Congrats Duilio on discovering the 1st Toxin-Antidote system in vertebrates! πHe single-handedly established the embryo project in my lab!π
07.03.2026 20:26
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Congrats Duilio on discovering the 1st Toxin-Antidote system in vertebrates! πHe single-handedly established the embryo project in my lab!π
We're excited to announced that our 2nd Annual QMUL Centre for Epigenetics Conference is happening on June 18th, 2026 at Mile End!
To find out more and book your ticket, please follow this link: www.qmul.ac.uk/epigenetics/...
The deadline to book your tickets is Monday, June 8th 2026.
explorers at the farthest reaches of our knowledge π€© neuronal ribosomes, and their mysterious rRNA expansion segments
immense story from the dream team @andschwarz.bsky.social & @muellermara.bsky.social in the @erin-schuman.bsky.social lab at @mpibrain.bsky.social
ribosome structureβ₯οΈneurons
new reference genomes for Plasmodium ovale wallikeri and Plasmodium malariae (& Pf too) direct from blood taken from children carrying these parasites -- this was done with as little as 2 ng of DNA. all sorts of craziness going on in the subtelomeric regions ...
"A protein-coding gene was defined as broken if the mapped MANE transcript met at least one of the following crit: (1) an invalid start and/or stop codon; (2) a premature in-frame stop codon; or (3) transcripts whose protein translation was less than 80% identical to the corresponding MANE protein."
We looked at this for the T2T-HG002 assembly which is complete, haplotype resolved, all that good stuff. Considering only MANE genes/transcripts "we identified 129 broken protein-coding genes on MAT and 121 on PAT" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Abstract submissions are open, and the program will be largely driven by the submissions! If you're on the east coast for Biology of Genomes, this will be a fun few day jaunt to CT afterwards. Bonus- if you drive from Long Island, the ferry is a ton of fun!
JAX Long-Read Sequencing Workshop
Keynotes by @aphillippy.bsky.social & @mydennis.bsky.social
Co-organized by @olgaanczukow.bsky.social, @christinebeck.bsky.social & Mark Adams
βοΈ Trainee travel awards
π Abstracts due March 3
π₯Ό Optional wet-lab training session
π www.jax.org/education-an...
Have thoroughly enjoyed my collaborations with Andrea! Check out his shiny new lab & homepage!
This was such a fun project.
Adam's thread on it is a great summary!
Credit to the two AMAZING students who led this work, Steven Solar and @prajnahebbar.bsky.social, as well as our long-time partners in acrocentric investigations π΅ @leogdlima.bsky.social, Tamara Potapova, @thinks.lol, Evan Eichler, Mario Ventura, and Jen Gerton [21/21]
As Ohno said in his preface to Evolution by Gene Duplication, βnatural selection merely modified, while redundancy createdβ [20/21]
Lesson learned: Repetitive regions of the genome, like the short arms of the acrocentrics, are prone to recombination and duplication. This makes them a pain to sequence, but also very dynamic. Natural selection can take advantage of that instability to effect rapid change [19/21]
This story is much better told in the paper, so I hope youβll read it and come to appreciate the important role that acrocentric chromosomes have played in our evolution. The formerly βdarkβ regions of the genome have some interesting stories to tell [18/21]
To bring things full circle, the PHRs that mediated the diversification of FRG1 genes in our ancestors became the PHRs that today predispose our genomes to Robertsonian translocations. Oops, sometimes evolution be like that π [17/21]
π€ So, it seems all those FRG1 pseudogenes in the human genome are the remnants of an adaptive evolutionary event in our (very) distant ancestors that was mediated by the unique properties of the acrocentrics, including PHRs [16/21]
A similar story played out for FRG1, but much longer ago. This amplification has since died out in human/chimp/bonobo, leaving behind a raft of pseudogenes (>20 in human). However, gorilla and orangutan continue to maintain multiple coding copies with evidence of positive selection [15/21]
The unique properties of the acrocentrics allow the genes on them to rapidly amplify and recombine, perhaps enabling accelerated evolution, which the CDS tree for GGT appears to show for gorilla [14/21]
IGSF3-GGT still appears to be in the birth phase, with most copies maintaining an ORF. The hypothesis is that gorillas (or their recent ancestors) found the new IGSF3-GGT fusion useful, and it underwent diversifying positive selection [13/21]
We focused on two specific genes, a gorilla-specific fusion gene IGSF3-GGT and FRG1. These two genes are lovely examples of birth-and-death evolution. Intron trees show the IGSF3-GGT fusion was born ~9 Mya, while the initial FRG1 duplication dates to the ancestor of all apes ~26 Mya [12/21]
(4) Gorillas have 7 pairs of acrocentrics, but only 2 contain rDNA arrays. We discovered that the other 5 gorilla acrocentrics contain amplified *protein coding genes*, some of which show evidence of positive selection! [11/21]
In addition to rDNAs, the human PHRs include megabases of segmentally duplicated pseudogenes. We identified one of these PHRs as the fusion site of (most) human Robertsonian translocations, but why do they exist in the first place? Seems like a bug, not a feature. Gorillas held the answer [10/21]
(3) In some cases, non-allelic recombination can maintain >99% sequence identity between *different* acrocentric chromosomes. We first saw this in human and named them βpseudo-homolog regionsβ (PHRs). We can now see that PHRs are a recurring feature of all the great ape acrocentrics [9/21]
This rapid turnover is partly due to the unique recombinational properties of the short arms. Meiotic crossovers appear repressed, but sequence exchange continues within and between chromosomes by other means such as non-allelic homologous recombination (NAHR), sister chromatid exchange, etc. [8/21]
(2) There is a huge amount of sequence turnover on the short arms, with all major ape lineages exhibiting strikingly different satellite patterns. Even chimp and bonobo (just 1β2 My diverged) have different characteristics (e.g. bonobo has a lot more HSat1) [7/21]
Did you ever wonder why human Chr9 has a huge block HSat3 near its centromere? Thatβs an ancient short arm you are looking at! Chr9 used to be acrocentric (and still is in gorilla and orangutan). An inversion in the ancestor of human/chimp/bonobo flipped the heterochromatin into the middle [6/21]
Assuming parsimony, there has been at least one acrocentric-to-metacentric conversion on each major branch of the great apes. The human Chr2 fusion is famous, but that is the only fusion in the great ape tree. Instead, short arm inversions have been the primary driver of karyotypic change [5/21]
(1) Over the past ~20 My of great ape evolution, there have been at least 6 whole-arm inversions that converted an acrocentric chromosome to a metacentric chromosome. Only orangutans have maintained the ancestral state of 10 acrocentrics, including rDNA on their Y chromosomes [4/21]
Finally finishing the short arms of the acrocentric chromosomes was my favorite part of the T2T-CHM13 project, and ever since I wanted to write a deeper paper on what we found. Since then we finished T2T genomes for all the apes and have kept digging. Here are some of the highlights... [3/21]
Basic intro: acrocentric chromosomes are the ones with asymmetric arms, with the centromere positioned more towards the tip (Greek άκΟΞΏ) than the middle. In human, the short arms of these chromosomes are home to the 45S rDNA arrays and a whole mess of other repeats [2/21]