Jeff Groh

Research Associate-Fixed Term - East Lansing, Michigan, United States Position Summary The Lowry Lab at Michigan State University is searching for a postdoctoral research associate to conduct molecular and physiological experiments to understand the causes of genetic va...

I am currently searching for a new postdoctoral researcher to study the evolution, genetics, and physiology of cold acclimation and freezing tolerance in switchgrass at Michigan State University. This work will be funded by a newly funded five-year DOE grant. careers.msu.edu/jobs/researc...

With @aconga.bsky.social we wrote a short Dispatch to highlight two awesome companion papers in @currentbiology.bsky.social by @jeffgroh.bsky.social, @gcbias.bsky.social and by Liu et al. on how the control of heterodichogamy is going nuts in the Juglandaceae :

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Hermaphroditic plants also use TIME ⏰🌿 to avoid selfing.

Two new @currentbiology.bsky.social papers explore the rapid turnover of this trait in the wingnut family.

Both @vincentcastric.bsky.social and I summarized these findings 👉 authors.elsevier.com/a/1m2MA3QW8S...

#Evolution #PlantBiology

Distinct haplotypes and reversed dominance at a single-gene balanced polymorphism controlling heterodichogamy in two genera of wingnuts In the angiosperm mating system of heterodichogamy, two hermaphroditic morphs temporally alternate between male and female flowering phases, promoting…

Congratulations to @jeffgroh.bsky.social on the publication of his paper on an ancient balanced polymorphisms controlling heterodichogamy in two genera of wingnuts. The paper shows the putative turnover & reversal of dominance of a mating type polymorphism
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Distinct haplotypes and reversed dominance at a single-gene balanced polymorphism controlling heterodichogamy in two genera of wingnuts In most species within the walnut family, two genetically determined morphs alternate between male and female flowering phases in time. Groh et al. identify a distinct locus for this dimorphism in two...

Sharing our new paper, "Distinct haplotypes and reversed dominance at a single-gene balanced polymorphism controlling heterodichogamy in two genera of wingnuts". Genomics & evolution of a mating type system involving two morphs with alternating sexes in walnut relatives www.cell.com/current-biol...

We're excited to be recruiting an NIH funded postdoc to work in the Coop lab at UC Davis. We're specifically interested in candidates who are want to work at the intersection of human genetics, GWAS, and population genetics modeling. Please RT

A species interaction kick-starts ecological speciation in allopatry | PNAS Adaptation to different environments is thought to play a key role in speciation. However, speciation typically begins in allopatry, where reproduc...

Work led by Marius Roesti, "A species interaction kick-starts ecological speciation in allopatry" now published - Varying degrees of divergence associated with presence/absence of a single interacting species predicts strength of prezygotic RI in freshwater stickleback www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New Article: "Ginger genome reveals the SMPED1 gene causing sex-phase synchrony and outcrossing in a flowering plant" rdcu.be/eJPdX

SMPED1, located in a dichogamy-determining region in Alpinia species, controls the timing of sex-organ synchrony.

Quantitative system drift https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.17.676933v1

Please share broadly: I am looking for a postdoctoral fellow to work on a collaborative project on the temporal population genomics of invasive Capeweed (using contemporary and herbarium genomics), with ‪‪@shaky-dingo.bsky.social‬ and colleagues

tskit_arg_visualizer: interactive plotting of ancestral recombination graphs Summary: Ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs) are a complete representation of the genetic relationships between recombining lineages and are of central importance in population genetics. Recent brea...

Excited to share our new preprint for the tskit_arg_visualizer Python package! ARGs can sometimes feel like a black box, so
@yanwong.bsky.social and I have been developing a method to programmatically drawing these graphs.

🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2508.03958

1/6

Shift in NSF GRFP award by field. The color shows the field, and the proportion of grants awarded is shown by the slope and weight of the line.

Fields like Computer Science, Physics/Astronomy, and Chemistry saw the largest increases in NSF GRFP awards in 2025.

Meanwhile, Life Sciences, Social Sciences, Psychology, and Mathematical Sciences experienced the steepest declines—marking a major departure from historical funding patterns.

Looking forward to #Evol2025! I’ll be presenting on the genetics of a balanced polymorphism for sex timing in hermaphroditic plants in the Reproductive Systems session on June 22 at 11:15 AM

NSF, NASA and NIH budgets per year, inflation adjusted from 2000-2025 along with the proposed cuts. NSF includes research component only. Massive cuts across all sectors, well below support spanning 25 years.

How bad will it be? Catastrophic.

Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come.

But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget.

Speak up now before it is too late.

(inflation adjusted $-s below)

Congrats!!

Increased rates of hybridization in swordtail fish are associated with water pollution Biodiversity loss can occur when disturbance compromises the reproductive barriers between species, causing them to collapse into a single population through hybridization. Recent research has documen...

1/9 Excited to share the preprint for the second half of my PhD with @mollyschumer.bsky.social: Connecting human environmental impacts to hybridization in swordtail fish through genomics, GIS, water chemistry, and histology. Thread below!

#SciSky

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New Academy Members Elected in 2025

Congrats to my wonderful PhD advisor @gcbias.bsky.social on being elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences! www.amacad.org/new-members-...

Biologist Jeff Groh wrote home to Hummelstown PA 🚜 to lay out the many costs of cuts to American science infrastructure. “Let’s not ruin a good thing” 🧪🏠

Inspired by others on here I wrote a short op-ed in support of federal research funding for a local newspaper in small town PA where I grew up

Photos: Nationwide Protests Against Trump and Musk Images from some of the hundreds of anti-Trump demonstrations across the country.

More than 1,200 demonstrations were held across the country on Saturday against the policies and actions of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. See images from some of the protests in California, Florida, Washington, D.C., and more.

Thanks! It certainly seems that a common theme is structural DNA variation affecting allele-specific regulation of flowering genes to regulate timing. In this case, we don't find evidence that the mechanism directly involves the 3' UTR

We would love feedback on a new NCBI-BLAST service we are launching today: sky-blast.com

Under the hood it's the same BLAST executable and databases provided by NCBI, with a replica of the NIH's interface - providing an alternative to the US gov service that's less congested, faster & more reliable

updated link to their preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Grateful for the support from co-authors including Gracie Ackerman (UCD undergrad), PhD advisor @gcbias.bsky.social , M Wenzel of Sonoma Bot Garden, and USDA Wolfskill germplasm collection

We discuss the implications of our findings for evolution of heterodichogamy, and turnover vs stability of the genetic systems that control it.

Similar haplotype structure for heterodichogamy in both Pterocarya and Cyclocarya, and gene expression patterns of GFAFL in Cyclocarya flowers

Heterodichogamy in Cyclocarya involves a distinct pair of alleles at GFAFL with a reversed direction of dominance. The alleles are specialized in unisexual flowers and expr again implies a trans interaction. Parallel genomic structure to the Pterocarya locus suggests a similar mechanism in both

In work done independently from ours, a separate group identifies the same locus and expression patterns with complementary methods, and provides direct evidence for regulation by small RNAs. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

In Pterocarya the trait maps to a narrow region of balanced polymorphism containing a single flowering gene, GFAFL. Allele-specific GFAFL expression patterns in flowers imply existence of a trans-acting mechanism which we hypothesize to involve small RNA based on structure of the dominant haplotype

Pictures of two dichogamy morphs in Pterocarya trees, a graph visualizing flower dimorphism, and a phylogeny of the Juglandaceae family showing divergence times and origins of genetic systems for heterodichogamy.

I'm excited to share our new preprint on the molecular evolution of heterodichogamy in two wingnut genera of Juglandaceae. Heterodichogamy features two morphs synchronously alternating male and female flowering phases in time to generate disassortative mating.
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Allelic turnover and dominance reversal at a single-gene balanced polymorphism controlling heterodichogamous flowering in wingnuts (Juglandaceae) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.10.642504v1