German Lagunas-Robles

Constraints on chromosome evolution revealed by the 229 chromosome pairs of the Atlas blue butterfly The genome of the Atlas blue butterfly contains ten times more chromosomes than most butterflies, and more than any other known diploid animal. Wright et al. show that this extraordinary karyotype is ...

How many chromosomes can an animal have?

In our paper out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social we show that the Atlas blue butterfly has 229 chromosome pairs- the highest in diploid Metazoa! These arose by rapid autosome fragmentation while sex chromosomes stayed intact.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

ggplot2 ethusiasts, new update just dropped! 🔥🔥🔥

ggplot2 4.0.0 A new major version of ggplot2 has been released on CRAN. Find out what is new here.

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN.

It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package.

Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

‘Almost unimaginable’: these ants are different species but share a mother Ant queens of one species clone ants of another to create hybrid workers that do their bidding.

A common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species

go.nature.com/4mOb5T9

Check out our latest preprint in Formica ants! We investigate how the sex ratio supergene evolved. We find that a colony-level sex ratio supergene evolved twice! This likely occurred as a result of recombination between the the ancestral queen number supergenes present in Formica. 🧬🐜🧬🐜🧬🐜

Led by Jessica Purcell. The team included @giuliascarparo.bsky.social , Madison Sankovitz, Mari West, Zul Alam, and Alan Brelsford.

There were ~10% of colonies showing mismatches between supergene genotype and phenotype, but we only observed this at one site. This raised the possibility that environment may override supergene control of colony queen number.

Colonies with single queens were more common in the north, but the queen number polymorphism was present throughout the gradient. The supergene haplotype frequency reflected this as the frequency also varied with latitude.

We sampled Formica podzolica colonies across a latitudinal gradient between Alaska and New Mexico. Surprisingly, Formica podzolica has SIX(!) common supergene variants that are differentiated by three distinct cassettes.

Variation in social organization and supergene control along a latitudinal gradient Widespread species often experience vastly different environmental conditions across their range. In species with polymorphic traits under strong genetic control, we can investigate how environmental ...

Excited to share some of the latest work coming from the Formica ant supergene system 🐜🧬! This project represents many collection trips and years of work!
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Very pleased to see this officially out - Genome Architecture and Speciation in Plants and Animals. With @siluwang.bsky.social, @dortizba.bsky.social and Loren Rieseberg. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Unexpected absence of a multiple-queen supergene haplotype from supercolonial populations of Formica ants Abstract. Ants exhibit many complex social organization strategies. One particularly elaborate strategy is supercoloniality, in which a colony consists of

The #EditorsChoice for this month from EIC @maxreuter.bsky.social is

"Unexpected absence of a multiple-queen supergene haplotype from supercolonial populations of Formica ants" by

@g-lagunasrobles.bsky.social et al

academic.oup.com/jeb/article/...

Thanks to Zul Alam and Alan Brelsford for their work on this! (4/n)

Taken together, these results suggest that supercoloniality isn't as simple as having the multi-queen supergene haplotype. (3/n)

We find that the multi-queen haplotype is missing from a supercolonial population. Additionally, we find a similar pattern with the multi-queen haplotype being absent in one supercolonial species, but present in another. (2/n)

Is supercoloniality a simple extension of polygyny?Supercolonies, networks of interconnected nests with many queens, have been proposed as a natural extension of multi-queen nests. In many Formica ants, a supergene determines whether a colony has a single queen or many queens. (1/n)

Thanks to Zul Alam and Alan Brelsford for their work on this! (4/n)

Taken together, these results suggest that supercoloniality isn't as simple as having the multi-queen supergene haplotype. (3/n)

We find that the multi-queen haplotype is missing from a supercolonial population. Additionally, we find a similar pattern with the multi-queen haplotype being absent in one supercolonial species, but present in another. (2/n)

A novel supergene controls queen size and colony social organization in the ant Myrmica ruginodis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.24.644106v1

Top: Topology weightings across chr15 showing how the karamu haplotype is related to the klugii and orientis haplotypes. Upper panel shows three possible rooted genealogical topologies. Second panel shows weights for each topology along the chromosome, smoothed with a 20 kb span. Arrows above the plot indicate the locations of inversions. Third panel shows unsmoothed topology weightings across a 1.5 Mb region corresponding to Inversion 2. Bottom: Ancestry painting across a 100 kb region within Inversion 2, showing ancestry tracts for two homozygous karamu individuals compared to two representative individuals homozygous for the orientis and klugii haplotypes. Coding regions are indicated below the plot, with the candidate gene for background colouration yellow indicated. Green triangles represent the top 10 SNPs for background colour in our GWAS. There is evidence for recombination throughout the supergene region, and specifically in the vicinity of yellow, consistent with the hypothesis that orientis ancestry at this locus (i.e., the B allele) is associated with darker colouration in karamu individuals.

Dynamics of a supergene. A study of the BC supergene in wing color morphs of the African monarch #butterfly by @rishidekayne.bsky.social &co reveals dynamic evolution of #supergene haplotypes, fueled by incomplete recombination suppression 🧪 @plosbiology.org plos.io/3DiFhnL

Centromere evolution isn't a sudden switch!

Our study shows centromere transitions are a step-by-step process driven by a combination of drift and selection. Discover how the kinetochore interface shapes this gradual change in our new preprint 🥳 doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.16.633479 🧵(1/8)

🦉🧪 Questions about high latitude myrtle warblers have been "up in the air" (pun intended) since 1899! @stephszarmach.bsky.social used fancy new geolocators that track light AND barometric pressure to add an unexpected chapter to this tale ......

Thanks to Zul Alam and Alan Brelsford who contributed to this work! (and are not on Bluesky)

Our preprint on the unexpected absence of a multiple-queen supergene haplotype in supercolonial populations is up on bioRxiv! We found that the P haplotype is not necessary for supercoloniality in the Formica rufa group, despite its longstanding association with non-supercolonial polygyny.

Happy to release Stacks v2.67 today. This release updates process_radtags to make it easier to use SRA data and to filter poly-G (error) runs coming from Nextseq/Novaseq machines + bugfixes. We also added a genotype depth filter to populations #RADseq
catchenlab.life.illinois.edu/stacks/

New article: 'The role of conflict in the formation and maintenance of variant sex chromosome systems in mammals'
🔬 From fusions to Y chromosome loss, sex chromosome karyotypes vary widely in mammalian genomes.
1/3

With a link that works 😊

Quantifying the role of genome size and repeat content in adaptive variation and the architecture of... Author summary The remarkable and seemingly inconsequential variation in genome size across species has long been an enigma in evolutionary biology. Calling this viewpoint into question, correlations ...

Hey ya'll. Our paper on the phenotypic consequences of intraspecific variation in repeat content and genome size was published over the holidays. Check it out when you get back to work :)

journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...

Phylogenomics resolves key relationships in Rumex and uncovers a dynamic history of independently ev... bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

Excited to share the first paper from my postdoc, using phylogenomics to uncover dynamic genome evolution in Rumex! Featuring @joannarifkin.bsky.social, @bmsacchi.bsky.social, @stepheniwright.bsky.social, and others not on the app!

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