Kevin Bennett

IGV window. Above, calming long reads. Below, chaotic short reads.

Looking at long-read data is so calming compared to short reads.

Instantly to the top of the reading list

Check out our short warbler hybrid paper out today, including a new unofficial common name. Carotenoid people will find some little tidbits of discussion about how these hybrids can help us understand regulation of yellow feathers.

Geothlypis plumage in general is interesting because there is a fairly deep split within the genus where the "yellowthroat" phenotype is on both sides of the split and the "Oporornis" phenotype is on only one side of the split, but then also shared with the outgroup. So which is ancestral?

VRmivora This VR experience—created by Penn State and the National Science Foundation—drops you into a young forest to find wood-warblers. Explore the landscape as you find and identify wood-warblers, which…

Super excited to release this virtual field / lab experience called "VRmivora":
davetoews.com/vrmivora/

It's free to download via SideQuest for a Meta VR headset:
sidequestvr.com/app/44760/vr...

Thanks to all involved, especially the Center for Immersive Experiences: immersive.psu.edu
🦉🧪

A mosaic of modular variation at a single gene underpins convergent plumage coloration The reshuffling of genomic variation from multiple origins is an important contributor to phenotypic diversification, yet insights into the evolutionary trajectories of this combinatorial process and ...

1/9 New in @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado8005
How does genetic architecture constrain evolutionary trajectories? To address this question, we inferred the genetic architecture of convergent plumage coloration and its evolutionary history in wheatears.

Correction needed!!!

Are they all posted yet? I'm not seeing all of them if so.

Mad

Yup

For decades, human genome editing has been limited to small, localized modifications.

Today, in a new paper published in @science.org , researchers from Arc's Hsu lab show that bridge recombinase technology is capable of large-scale genomic rearrangements in human cells.

Spring in Washington, Louis Halle

Great contribution to the field! I wonder though for those of us studying vertebrates if we should still expect this to hold? Most of your animal species were invertebrates, right?

Question: why do birds in the east appear to be going north?

I feel like a lot of organizations decided it was more convenient to just not go back to doing things in person after the pandemic. The police dept. in my town was still claiming COVID restrictions as a reason for not inspecting my infant car seat in 2022!

Moncrieff Lab | Bird Evolution The Moncrieff Lab is a research lab based at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. Research in the lab involves museum specimens, fieldwork, and...

🐦🔬 Recruiting PhD students! 🌎🧬
I’m looking for 1–2 PhD students to join our team starting Fall 2026 at the Sam Noble Museum & University of Oklahoma.

Our research: 🐦 birds • 🌍 biogeography • 🌴 Neotropics • 🧬 population genomics • 🌱 speciation

👉 Learn more: www.moncriefflab.org

Please share!

Does anyone have a recommendation for a good review / synthesis of the evolution of DNA sequencing technologies over the last 40-50 years? Looking for something to read as a lab group with folks who are newer to the field. TIA

Looks like it has some Ardea genetics. Tricolored-GREG?

Saw this and thought to myself "Oh no we got scooped!" Nope. This is the preprint of our manuscript. Fun collab with Laura Céspedes Arias.

#AOS2025 don't miss @kevinfpbennett.bsky.social's talk at 11:15am on Wednesday in the Genomics 2 session (Ballroom C). We're cooking up some cool stuff with @mbtoomey.bsky.social on warbler carotenoid processing enzymes! 🦉🧪

Al, you got et al.-ed! But seriously, nice work!

Phyling: phylogenetic inference from annotated genomes Phyling is a fast, scalable, and user-friendly tool supporting phylogenomic reconstruction of species phylogenies directly from protein-encoded genomic data. It identifies orthologous genes by searchi...

This looks like an amazing tool
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I'll be there

Yes our learning management system is ClassWorks, but to manage your roster you have to go to Socrates. But students register through Einstein+. And to enter grades you have to go to Gradify. Except if the student is graduating, then you have to use Gradly. Oh and classrooms are managed through Bluo

Not every bird lives up to both its common and scientific names.

#evobio #popgen 🧪

Thanks Jess!

A photo from the bank of the Changuinola River in a hilly area, rainforest on both sides.

So what does this mean for plumage introgression? It could mean that we’ve caught this situation as gene flow is temporarily slowed at the river before it continues. Or it could point to geographic variation in female preference or some other unusual scenario. Either would be pretty interesting.

Finally, we ran demographic models to estimate gene flow and found a similar result. Higher gene flow upriver than downriver. But in both areas, there is plenty of gene flow across the river.

Second, population structure showed a river effect, but only in the lower reaches of the Changuinola where it is widest. Upriver, there was hardly any population structure. This general pattern mirrors findings from some of the world’s largest rivers, but on a much smaller scale.