C. Brandon Ogbunu

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

Responsible publication of your research!

To help you do this @nicolasgaltier.bsky.social and coauthors have put together a handy database of academia-friendly journals, DAFNEE. You can read about it in their article recently published in @jevbio.bsky.social:

doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

Does the noncoding genome actually carry more genetic information than coding seqs? Motivated by this question we mutated every bp in the 10kb MYC locus. Results are even more exciting: Decoding the MYC locus reveals a druggable ultraconserved RNA element www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Ooh, now with fancy flyer. Zoom link usc.zoom.us/j/96588553185

How MAHA Exploits the Flaws of Modern Science Opinion | The weaknesses in science’s processes have been weaponized against it. It’s time to confront those flaws and fix them.

"Take away college football tomorrow & watch college towns descend into chaos. But when they came for our pipettes & microscopes, almost nothing happened. "

New thoughts on the War on Science, 1 yr later, for @undark.org:

'How MAHA Exploits the Flaws of Modern Science '
undark.org/2026/01/28/o...

New research explores ecological and social roots of same-sex sexual behaviour in primates A comprehensive new study of primates reveals that same-sex sexual behaviour (SSB) is widespread and influenced by a combination of environmental and...

www.imperial.ac.uk/news/article...

Interactions within higher-order antibiotic combinations do not influence the rate of adaptation in bacteria The prevalence and strength of antibiotic resistance has led to an ongoing battle between the development of new treatments and the evolution of resistance. Combining multiple drugs simultaneously is a potential solution for combating antibiotic ...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’

🚨🚨🚨 "At least 63 times since 2007, data from some of the 28 human genomic repositories that the N.I.H. controls was improperly released to researchers, used for unapproved purposes or made vulnerable to theft..." (Gift Link) www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/u...

Fascinating work from @ssalinas.bsky.social and colleagues

Amazing!! Congratulations on this!!! Haha me and James were *just* talking about you and this study!!

Photo of 3-versus-3 football game

1/12 Really proud of this paper! We borrowed tools from biology to ask a simple question: does who you play with actually matter in football? (Spoiler: it does, a lot.) 🧬 🤝 ⚽

Paper here: authors.elsevier.com/a/1mUusArnpe...

Great thread from our resident expert on industry influence, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, enumerating and contextualizing the key results of our recent preprint.

Social media research has a conflict of interest problem:

“these findings suggest industry influence in social media research is extensive, impactful, and often opaque”

A real concern is that this may incentivize scholars to minimize the harms of social media platforms
arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11507

Disinformation Summer Institute (DSI) - Disinformation Summer Institute Disinformation Disinformation is false or misleading information created and spread to advance policy, political, economic or ideological goals. It is sometimes used by industries, governments, and ot...

Do you study disinformation or want to start working in that area?

Come to the DSI June 15-18th with @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @katestarbird.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, @rcalo.bsky.social, @naomioreskes.bsky.social, @emmaspiro.bsky.social, and many more.

disinfoinstitute.org

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

A lovely review of Henri Bergson's masterwork "Creative Evolution" by @asmeincke.bsky.social, and its relevance to current philosophy of biology

Principles of Client Enrichment in Multicomponent Biomolecular Condensates Biomolecular condensates are commonly organized by a small number of scaffold molecules that drive phase separation together with client molecules that do not condense on their own but become selectiv...

I’m excited to share a new preprint led by Aishani Ghosal, formerly a postdoc in my group and now an assistant professor at NISER, with experiments led by Lindsay Case’s group at MIT! We show how client recruitment shapes composition in multicomponent condensates.
arxiv.org/abs/2601.11450

The Race to Build the DeepSeek of Europe Is On As Europe’s longstanding alliance with the US falters, its push to become a self-sufficient AI superpower has become more urgent.

SOOFI, an open-source model development project, intends to put out a competitive general purpose language model with roughly 100B parameters within the next year www.wired.com/story/europe... #artificialintelligence #llms #soofi

What happens when scientists studying population, evolutionary, and quantitative genetics all get together in one room? You get #PEQG26! Hear why PEQG 2026 stands apart directly from conference organizers: buff.ly/O0jiIBE

1/2🧵

Tylenol during pregnancy is safe without increased risk of autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability of offspring
A new review of the evidence just out
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Paper accepted! 😊 "Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is Not Deterministic" will appear in Synthese. Final version available here: arxiv.org/abs/2503.19672 - with Henry Potter and George Ellis

From obstacle to lynchpin: the evolution of the role of bacteriophage lysogeny in defining and understanding viruses Abstract. The phenomenon of bacteriophage lysogeny has played a vital role in understanding the nature of viruses more generally. Discovered in 1920, the p

From obstacle to lynchpin: the evolution of the role of bacteriophage lysogeny in defining and understanding viruses url: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsnr/article...

The many faces of multivariate information Extracting higher-order structures from multivariate data has become an area of intensive study in complex systems science, as these multipartite interactions can reveal insights into fundamental feat...

New preprint on unifying the zoo of multivariate higher-order information measures into a common form.
May be of interest to anyone interested in higher-order interactions, complex systems, emergence, or complexity.
1/N
arxiv.org/abs/2601.08030

Thank you, Professor! That was a blast! Beer soon….

Haha

Comparing Strategies to Introduce Two New Antibiotics for Gonorrhea: A Modeling Study Immediately introducing 2 new antibiotics to treat gonorrhea alongside 1 currently used therapy is more effective at minimizing drug resistance than holdin

New publication! Comparing Strategies to Introduce Two New Antibiotics for Gonorrhea: A Modeling Study featuring authors: @mckline98.bsky.social, @kroster.bsky.social, @dhelekal.bsky.social, @rumpl-er.bsky.social, and @yhgrad.bsky.social. Read it here at bit.ly/3Z1Zplh

Metaphor there — I (still) do everything in graduate student mode. Except eating (thankfully)

But yeah — the healthy dose of doubt and skepticism is good

New preprint from my lab (with Arya Kaul, @fernpizza.bsky.social, and @brinda.eu), in which we explore new genes hitchhiking on the beneficial deletion that fused them together, and find them in the LTEE, M. Tb/bovis, and across the bacterial tree of life

WTH Lol

“There Are Two Possible Futures for American Science.” The Simons Foundation president talks about science philanthropy, the future of the research enterprise, and remaining hopeful.

Folks interested in science philanthropy should read this interview w/Simons Foundation President David Spergel on the role of philanthropy, support of early career scientists (from incentives to a call for more retirements), and the pivot point between future scenarios.

issues.org/american-sci...

Two new chapters from my free online book in human genetics out this weekend!
These complete Part 3 of the book, on human population structure and history:
3.3: Human prehistory [separate thread]
3.4: Ancient DNA: a genetic time capsule [this thread]
web.stanford.edu/group/pritch...