Hernán A. Burbano

Excited to see our FML Research Group Leader
@luisapallares.bsky.social
in the latest Max Planck Research! 🎉
The article follows her journey from Colombia to Germany and her work on how genes and environment shape complex traits using fruit flies.

Read the full story: www.mpg.de/26180374/W00...

Come join us!

We are looking for a Professor or Associate Professor of Computational Genomics in Health and Disease at University College London.

Details 👉 www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Post funded by UCL Health Strategy.

Join us at UCL @ugiatucl.bsky.social @ucllifesciences.bsky.social 👇🧵

Mi gente latino!
Ya llegó ya está aquí. La primera reunión de Biomoleculas antiguas en Latinoamerica patrocinada por el @official-smbe.bsky.social . Reserven la fecha y estén al pendiente de las fechas importantes. Mas info en nuestra pagina web smbeperu.github.io/SMBEperu-esp/

Please get in contact if you are interested in studying the evolution of plants and their pathogens combining contemporary and ancient DNA! #aDNA Check our latest publications here: www.burbanolab.org/publications

Current UCL students – join us for an information event about Bioscience master’s degrees with refreshments. “How to get a Master’s” will be held on Thursday 5 February starting at 4pm in UCL Anatomy Building G29 JZ Young Lecture Theatre.

Register here: https://forms.office.com/e/s3BV1AvKXD

Looking for something new to integrate into an #evolution or #microbiology course? Useful for lectures, labs, homework?

Have a look at our STEPS program, which simulates bacterial evolution, including the #LTEE. Easy web-based interface & lab manual w/ exercises to help develop students' intuition.

New Teaching Tool!
blog.aspb.org/new-teaching...
Check out the latest unit in the Teaching Tools in Plant Biology series, “Genomic Analysis of Botanical Collections: Opportunities and Challenges,” by M. Deglialberti, C. Paleni, F. Fainelli, C. Lambertini, & Silvia Manrique. @tank-silvia.bsky.social

Reimagining Health with Big Data | Norwich Science Festival Dr Marina Escalera Zamudio and Dr Cenk Celik will share the ways in which big data and AI are transforming medicine.

See UGI's Dr Marina Escalera Zamudio (Rosetrees Fellow) and Dr Cenk Celik (Research Fellow) @cenkcelik.bsky.social presenting at the Norwich Science Festival @niscifest.bsky.social session on "Reimagining Health with Big Data".

norwichsciencefestival.co.uk/whats-on/rei...

#NISF26

A new preprint from the lab, with postdoc @deboraycb.bsky.social and collaborators @aidaandres.bsky.social and Tim Connallon:

“Characterising the detectable and invisible fractions of genomic loci under balancing selection”
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New species of oomycete named after Sophien Kamoun @kamounlab.bsky.social 🥳 🥳

Join Peter Grant FLS FRS & Rosemary Grant FRS on Wed 4 March as they discuss their landmark research on Darwin’s finches and how new species form. Peter and Rosemary are renowned evolutionary biologists, having studied these finches on the Galápagos islands since 1973.

buff.ly/ZbYnmf2

Diverse bacterial pattern recognition receptors sense the conserved phage proteome Recognition of foreign molecules inside cells is critical for immunity in all domains of life. Proteins of the STAND NTPase superfamily, including eukaryotic nucleotide-binding oligomerization domain ...

NLR-like immunity in bacteria

A new study from the Alex Gao lab. The scope of this work is incredible!!!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Welcome to Term 2! ❄️

We hope you had a restful break and are feeling ready for the weeks ahead. As the campus comes back to life this winter, we’re excited to welcome back our returning students and say a warm hello to those joining us for the first time this term.

#WelcomeToUCL

📸: @yuislucky

Congrats Saskia! @saskiahogenhout.bsky.social

Beautiful study of the population history of Sudan, including a striking signature of adaptive admixture in the Duffy-null blood group gene, potentially as a mechanism of local adaptation to Plasmodium. Congratulations @lvilavalls.bsky.social, what a great regal de reis!

Proud to announce SimPhyNI, a new tool for bacterial GWAS with higher precision and scalability than existing tools. Try it out and let us know what you think!!

The distinction between virulent & temperate phages gets fuzzier if one can find so many virulent phages in the sequences of bacterial genomes coming from standard lab "pure" cultures. Check Peter's thread on our work and the N&V by Carson & Hynes: doi.org/10.1038/s415...
#phagesky #microsky

New preprint on pop #genomics of #spittlebug—the main insect vector of Xylella, the bacterium that has ravaged olive groves in southern Italy 🇮🇹 🫒

Take-home: problematic insect vector may be less widespread than initially thought—important implications for disease control 💥

👇

Congratulations to Johannes for his #LeibnizPreis, Germany’s most prestigious research funding award. @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social

Rewriting the code of plant immunity-

New approaches to engineering plant immunity can more broadly protect crops against pathogens and disease, once they get through regulatory hurdles.

@resurrectbio.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Persistent trade-offs balance competition and colonization across centuries Microbial competition drives rapid adaptation, often forcing organisms to specialize in new ecological niches. Adaptations that improve competitive ability can reduce performance in other environments...

ICYMI, this new preprint is just awesome.

"Here, we show that O-antigen–dependent trade-offs between pathogenicity and interbacterial competition have persisted for over two centuries in natural P. viridiflava populations."

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

We are thrilled to announce the first official release (v0.1.8) of #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗿, the successor to one of our flagship tool, #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀! Based on ideas we conceived of long ago (!), this was achieved thanks to the dedication of Brent Pedersen.

1/n

quick analysis of sedimentary ancient DNA using quicksand Abstract. Ancient DNA extracted from the sediments of archaeological sites (sedaDNA) can provide fine-grained information about the composition of past eco

Cool work from my colleagues @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social just dropped! Merlin Szymanski, @janetk.bsky.social et al. developed quicksand, a fast, accurate and beautifully designed Nextflow pipeline for taxonomic classification of mammalian mtDNA from ancient sediment DNA. doi.org/10.1093/molb...

Boris Shraiman points a physicist’s eye on biological quandaries Boris Shraiman is awarded the American Physical Society’s Max Delbrück Prize in Biological Physics.

Boris Shraiman points a physicist’s eye on biological quandaries news.ucsb.edu/2025/022264/... 🧪

Imputation of ancient canid genomes reveals inbreeding history over the past 10,000 years | PNAS The multi-millennia-long history between dogs and humans has placed them at the forefront of archaeological and genomic research. Despite ongoing e...

A PNAS Special Feature exclusively about dogs? Woof!
Here are 3 of the 8 that we were involved with. Congrats to @lachiescarsbrook.bsky.social & @undeaddandy.bsky.social
Dingoes!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
German Shepherds!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Imputation!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

An amazing paper! Give it a read - you won’t be disappointed.

Thank you, Daniel!

Next generation of 1001 Genomes Plus browser and data download Please indicate all features you would like to see in a browser that displays features of completely sequenced Arabidopsis thaliana genomes

We (Nordborg & Weigel labs) need input on the next generation of genome browsers & data download modes for the #Arabidopsis #1001GenomesPlus project. We have now a curated collection of over 500 long read genomes.

Please help us by filling out this questionnaire: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

CRISPR-Cas–mediated heritable chromosome fusions in Arabidopsis The genome of Arabidopsis thaliana consists of 10 chromosomes. By inducing CRISPR-Cas–mediated breaks at subcentromeric and subtelomeric sequences, we fused entire chromosome arms, obtaining two eight...

And now we have Arabidopsis plants with 8 chromosomes instead of 10 and no obvious phenotypic differences, this week in @science.org
#PlantScience
Paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Perspective here:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...