Thijs Janzen

Potato-tomato

Congratulations to Dr @friggspeelman.bsky.social who was awarded a PhD yesterday 🎉 @rug.nl on 'Socially monogamous partnerships in birds: Causes, consequences, and pair-bond strength' research.rug.nl/en/publicati... A fantastic achievement!

Join Our Citizen Science Project!

We are mapping the house mouse hybrid zone in Schleswig-Holstein, DE, and you can help. Visit our House Mouse Hybrid Zone Project website to learn more jwinternitz.github.io/mouse-hybrid.... Funded by @dfg.de at @uni-hamburg.de

#DFG #musmusculus #wildmice

Muyuan Chen has turned structural biology into an immersive experience with his new video game Meowtabolism, now available on Steam.
Try the demo here: store.steampowered.com/app/4045010/...
Give Muyuan feedback: steamcommunity.com/app/4045010
#ScienceGaming #StructuralBiology #CryoEM #STEMOutreach

Alphavirus replicons encoding IFN-γ enhance cancer virotherapy by overcoming macrophage-mediated suppression Interference by tumor-associated macrophages may significantly reduce the efficacy of therapeutic viruses designed to infect cancer cells and activate…

Very glad to share my first last-author paper, now published in iScience! 🎉In this study, we addressed a key challenge in virus-based cancer therapy: macrophage-mediated suppression, which limits viral infection and restricts T cell activation in tumors.
Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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

Fishing for biodiversity Horizons - In brief

Even the cichlid fish eggs of Lake Tanganyika are highly diverse!

Picture by Grégoire Vernaz and Anja Haefeli

www.horizons-mag.ch/2025/09/04/f...

🚨 Our study investigating the relationship between evolutionary age and range size across plants and animals is out in @natcomms.nature.com! Delighted to be part of this great project led by @adrianaalzate.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐📈⏳️🐐🐋🐦🦎🐸🐠🌴🏝

🚨New paper led by @adrianaalzate.bsky.social showing that in most plant and animal groups the age of a species predicts its geographical range size, although the relationship is strongly mediated by dispersal ability and occurrence on islands 🧪🌐🪶

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

Now published @natecoevo.nature.com with @annika-nichols.bsky.social, our latest on the evolution of 𝘴𝘭𝘦𝘦𝘱 across 𝟲𝟬 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀 of cichlid fishes! doi.org/10.1038/s415...
with members of the @schierlab.bsky.social and Salzburger labs, as well as the burgeoning Shafer lab @uoftcellsysbiol.bsky.social

🔥ADVANCE ACCESS🔥: Climatic oscillations, dispersibility and adaptability behind worldwide mountain radiations of the Helichrysum– Anaphalis—Pseudognaphalium (HAP) clade (Compositae)
doi.org/10.1093/aob/...

Evolutionary age correlates with range size across plants and animals - Nature Communications Why are some species widespread while others are found only in small, isolated areas? This study shows that species with narrow ranges, and thus higher extinction risk, are often island-restricted, po...

To the paper: doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Older species tend to have large ranges – unless they live on islands New Nature Communication publications sheds light on how ecological, evolutionary, and geographical processes can simultaneously shape species’ vulnerability to extinction.

A new @natcomms.nature.com study led by iDiv alumna @adrianaalzate.bsky.social @naturalis.bsky.social uncovered that across >26,000 species evolutionary age is positively linked to range size, except in marine mammals.

#Biodiversity #Evolution #iDivResearch
www.idiv.de/older-specie...

Where can we get one in sept?

Indirect effects drive evolution An international study conducted in Eawag's experimental ponds demonstrates how indirect ecological effects influence the evolution of species.

An international study conducted in Eawag's experimental ponds demonstrates how indirect ecological effects influence the evolution of species.

👉 www.eawag.ch/en/info/port...

Impact of Partition Models on Phylogenetic Inference and Divergence Times of Lampyridae from Mitochondrial Genomes Mitochondrial genomes are frequently used for phylogenetic inference due to their availability and cost-efficient sequencing. In most mitogenomic phylogenetic analyses, only the two ribosomal RNA and ...

This study by @hoehna.bsky.social and coauthors seems very reassuring: where we often pick partition specific models rather ad-hoc, it appears these do not influence divergence time estimations.
(I would still love to see a densitree plot though!)

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

Evolutionary age correlates with range size across plants and animals - Nature Communications Why are some species widespread while others are found only in small, isolated areas? This study shows that species with narrow ranges, and thus higher extinction risk, are often island-restricted, po...

🌍 Age and extinction risk

Analysing 26,000 species, researchers found older plants and animals usually have larger ranges, while younger species, island dwellers, and poor dispersers face greater extinction risk.

🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#SciComm 🧪

Phylogenetically informative proteins from an Early Miocene rhinocerotid - Nature Protein sequences from fossil tooth enamel of a rhinocerotid from Canada’s High Arctic are used to develop phylogenetic frameworks from a specimen too old to preserve ancient DNA.

We now have protein sequences from rhino enamel that are >20 million years old! I am extremely excited and grateful to have been part of this project. The incredible thing: these sequences are informative enough to place this ancient species in the rhino tree! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is an amazing visualization of genome equivalence!

(I do wonder to what extent such reshuffling of the genome impacts the phylogeny? Is this phylogeny really valid given so much reshuffling?)

❗️Our next workshop will be on June 13th, 6 pm CEST, on Using LLMs with ellmer by @hadley.nz!
Register or sponsor a student by donating to support Ukraine!
Details: bit.ly/3wBeY4S
Please share!
#AcademicSky #EconSky #RStats

🧵5 Top Free Alternatives to BioRender for Scientific Illustrations!

These five websites offer free scientific illustrations for biologists. Great for presentations, research papers and other research communication needs.

Save and share the post!

Exploring themes in {ggplot2}? 🎨 Check out: bit.ly/4d9jtbH

It lets you preview different themes before adding them to your code - so handy for picking the perfect vibe! ✨
It features packages like:
🖌️ {ggthemr}
🌙 {ggdark}
👩🏽‍🔬 {ggtech}
⚙️ Setting an active theme globally

#RStats #ggplot2 #DataViz

Estimating Genome-wide Phylogenies Using Probabilistic Topic Modeling Abstract. Methods for rapidly inferring the evolutionary history of species or populations with, genome-wide data are progressing, but computational constr

Some of you may be interested in this: academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan...

Really excited that our DFG grant on the Speciation Genomics of Eye Size variation in *Heliconius* has been funded :) In the next weeks, I will post an advert for a PhD, but if you know of good students, please suggest they get in touch. Please repost.

Advancing the mapping of vegetation structure in savannas using Sentinel‐1 imagery As vegetation structure monitoring is important for the understanding and conservation of savanna ecosystems, we explored the utility of C-band synthetic aperture radar imagery for mapping both grass...

New paper alert🚨
We used calibrated Sentinel-1 backscatter coefficients to estimate grass biomass, woody canopy volume and tree basal area in the Greater Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem.
zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

What would a PhD be without a side quest? 🦀🪸
Super excited our study is out in Frontiers in Marine Science!
We tested if gall crabs affect coral algal symbionts using Imaging PAM fluorometry.
Turns out—these tiny tenants don’t stress out the algae.
🔗 doi.org/10.3389/fmar... (1)

And no ORCID...

O'RLY book title 'Rewriting R in Rust' with a subtitle 'How Hard Can It Be?' and a 'A Compelling Weekend Project' header written by the R Core Team

#Rstats is being rewritten in Rust, and the R Core already has a book coming out!

Presenting our poster on programming oncolytic alphavirus replicons with immunogenic signals at the Dutch Annual Virology symposium #DAVS2025 in #sunny Utrecht 🌞