Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾

Congratulations @thibautbrunet.bsky.social and all the authors! This is an awesome story! Very excited to have these critters in the lab now 😍

Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating).

A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)

«That which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun…»

Blue, but not like thaaaaat.

«I want the yellow bottle.»

«We don't have a yellow bottle.»

«I want the blue bottle.»

«Ok, here you go.»

[Toddler takes the blue bottle] «It's yellow.»

It's hard to recreate that mindset now, because know we *know* - we've *seen* a world brought to a halt. But this was incomprehensible then. How do you just - stop everything?

What situation would we not believe today? Or are we more likely to believe overall?

Will I ever have that feeing again?

It was the unprecedentedest of times, it was the precedentedest of times…

Morning poem from Mary Oliver, curated by @samantharhill.bsky.social

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted—

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead—
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging—

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches—
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

I just read Gunther Stent’s 1977 review of The Selfish Gene (in the Hastings Center Report), and oh boy. A 🧵

Some samples:
Dawkins’ “perverse” definition of the gene “denatures the meaningful and well-established central concept of genetics into a fuzzy and heuristically useless notion.” /1

Thanks!

So, this means you recommend running unmasked models on softmasked genomes? Or unmasked models on unmasked genomes?

Hey genomics colleagues: are they any software programs you wish still worked on your modern OS? I’m trying to get a list of dead software that lost support and fell out of fashion, not due to method but due to software support. #genomics #evosky #evolbio #popgen #Evolution

A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life. RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but their large size and structural ...

How could a simple self-replicating system emerge at the origins of life? RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but existing ones are so large that their self-replication seems impossible. Could they be smaller?

Excited to share our latest work in @science.org on a new small polymerase.
1/n

Vertebrate populations are declining worldwide.
But which threats are actually driving the steepest declines?
A global analysis of 3,129 vertebrate population time series reveals a surprising pattern 🧵👇
#Biodiversity #Ecology

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.

Happy birthday to Charles Darwin,
patron saint of tired scientists, grumpy fieldworkers, and hating your own manuscript.

1/7 🧬 New preprint!

What is it like to have one of the highest genomic diversities among metazoans?

🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It’s an LLM. Not fully understanding the inner workings of these complex models doesn’t turn them into something else. If we didn’t use them to fabricate speech and symbols, this wouldn’t even be in question.

One wonders what’s in the remaining 1% of explained variance. Probably a bunch of small TE fragments wearing a trenchcoat.

I've always been very fond of the drift-barrier hypothesis et al. — it's a simple and powerful explanatory framework.

Its predictions often place vertebrates among the extreme values of many parameter distributions, which makes them particularly interesting as a testing ground for this theory.

This is very interesting! A critical examination of a key tenet of the drift-barrier and mutational hasard hypotheses: is there link between effective population size, mutation rates, and genome size?

This is bound to make quite some noise…

Hello Bluesky!

Does Nₑ really explain mutation rate (μ) or genome size (GS) in vertebrates?

We find the apparent Nₑ–μ link in Bergeron et al. (2023) is a “back-door” path via generation time, and GS is decoupled from both Nₑ and life-history traits.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

#evobio #PNAS

The coral symbiosis and immunity lab is looking for PhD and MSc students to study coral-algal symbiosis, coral innate immunity, stress response and applications in marine biotech. The lab is led by Shani Levy and located in the School of Marine Sciences in Haifa, Israel.

Interested in a PhD or MSc in coral biology? Join Shani's lab in Haifa! 🪸

www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

#academicjobs #phdjobs #phdposition

The timing and nature of marine ecosystem recovery following the Permian-Triassic mass extinction - npj Biodiversity npj Biodiversity - The timing and nature of marine ecosystem recovery following the Permian-Triassic mass extinction

Exciting news! Our invited perspectives in npj Biodiversity looks at how marine life bounced back after the worst mass extinction ever, the Permian‑Triassic Mass Extinction (PTME) ~252M years ago. Big questions: fast or slow? recovery or restructure?

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Funnily enough, some of the quotes in the article also express some degree of bewilderment at the situation.

A new Cambrian soft-bodied biota after the first Phanerozoic mass extinction: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Many non-bilaterian animals including beautiful sponge (panel b, c) and ctenophore (panel d) fossils🤩 🧽🪼.

#sponges #ctenophores #Cambrian

Our project on molecular convergence in teleosts is published in MBE. This study involved analysing over 2 million genes, and combining multiple data modalities to uncover some surprising insights behind the evolution of adaptations in teleosts. Thank you @hfspo.bsky.social for the funding!