TENURED JOBS to serve our country instead. Way to make us great again I guess 🤬

Mapping the genetic landscape across 14 psychiatric disorders - Nature Genomic analyses applied to 14 childhood- and adult-onset psychiatric disorders identifies five underlying genomic factors that explain the majority of the genetic variance of the individual disorders...

1/4 Thrilled to be sharing new work published today in Nature describing the third wave of results from the PGC Cross-Disorder Group. This reflects a massive group effort to examine shared and unique genetic signal across >1 million cases for 14 psychiatric disorders. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

a man is holding a sign that says i think that comic sans always screams fun . ALT: a man is holding a sign that says i think that comic sans always screams fun .

I for one, don’t care for Times New Roman or Calibri either. Arial, Comic Sans, or Wingdings. Nothing in between.

The fitness costs of reproductive specialization scale inversely with organismal size The evolution of reproductive specialization represents a fundamental innovation in multicellular life, yet the conditions favoring its evolution remain poorly understood. Here, we develop a populatio...

1/28 New preprint up, which I think is the best theoretical idea I've ever had. We asked a simple question: what are the costs of investment into non-reproductive somatic cells? Turns out these costs decrease with the *logarithm* of organism size!

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

a cartoon of snoopy dressed as santa claus is blowing a bell on a chimney . ALT: a cartoon of snoopy dressed as santa claus is blowing a bell on a chimney .

Yay - Monday evening grant rejection. This job is so giving…tis the season 😿

Omg I got this today too - didn’t know wtf to make of it, or if someone is actively soliciting these? Mine was from BGPT - there’s more companies?!

The UC Davis Ecology and Evolution in Working Landscapes REU provides undergrads with research experience in ecology and evolution in natural and managed landscapes. Apply now through Feb 15 via etap.nsf.gov

Contact me or @clhom.bsky.social for questions!

It us - your awesome @genetics-gsa.bsky.social Board of Directors, staff, & colleagues at the annual Board meeting in PIT. So proud of serving our community of genetics to ‘design’ our next year at G3, Genetics, Worm, Dros, Yeast, Fly, and other meetings.

Dated gene duplications elucidate the evolutionary assembly of eukaryotes - Nature Analysis of eukaryotic gene sequences using a relaxed molecular clock methodology indicate that eukaryotes emerged 3.0–2.25 billion years ago as a result of mitochondrial endosymbiosis with complex ar...

Dated gene duplications elucidate the evolutionary assembly of eukaryotes www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

Homo sapiens-specific evolution unveiled by ancient southern African genomes - Nature The genomes of 28 ancient southern African individuals dated to between 10,200 and 150 years before present offer insights into the evolution of Homo sapiens.

Our new ancient DNA paper has just been published!
We present 28 new genomes from southern Africa - several of them high-coverage whole genomes.
Exciting to be moving towards population-level representation of ancient southern African genetic diversity!

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

My heart! ❤️

San Diego area friends - students from my Fall '25 BIOL 596 Research Methods class will present posters from their semester-long projects on Thursday, 12/18 from 4-6 PM at White Labs Brewing Co. (across from the MCAS in Miramar). Deets in the flyer! Do join us and stay for pizza and "hoppy" hour.

Optimising Genome‐Wide Detection of Runs of Homozygosity: Impacts of Reference Genome Quality and Sequencing Parameters on Inbreeding Assessment Inbreeding and inbreeding depression pose a critical challenge to the persistence of small and isolated populations, driving the need for precise assessment of genomic metrics. Genome-wide runs of ho...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Nothing could be better than bedtools. But maybe something could be bedder…

Every year, I sing with the San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus at this tree lighting ceremony to honor loved ones lost to AIDS, and celebrate our resilient community. In its 34th year, Mama’s Kitchen has now provided over 14 million meals to San Diegans facing critical illnesses.

Sure, the federal government can derecognize World AIDS Day, but I’m so glad to live in this beautiful city where our elected officials understand that the HIV epidemic is still upon us, & that we will not rest until we get to zero, provide equitable access to PreP/PeP, treatment, & end the stigma.

Whoop! New preprint has dropped - led by the amazing @trevormugoya.bsky.social. We developed a SV-calling and benchmarking platform called SaVor and test it on 1,165 Arabidopsis thaliana short read whole genomes. Do check out the paper, and try SaVor on your own data: github.com/ChabbyTMD/Sa...

I have a new preprint demonstrating a genome-architecture-aware approach to inferring species trees and introgression landscapes from a small number of genomes. If you are interested in phylogenomics, birds, or hybridization, this is for you! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happy holidays from my very gay queer academic group to ya!

How do new centromeres evolve while staying compatible with the division machinery?

Discover it in our new Nature paper! We show centromeres transition gradually via a mix of drift, selection, and sex, reaching new states that still work with the kinetochore.

👉 doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09779-1

The last work of my PhD is finally out: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...! This work is about accurately estimating branch length in the Ancestral Recombination Graph (ARG), which is achieved by a really simple framework with minimal assumptions. (1/n)

Emotional intelligence!! That’s the phrase I was looking for - not spirits and ghouls lol.

Are you sure you don’t want to rank their team spirits, souls, their ancestors, and their qualities on a scale of 1-10? 😝

Embarrassing - meanwhile, if I didn’t have a pertussis vaccine (or a gamut of other vaccines), I would have been refused entry into the United States as an immigrant. Meaningless deaths, almost entirely preventable by vaccines, which our CDC should insist and ensure that that every child receives.

Ever wondered whether dogs are a different species from wolves? On an ecological, and behavioral basis, I think so. The Dec 2 issue of PNAS will be interesting! www.pnas.org/toc/pnas/122... and the introductory article to the issue: doi.org/10.1073/pnas... . Here: my daughter, my son, and our dog: