Nicolas Bierne

Scanning mussel morphology #MusselsAreCool. The attempts are not yet conclusive, but it's cool.

On vous attend à Courbevoie le 11 octobre ! Un conte scientifique et musical de 7 à 97 ans 😀

Exciting news!
The next #PopGroup meeting will take place in Lille 🍟, France, 7–9 January 2026 – just 1 hour by train from London, Brussels, and Paris.

This year, PopGroup will also host ALPHY, the annual meeting of Evolutionary Genomics.

More info: populationgeneticsgroup.org.uk

See you there !

Very happy to announce that the next POPGROUP meeting will take place in Lille on 7-9 January !

Follow ‪@popgroup2026.bsky.social for all updates.

📢 Please share widely ! 📢‬

🚂 Sauvons les trains de nuit Paris-Berlin et Paris-Vienne Signez la pétition maintenant !

🚂 This petition needs your signatures! Save the wonderful nighttrain that gets you into the center of Paris/Vienna/Berlin in time for breakfast whilst you doze off or have memorable encounters and conversations with fellow travellers agir.greenvoice.fr/petitions/sa...

#fieldwork Again in ports to sample dock mussels that stayed encaged after reciprocal transplants. #MusselsAreCool #UrbanEvolution #MarEvol #PopGen

As every year, I will soon teach an online workshop on DNA methylation and its bioinformatic analysis, using short reads (BS-seq) and long reads (ONT and PacBio) approaches. It will be October 27th-29th (european afternoons and US mornings). Mor info here instats.org/seminar/anal...

#stage #master2 #Montpellier @isemevol.bsky.social #PopGen #MarEvol #MusselsAreCool

Si intéressé, contactez moi en DM ou par mail.

Un programme complet avec: des reconstruction de segments chromosomiques d'ancestry, des phénotypes multivariés (transcriptomes, microbiomes, asymétrie fluctuante), de la modélo avec SLIM et des équations, et de l'ajustement de modèles aux données (surface de fitness). Venez vous amuser avec nous.

Sujet de stage M2 sur la "dock mussel", cet écotype de moules hybrides qui habite dans les ports. L'objectif est de tester si la dock mussel s’est adaptée grâce à sa variance génétique d’admixture ou si l’admixture n’est que le corolaire du contact secondaire entre les deux espèces parentales.

These Ants Found a Loophole for a Fundamental Rule of Life

Thanks to @cjgiaimo.bsky.social for this nice article in @nytimes.com (www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/s...) about our last study (www.nature.com/articles/s41...)

Shrinking to bird size with dinosaur-level cancer defences: Evolution of cancer suppression over macroevolutionary time Author summary Humans are not the only species suffering from cancer, yet cancer does not impact all life equally. Body size is relevant because maintaining a large number of cells in a tumour-free st...

New paper out! 🤩 "Shrinking to bird size with dinosaur-level cancer defences: Evolution of cancer suppression over macroevolutionary time" with @kokkonut.bsky.social and @marcanthonytollis.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1371/jour... A short thread:

YouTube video by 7 Days of Science The Ants That Broke Biology

If you’ve heard about our study on ants producing two different species but are still confused about how it works (and don’t have time to read the paper), this 10-minute video made by @bengthomas.bsky.social is very informative:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-O4...

Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Figure 1A from the paper shows the distribution of black-headed (western) and rose-breasted grosbeaks (eastern) throughout North America. Small illustrations of males of each species are shown. Black-headed has a rusty orange breast and black head, while rose-breasted has a small reddish bib with a bright white belly. There is an inset map of South Dakota showing the transect across the hybrid zone

The first Aguillon Lab paper is officially out in early view at Evolution!! Led by postdoc @devonderaad.bsky.social, we’ve explored the hybrid zone between black-headed and rose-breasted grosbeaks in the Great Plains. #ornithology #hybridization #speciation #evolution doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Curious to hear thoughts from #popgen, #humangenetics, #genomics folks on recent paper:

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

"Directed mutation" in specific human pop'ns seems unlikely to me. DM didn't stand up as proposed in bacteria, but there are hot spots shaped by past selection. Plausible here?

Legacy effects of religion, politics and war on urban evolutionary biology - Nature Cities Cities affect biological evolution, but traditionally researchers focus on the biophysical influence of urban environments. Instead, this Review explores how the social processes of religion, politics...

Thrilled to share our Perspective published in 𝘕𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘊𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴: 𝗟𝗲𝗴𝗮𝗰𝘆 𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗼𝗻, #𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 #𝘄𝗮𝗿 𝗼𝗻 #𝘂𝗿𝗯𝗮𝗻 𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗯𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆.

It also elevates Eastern European perspectives - underrepresented in #urban #evolution narratives.

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

Hybridization and introgression are major evolutionary processes. Since the 1940s, the prevailing view has been that they shape plants far more than animals. In our new study (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
), we find the opposite: animals exchange genes more, and for longer, than plants

Looking forward to speaking @dzg2025berlin.bsky.social in Berlin on Anthropocene Biology in Eastern Europe and Beyond. I will talk about the implications of #war on wildlife. Sadly, science meets reality when my departure to Berlin was delayed due a #drone attack in Poland.

📣Enquête 2025 - Financement de la recherche publique

💡 Une recherche publique sous-financée, mal soutenue, bridée par l’administratif.
🔻 < 15 % des scientifiques en sont satisfaits.
🔒 Plus de 70 % jugent qu’elle freine les projets novateurs.

#socsav #recherche #VeilleESR #FinancementESR2025

Enhancing local meiotic crossovers in Arabidopsis and maize through juxtaposition of heterozygous and homozygous regions - Nature Plants This study discovered that locally confined DNA differences boost crossover rates in both Arabidopsis and maize, revealing a conserved mechanism that can accelerate plant breeding and trait introgress...

Breaking genetics news‼️🌱🌽 A natural DNA trick triples recombination in maize. What we first saw in Arabidopsis (@hendersi lab) a decade ago is now confirmed in crops—opening new doors for plant breeding. Published today in Nature Plants! More details 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📢 Postdoc Opportunity – Université Paris-Saclay
🌾🧬💻 Reproductive isolation between crops and their wild relatives
Candidates with PhD in evolutionary genomics & programming skills.
👉 Full description & how to apply: [https://moulon.inrae.fr/en/]
#Postdoc #EvolutionaryGenomics #Speciation

This is the best explanation of the weird new ant paper.

One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants - Nature In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same moth...

You may have missed this #ant poster at #ESEB2025, but be sure not to miss the article just published in #openacess in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

‘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

Why do speciation rates vary across the tree of life?
Some of the best yet most underappreciated places for this investigation are natural hybrid zones.
This preprint takes you to the hybrid zones in the origin of species to find a clue. 👉 shorturl.at/N7FXE
#Speciation #Evolution #hybridization

Would a rose by any other gene smell so sweet?

« La science est engagée dans un productivisme qui fait des ravages » En s'alignant sur les objectifs de croissance, la recherche scientifique participe au chaos environnemental, estime l'historien et journaliste Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis. Il appelle à un mouvement de ...

A réfléchir, la "decroiscience" #degrowth reporterre.net/La-science-e...

Collateral mutagenesis funnels multiple sources of DNA damage into a ubiquitous mutational signature Mutations reflect the net effects of myriad types of damage, replication errors, and repair mechanisms, and thus are expected to differ across cell types with distinct exposures to mutagens, division ...

In these dark times, it comes as a rare pleasure to highlight @natanaels.bsky.social ‬ & @marcdemanuel.bsky.social's work on germline and somatic mutations in humans. 1/n
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...