Israt Jahan

Don't forget to register for our next MEE live!

In this free webinar, we'll hear from Drs Figueiredo and Radchuk about the R package estar 🌍 🧪

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Phylogenomic tree of Cercozoa based on single-cell transcriptomes from 100 uncultured cells - BMC Biology Background Cercozoa are single-celled eukaryotes (protists) and are part of the supergroup Rhizaria. Cercozoans have vastly different morphologies and are defined by their phylogenetic affinity. While...

Great to see this paper in all its glory online: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

A huge effort from Gordon and the team at @pjkeelinglab.bsky.social!

Phylogenomic tree of Cercozoa based on single-cell transcriptomes from 100 uncultured cells

@ubcbotany.bsky.social @science.ubc.ca

Predator–prey interactions as drivers of cognitive evolution Nature Reviews Biodiversity, Published online: 26 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s44358-026-00141-5The drivers of cognitive variation remain elusive. In this Perspective, Wooster et al. propose the predatory intelligence hypothesis, positing that the complex interactions between predator and prey promote cognitive variation on individual, developmental and evolutionary levels.

New online! Predator–prey interactions as drivers of cognitive evolution

SORTEE Webinar: On what makes good sharable and reproducible R code, how to do it, and why it’s good for science For this month's SORTEE webinar, Dr. Dax Kellie from the Atlas of Living Australia will present on good, sharable, and reproducible R code in science

Coming up in March! Join @sortee.bsky.social for a webinar with @daxkellie.bsky.social on good, shareable, and reproducible R code - register here: events.humanitix.com/sortee-webin...

Cool thread, especially for the microbiologists. FYI, no alt text on any photos

Announcing the publication of TAIR12: Consult the fully reannotated genome on the European Nucleotide Archive - Phoenix Bioinformatics TAIR (The Arabidopsis Information Resource), together with our nonprofit host Phoenix Bioinformatics, is pleased to announce the public release of TAIR12

🎉📣 #TAIR12, the latest reannotation of the Arabidopsis thaliana genome, is now available under accession number PRJEB100887 on ENA and NCBI!

Thank you all the volunteer researchers whose hard work has made this possible!

#plantscience #plantbiology 🧪

bit.ly/3ZHtneT

New approaches to meta-analyze differences in skewness, kurtosis, and correlation by Pietro Pollo, Szymon M. Drobniak, Hamed Haselimashhadi, Malgorzata Lagisz, Ayumi Mizuno, Laura A. B. Wilson, Daniel W. A. Noble, Shinichi Nakagawa Biological differences between males and females are pervasive. Researchers often focus on sex differences in the mean or, occasionally, in variation, albeit other measures can be useful for biomedical and biological research. For instance, differences in skewness (asymmetry of a distribution), kurtosis (heaviness of a distribution’s tails), and correlation (relationship between two variables) might be crucial to improve medical diagnosis and to understand natural processes. Yet, there are currently no meta-analytic ways to measure differences in these metrics between two groups. We propose three effect size statistics to fill this gap: Δsk, Δku, and ΔZr, which measure differences in skewness, kurtosis, and correlation, respectively. Besides presenting the rationale for the calculation of these effect size statistics, we conducted a simulation to explore their properties and used a large dataset of mice traits to illustrate their potential. For example, in our case study, we found that females show, on average, a greater correlation between fat mass and heart weight than males. Although calculating Δsk, Δku, and ΔZr will require large sample sizes of individual data, technological advancements in data collection create increase opportunities to use these effect size statistics. Importantly, Δsk, Δku, and ΔZr can be used to compare any two groups, allowing a new generation of meta-analyses that explore such differences and potentially leading to new insights in multiple fields of study.

New approaches to meta-analyze differences in skewness, kurtosis, and correlation @PLOSBiology.org

So nice to see this coming out (nearly). It always feels special to publish in @asn-amnat.bsky.social. Such classy formatting.. brings me back to scanning every new paper edition cover-to-cover as soon as it came out when we students. Congratulations again @stuwest.bsky.social on your ASN Award!

Hell is other people's gff file

Next one in a storm of preprints from our lab's amazing scientists.. Recent-ex-postdoc, #newPI @cathyhernandez.bsky.social studied thermal ecology of marine bacteria isolated near New Haven. Turns out, response of this bacterium to temperatures is shaped by prophages!

#phagesky #microsky

TreeProfiler: large-scale metadata profiling along gene and species trees Abstract. Profiling biological traits along gene or species tree topologies is a well-established approach in comparative genomics, widely employed to infe

@dengziqi1991.bsky.social et al. present TreeProfiler, a tool for automated annotation and interactive exploration of hundreds of features along large gene and species trees, with seamless summarization of mapped traits at internal nodes.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molb...

#evobio #molbio #compbio

A new review paper from our lab courtesy of @jazzsynbio.bsky.social is published in Trends in Biotechnology
In this review, we look at the many opportunities for synthetic biology to be used in the research and applications of Holobionts.

Symbiotic entrenchment through ecological Catch-22 A symbiotic rove beetle develops a stealth phenotype by silencing production of its hydrocarbon pheromones, enabling it to infiltrate ant colonies, steal ant pheromones, and achieve social acceptance as a parasitic impostor. Evolution of this strategy is irreversible, locking the beetle’s lineage into obligate dependence on host ant societies.

Now online! Symbiotic entrenchment through ecological Catch-22

This is a beautiful paper examining the molecular genetics of facultative multicellularity in a marine black yeast.

I also love that they figure out the ecological context for the behavior (MC form when in sponges, where there are nutrients, & uni when starving!).

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Priority effects inhibit the repeated evolution of phototrophy - npj Complexity npj Complexity - Priority effects inhibit the repeated evolution of phototrophy

New paper out! Here's a puzzle: phototrophy, the ability to use light for energy, is one of life's great innovations. It evolved early and transformed the biosphere. But it evolved 2x. Why not just once, why not more? Our work suggests the answer is priority effects.

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

Cooperation is a universal feature of complex systems, from the origins of life and microbiomes to societies. What universal patterns can be found in these systems? Here's our new @pnas.org paper. @jordipinero.bsky.social @artemyte.bsky.social @sfiscience.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

Genomic adaptations for tail-length evolution in arboreal snakes Abstract. Adaptation to arboreal environments requires overcoming gravitational constraints, driving repeated morphological innovations across snake lineag

Wang et al. reveal that arboreality evolved independently in multiple snake clades, with tail elongation as a recurrent morphological adaptation, and identify accelerated evolution in genes associated with somite specification.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag029

#evobio #molbio

When studying animal physiology we carefully control temperature, oxygen…but often ignore who animals live with.

Social context such as parents (1), social environment (2), litter mates (3) can shape physiology and later plasticity (4). We discuss it in this commentary 👉 doi.org/10.1242/jeb....

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 ...

Ooooh. Cool new paper on origins of life. A simple 45-nucleotide RNA molecule that can perfectly copy itself.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

the evolutionary and ecological consequences of cooperation

the evolutionary and ecological consequences of cooperation

Huge thanks to @asn-amnat.bsky.social for inviting our review on the evolutionary and ecological consequences of cooperation. @annadewar.bsky.social @asgriffin.bsky.social @lauriebelch.bsky.social www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Delighted to have been a part of this. It's a very exciting area in the field of social evolution and beyond!

"The work has been turning out badly for me this morning & I am sick at heart & oh my God how I do hate species & varieties."

Bonus, adding in a new Darwin canon hater moment for fellow ecologists and nature folks:

"The work has been turning out badly for me this morning & I am sick at heart & oh my God how I do hate species & varieties."

www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docI...

So I presented in lab meeting today and there was a guest. Thanks, John!

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

Michael Lynch did a back of the envelope calculation of the cumulative length of all DNA molecules in his book “The origins of genome architecture”.
It blew my mind: about 10 times the diameter of the observable universe. #popgen 🧪🧬

Why does life explore so few of the forms it could possibly take? Using fractal descriptors, this #scienceadvances paper shows that Earth’s biosphere clusters around simple shapes, reflecting deep evolutionary constraints. @artemyte.bsky.social @manlius.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Life in topological dimensionality morphospace.
🧪 #Geology ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio

Large-scale metagenomic analysis reveals host genetics shapes microbiomes in wild freshwater fish gut and skin Tang et al. performed a large-scale metagenomic analysis that provided a deeper understanding of the microbial composition of the gut and skin of wild freshwater fish as well as the phylosymbiosis rel...

Fish at it again. They have been a surprisingl case of #phylosymbiosis in a rising number of gut and skin appears. This study investigates 903 gut/skin samples from 121 species in southwest China under the Wild Freshwater Fish Microbiome Catalog. www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Excited to share our work on the first complete cp genome of Bergenia crassifolia 🌿🧬
🔬 156,378 bp | 128 genes | 84 PCGs
🌳 Sister to B. purpurascens & B. scopulosa
Valuable insights into Bergenia evolution
#ChloroplastGenome #Phylogenomics

Further reading: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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...