Dr. Arun Sethuraman

🌿 Postdoc opportunity in plant evolutionary ecology/genetics!

My lab in the Dept. of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan is recruiting a postdoctoral researcher to start Fall 2026.

We study plant adaptation, using weeds as model systems.

#Postdoc #EcoEvo

Pls RT!

Escaping bottlenecks: The demographic path to genetic recovery in koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus) Population bottlenecks can lead to evolutionary dead ends by eroding genetic diversity and intensifying inbreeding. Although theory predicts possible escape routes, direct observations of this process...

Escaping bottlenecks: The demographic path to genetic recovery in koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus) 🐨 🧬 #consgen #popgen

My heart!!! ❤️

So stoked for my awesome colleague @svasti.bsky.social, and now new collaborator, Asona Lui (UCSD) on this award! Bleak times, but we celebrated today with yummy food and cava. Looking forward to working with both their labs on some fun scRNAseq work in breast cancers from diverse populations!

The @scilifelab.se Ancient DNA Unit is recruiting a (permanent) Research Engineer for planning user projects and generating #aDNA 🧬 data:

Application deadline: March 25th 🧪🏺

www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.

What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.

Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

Deets here: www.calstate.edu/Pages/ocr.aspx

Proud of being a @calstate.bsky.social employee today - kudos to Chancellor Garcia & team for not just rejecting the ludicrous findings from the Dept. of Ed. that SJSU violated Title IX for letting a transgender student athlete compete, but also filing a lawsuit against their Office of Civil Rights.

Have you ever wondered how many archaic populations contributed DNA to modern humans? We know about Neanderthals and Denisovans, but the fossil and genetic evidence suggests a much more complex history!

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

Data Visualization A Practical Introduction

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

Assembling a fully-dated complete tree of life https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.05.709771v1

Lol! I remember when their system glitched back in 2021 and they were selling a 1000 N95 masks for 30 bucks. Guess who screenshotted it, got 2 boxes of them, and won the fight? 🙋🏾‍♂️

If you’re around San Diego, do stop by my keynote lecture tomorrow at @sandiegostate.bsky.social’s S3 Awards Ceremony, 9 AM on in Montezuma Hall! I titled my talk “Science of Everything, Everywhere, Everyhow” - come hear about 10 years of fun science from the Sethuraman Lab! (Pics: 2016 vs 2026)

Scientific datasets are riddled with copy-paste errors Initial results from scanning through Excel files belonging to 600 published scientific papers.

Today, a study was published on Science Detective featuring case studies of datasets published on Dryad.

The study is a testament to the importance of #opendata in supporting research integrity by enabling validation.

You can read the report here: www.sciencedetective.org/scientific-d...

Recently we're working with SNPs from whole genome assemblies to estimate ARGs. It's a pain to go from alignment files to vcf, keeping track of masked and invariant sites. So we wrote a snakemake/SLURM pipeline. Hope it's useful to others, and don't hesitate to post issues if there are problems!

Incorporating polygenic risk scores and social determinants of health across populations: Considerations and best practices in research Despite increasing focus on the intersection of genetic and social risk factors on health, heterogeneity in how these factors are measured, distributed, and analyzed across populations and datasets co...

🧬 New Review from Cromer et al!
📄 Incorporating polygenic risk scores and social determinants of health across populations: Considerations and best practices in research
#PRS #SDoH

Large genome model: Open source AI trained on trillions of bases System can identify genes, regulatory sequences, splice sites, and more.

Evo 2 is here, and the scale is wild. It’s trained on nearly 9 trillion bases across all domains of life, picking out regulatory DNA and splice sites that often trip humans up. It’s fully open-source and already identifying critical BRCA2 mutations with impressive accuracy.
🧬💻

A digital CAPTCHA verification window titled "Select all squares with PIPES" against a plain white background. The window contains a 3×3 grid of numbered squares, mixing literal hardware, smoking pipes, and programming syntax.

These captchas just keep getting harder #rstats

That's a good name for software:

MKado: a toolkit for McDonald-Kreitman tests of natural selection

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

Good morning ❤️

Population genomics using ancient DNA data 21th-25th September 2026

🚨 Registrations are now open for the 4th edition of the course Population Genomics Using Ancient DNA with @arunsethuraman.bsky.social & @cegamorim.bsky.social 🧬

Learn to analyse aDNA data, from data QC to population structure & demographic inference.

www.physalia-courses.org/courses-work...

I think Calvin doesn’t think my breakfast looks very appetizing - where’s the tuna, human?!

On the expansion and evolution of a master’s project Academics often lament that hardly any master’s projects – even the best ones – get published. The student moves on. Other research takes priority. No one has time to do the final analyses. Here I tel...

Academics often lament that hardly any master’s projects get published. The student moves on. Other research takes priority. No one has time to do the final analyses. Here I tell how one master’s project was, through persistent teamwork, finally carried over the finish line: go.nature.com/4aKs7N3

Pic from my tenure + NSF CAREER award celebration party back in 2023 at Jody’s! ❤️

I miss my Hey Lab peeps, but more importantly, I miss collaborating on all this fun science. Congrats to Alex & @sarahtishkoff.bsky.social on this new paper! I remember discussing ghost introgression with them back in 2013/14. So happy to see it come to fruition. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I had fun writing this N&Vs on two fascinating new papers on centromere evolution in yeast. If you’re interested in how centromeres adapt yet stay functional, here’s my take. rdcu.be/e6DD0 @nature.com @gautamdey.bsky.social @gsherloc.bsky.social @helsenjana.bsky.social @maxhaase.bsky.social

The core-pivotal index: a geometry-first approach to academic impact The defining goal of the academic endeavor is to establish a single perfect value that completely summarizes entire careers’ achievements. Such an index wo

@russcd.bsky.social ushers in a new era of academic metrics with the core-pivotal author index, which assigns all credit to authors that occupy the exact center of the author list, while non-central peripheral authors receive no credit whatsoever.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag026

#evobio #molbio

Awww! Thank you - this just made my day! ❤️ Hail our beautiful spider bebes!

Postdoctoral Researcher - Evolutionary Genomics and Population Genetics Position Title: Postdoctoral Researcher - Evolutionary Genomics and Population Genetics Appointment Type: Post Doc/Trainee Job Description: Summary of Duties and Responsibilities: We are seeking a Pos...

Postdoc in evolutionary genetics with @mbhufford.bsky.social isu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/IowaStateJob...

Integrating the Microbiome Into Infection Ecology and Evolution in Wild Animals Parasites are a ubiquitous force in nature threatening wildlife populations and ecosystems. Interactions between hosts and their parasites are impacted by host-associated microbiomes, which are essen...

A nice collaboration from post-docs in my lab 😊 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... @jingdi.bsky.social @luismsilva.bsky.social @paradyseb.bsky.social @molecularecolup.bsky.social