Michael Metzger

Could I ask what would qualify as good advice on deciding whether a paper was related to the grant? I have had a PO get very nervous and ask for serious explanations when they found out I had planned a second grant to be cited on a paper, so I try to be very cautious about this, and I am curious.

📢 EvoMG-DN PhD applications are now open!
Join our EU-funded MSCA network and explore evolution, ageing, and disease.
👉 www.evomg-dn.eu

📅 Apply by 30 November 2025

#PhD #DoctoralTraining #MSCA #HorizonEurope #Genomics #EvolutionaryBiology #BiomedicalResearch#EarlyCareerResearchers

Bummed I had to miss this. Did it get recorded?

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

Biologists Announce There Absolutely Nothing We Can Learn From Clams WOODS HOLE, MA—Saying they saw no conceivable reason to bother with the bivalve mollusks, biologists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution announced Thursday that there was absolutely nothing to...

You too Onion?

theonion.com/biologists-a...

We have two fantastically well-funded #PhD studentships available through the @evomg-dn.bsky.social #EU doctoral network (led by brilliant @mirimiam.bsky.social, @crg.eu). These enable students to move to the UK and come and work with us @icr.ac.uk to exploit #cancer #evolution for patient benefit.

Thanks! We are definitely looking forward to see more of your work on the mussel #TransCan!

Congratulations to Drs. Ramsdell, Brunkow, and Sakaguchi! I actually didn’t realize until today that PNRI’s David Galas was a part of the project to identify the genetic basis of the “scurfy” mice that led to Tregs. (@pnrigenetics.bsky.social) David’s legacy has touched more than I can imagine!

@sse-evolution.bsky.social just announced the following:

Call for Proposals: Research Synthesis Working Groups
The Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) invites proposals for sponsored Research Synthesis Working Groups at the 2026 Evolution meeting (up to two in-person and one virtual). ...

And we have more to come--understanding disease transmission, identifying new outbreaks of transmissible cancer, and several different strategies to find the genetic mechanisms behind the evolution of resistance to cancer in this unique and exciting system!

(If we still have a lab...)

Soft-shell clams in individual tanks in the lab

Each of the 3 first authors were awesome techs who ran the project for over a year, and all 3 are now PhD students! Rachael Giersch (UO), Jordana Sevigny (UCSC), and Sydney Weinandt (UAB). Huge effort from everyone involved and I am excited to see it all come together.

Overall, this was the culmination of a long effort, especially if you count 2020, in which we were conveniently running a year-long experiment to test different clam maintenance conditions, once we realized that we needed to keep clams alive for a lot longer than we had thought initially.

Figure 4. Detection of MarBTN-specific eDNA in tank water at late stages of MarBTN progression.

And because it is BlueSky I have to include the dual axis plot of representative clams from each outcome type comparing cancer fraction over time (lines) with eDNA detection (dots).

Figure 5. Modeling the relationship between cancer level in hemolymph and MarBTN in tank eDNA.

We also tested the tank water for eDNA to see when cancer cells are released by sick clams. We found 2 phases: an early phase <24% cancer without much transmission and an infectious phase >24% cancer with BTN eDNA detected in water, released in bursts and correlated with disease severity.

We also saw the timing of progression could have a long delay and was highly variable, and we even saw progress in a few clams initially diagnosed as negative, showing that there can be a long latent period when the cancer cells engraft into tissues and stay/grow there, before being seen in lymph.

Progression is clear, and we show it is associated with early death, but the surprising thing was that cancer did not progress in about half of animals, which suggests evolution of resistance in these populations after the earlier severe outbreaks.

Figure 2. Multiple distinct outcomes observed in soft-shell clams (Mya arenaria) after natural infection with MarBTN.

We found a lot of variability, but saw three main outcomes: Progression to Death, Long-Term Non-Progression, and Regression.

To determine how transmissible cancers really affect clams in New England now, we maintained clams collected from the wild in individual tanks in the lab and followed the cancer with qPCR of their hemolymph every 2 weeks for up to a year to quantify the fraction of BTN cells at each time.

Figure 1. Anecdotal case of regression in a clam with naturally acquired BTN.

It was reported to be lethal and had been reported to cause severe population die-offs in the 80s and 2000s. But there were some older reports of regression, and during other experiments we anecdotally noticed one of the clams in our lab showed a very clear case of cancer growth and then regression.

While the cancer has been seen for decades and we discovered that it was a transmissible cancer during my postdoc 10 years ago now (I am old I guess), there hadn’t been much work following BTN in clams over time to see what the actual outcomes of disease are and how it can progress.

Soft-shell clams in tanks

I am happy to share some good news from the lab! Our paper on the outcomes of Bivalve Transmissible Neoplasia is out this week in PLOS Pathogens!
doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Has Your Scientific Work Been Cut? We Want to Hear.

Hey US scientists, the NY Times wants to hear from you if you've had your funding cut. 🌊🧪

Image from Nightmare Before Christmas with a shot of Jack reaching for the Christmas Town doorknob and seeing his reflection in it.

Before there was the Matrix doorknob shot…

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

Let’s talk about AI art.

theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

Two full-time positions | Bioinformatician (m/f/d) + Applications Specialist (m/f/d) - Molecular Biology The Genome Facility at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön is seeking to fill two positions (full time) to support and expand our core facility services.

Two new positions are available at the MPI for Evolutionary Biology to support development of our genomics facility. Both stand to become permanent. Both offer a ton of opportunity to engage in a wide range of creative science.

Pls repost 🙏

www.evolbio.mpg.de/3838377/job_...

I need to know more!

*from someone trained in molecular biology and infectious disease

Naive question for someone trained in molecular biology and infectious disease: What makes a question or a study ecology v. evolution or vice versa?

I find myself following interesting infectious disease questions into evolution and ecology and stepping on field boundaries without realizing it.

Advice: download PDFs of any documents you might need from government websites. The NIFA website went offline during the government shutdown during my PhD