Claire Patiou, PhD.

De novo origin and evolution of an antimicrobial protein function https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.05.703623v1

Check out our new review in Nature Reviews Genetics on de novo emerged genes and proteins. How they emerge, are lost and persist - and how de novo emerged proteins relate to randomized proteins! @bornberglab.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Emergence and evolution of protein-coding de novo genes Nature Reviews Genetics - De novo gene evolution entails the birth of new genes from previously non-coding DNA. In this Review, Bornberg-Bauer and Eicholt overview how protein-coding de novo genes...

New review out in Nat Rev Genet: Emergence & evolution of protein-coding de novo genes by Erich and Lars Eicholt @lacholt.bsky.social. How non-coding DNA becomes translated, persists or is lost in populations, and can yield structured/functional proteins—plus methods & open questions! rdcu.be/e09SM

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.

www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

🚨Hiring a postdoc!

Are you interested in #evolutionarygenomics, #sexchromosomes, #transposableelements & #Sexspecific #recombination in 🐸🧬?

Join my lab @vubrussel.bsky.social
🔹 @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social funded up to 3y
🔹 Deadline 10/3/2026
🔹 Start ~1/6/2026

Apply 👉: jobs.vub.be/job/Elsene-P...

🧬 What does the starting material from which genes could emerge #denovo look like?
🌱 We used #RiboSeq to investigate the landscape of translated de novo ORFs in 3 #Arabidopsis species, and how they might be linked to gene birth!

📝 Check out our preprint here:
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

De Novo Genes: Current Status and Future Goals Abstract. The recent Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution Satellite Meeting on De Novo Gene Birth, hosted at Texas A&M University on November 6

@ccasola.bsky.social, V. Luria, @vakirlis.bsky.social & @lizhao.bsky.social discuss advances and open questions in de novo gene emergence and evolution presented at the SMBE Satellite Meeting on De Novo Gene Birth (@official-smbe.bsky.social).

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf230

#genome #evolution

a woman says " would you like to join us " with her eyes closed ALT: a woman says " would you like to join us " with her eyes closed

📢 Open faculty position – Origins of Life
We have an opening in our section at the University of Geneva! 🧬🚀

SPREAD THE WORD

Apply here: jobs.unige.ch/www/wd_porta...

It was an immense pleasure to be back in Lille and present work from my PhD @popgroup2026.bsky.social , a huge thanks to the organizers! 😁
#PGG59

📢 Job alert: Post-Doc Position in the project "Functional annotation of genomic🧬 innovations in a densely populated clade🪰 with deep learning 💻" Join the GEvol community in a collaborative project between @bornberglab.bsky.social and @katharinahoff.bsky.social lab.
👉 bornberglab.org/post-doc-pos...

Postdoctoral Research Associates are sought for the GEvol project on evolutionary genomics. Candidates should have programming and data analysis skills. More info: https://g-evol.uni-muenster.de/open-positions/ #postdoc

Time to publish responsibly: DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly journals in ecology and evolutionary biology Abstract. The current economics of scientific publishing reveal a profound imbalance: academia pays prices far exceeding the actual costs of publication. R

DAFNEE, a useful database of academic-friendly journals in #Ecology and Evolutionary #Biology

academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...

Time to publish responsibly: DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly journals in ecology and evolutionary biology Abstract. The current economics of scientific publishing reveal a profound imbalance: academia pays prices far exceeding the actual costs of publication. R

Time to publish responsibly: DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly journals in ecology and evolutionary biology url: academic.oup.com/jeb/article/...

My generation had to deal with datasets where Excel had autocorrected gene names to dates. Future generations are going to have to deal with the hallucinations of slopbots.

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

FlyBase secures funding for year, but future still uncertain The FlyBase team’s fundraising efforts have proven successful in the short term, but restoration of its federal grant remains uncertain.

🪰 folks! I spoke to the Transmitter about FlyBase. As noted at flybase.org, bridge $ ran out and many staff were laid off.

Good news is stopgap contributions will keep core FlyBase operations active. But community support remains essential. Please donate @FlyBase and share! 1/2

tinyurl.com/FlyBase

Massively parallel interrogation of the fitness of natural variants in ancient signaling pathways reveals pervasive local adaptation The nature of standing genetic variation remains a central debate in population genetics, with differing perspectives on whether common variants are almost always neutral as suggested by neutral and n...

One of the most exciting works of my career, years in the making. We used high-throughput precision genome editing to test the fitness effects of thousands of natural variants. Our findings challenge the long-held assumption that common variants are inconsequential.

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

#PortraitdeScience 👩‍🔬
Découvrez le Portrait de @mariemonniaux.bsky.social, chargée de recherche #EvoEcoPaleo !
Marie Monniaux consacre ses recherches à un phénomène fascinant : l’auto-incompatibilité chez les fleurs🌷

➡️ www.hauts-de-france.cnrs.fr/fr/cnrsinfo/...

👋 @cnrsecologie.bsky.social

Rapid establishment of species barriers in plants compared with that in animals Speciation, the process by which new reproductively isolated species emerge from ancestral populations, results from the gradual accumulation of barriers to gene flow within genomes. To date, the noti...

Check out this cool work from @crouxevo.bsky.social and others, congrats!!! 🥳
Rapid establishment of species barriers in plants compared with that in animals | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

bioRxiv bat signal. We had a huge influx of submissions around Labor Day and now have a backlog. If any affiliates are available to screen, we'd be eternally grateful!

Lots of inspiring talks & posters at our GEvol symposium at #ESEB2025 yesterday!
Thanks to everyone who presented, especially our invited speakers @ahuylmans.bsky.social & @rmwaterhouse.bsky.social. From GEvol, Marie Lebherz, Elisa Israel and Barbara Feldmeyer gave talks about their work. (1/2)

Erich and Marie travelled to Barcelona for #ESEB2025. Erich gave two talks: one exploring de novo and random proteins, and another discussing gene family losses in slave-maker ants. Marie presented her work on neORF emergence in Drosophila at Symposium 29, organised by @gevol.bsky.social. 🧬🪰🐜

This new paper documents a tenfold increase in research papers using community-collected iNaturalist data over just five years: tr.ee/89Ot3I

According to the study, here are four key ways that iNaturalist data directly powers science 🧵⤵️

Our new paper in BioScience shows how iNaturalist data is powering research across the globe, with use growing 10x in 5 years and spanning 128 countries & 638 families of life.

Paper: doi.org/10.1093/bios...

@ifas.ufl.edu @inaturalist.bsky.social

#Biodiversity #iNaturalist #OpenScience

We are excited to announce the SMBE Fellows Program! ✍️

Designed to provide networking and mentorship opportunities to early-career researchers through scientific writing in evolutionary biology for @molbioevol.bsky.social and @genomebiolevol.bsky.social

📆 Aug. 31

🔗 smbe.org/smbe-fellows-program

A screenshot of the termination notice showing "Outstanding Investigator Grants"

A screenshot of the termination notice with "This award is terminated effective the date of this award, due to unsafe antisemitic actions that suggest the institution lacks concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students." highlighted

Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminated for reasons not related to the content of the science, or any actions taken by me or members of my lab

🚨 Another major round of #NSF terminations today 😞. Please report and encourage your colleagues to as well! We need this info to shed light on the damage caused, and to organize and advocate for science that includes and benefits all. airtable.com/appGKlSVeXni... 🧪

Expression of De Novo Open Reading Frames in Natural Populations of Drosophila melanogaster We show that newly-evolved, expressed open reading frames (neORFs) identified in a set of inbred Drosophila melanogaster lines are also expressed in multiple tissues and developmental stages of poole...

New Paper Alert! Together with the Parsch lab, we investigated the expression of neORFs (newly evolved expressed open reading frames, identified in a previous study) in Drosophila populations using publicly available RNA-seq data. (1/2)

doi.org/10.1002/jez....

Si tel n'est pas le cas, il serait peut-être judicieux d'effectuer un petit rappel auprès de vos effectifs 😉

Bonjour chère @education-gouv.bsky.social,
Ma mère institutrice au sein de l'académie d'Amiens, a demandé une journée pour être présente à ma soutenance.
Son absence lui est maintenant reprochée par le rectorat, selon lequel une soutenance de thèse n'est pas un "motif valable".
Vous confirmez ?