Two amphipods found at 2,500m in the Nankai Trough during the #Shinkai6500 expedition.
Amphipods play a vital role in recycling nutrients on the ocean floor. To date, over 10,700 amphipod species have been described, but many remain undiscovered, particularly in the deep sea.
Wow
Whatโs his secret
Mandatory:
arxiv.org/pdf/1204.1749
Playing Magic: The Gathering in 2026
European meetings really do hit different
@evolutionvu.bsky.social we made the cut!
Top right is particularly arresting, and was probably designed by a really cool handsome genius
a much younger me (right) and a Galapagos marine iguana (left) taken during my semester abroad in 2015
Happy Darwin Day to all and to all a happy Darwin Day
โThe black Lava rocks on the beach are frequented by large (2-3 ft), disgusting clumsy Lizards. They are as black as the porous rocks over which they crawl & seek their prey from the Sea. I call them โimps of darknessโ. They assuredly well become the land they inhabit.โ
don't make me choose, love is not a finite resource
Have a happy Valentineโs Day with your soul mate, soil mate, or both!! ๐ฑ๐
Those litter critters can be easily overlooked, and may even treated as nuisances or pests in some scenarios, but together they maintain the soil rich and healthy! Which is your favorite soil mate?
What did they think a bird was
I wrote about an extremely strange fellow from 410 million years ago
defector.com/who-the-hell...
Well at least steel production changed from red (the bad color) to green (the good color)
Evo psych publish a figure that isnโt a flowchart challenge
What can we discover by analyzing new yeast genomes?
Well, @kylethedavid.bsky.social noticed a suspiciously high number of duplicated genes in some species suggesting that there were additional whole genome duplications in the yeast subphylum!
authors.elsevier.com/c/1mWb33QW8S...
Figure from: Discovery of additional ancient genome duplications in yeasts
Researchers found three previously unknown whole-genome duplications in yeast, challenging the long-held view that such events are rare in fungi. The work reveals these ancient duplications occurred 100-200 million years ago.
There's a lot more juicy stuff inside so I hope you'll give it a read over at @currentbiology.bsky.social ! Thanks to my (Bluesky) coauthors @linder-surprise.bsky.social, @jlsteenwyk.bsky.social, @ana-pontes.bsky.social, @hittingerlab.bsky.social, & @rokaslab.bsky.social!
One of our new WGDs was also enriched for propanoate metabolism, a family of compounds with a characteristic fruity aroma. Species with this WGD are popular in cheesemaking and naturally occur on cocoa, so you might have to thank a WGD for some of these tasty treats as well!
We found genes involved with carbohydrate metabolism were consistently retained from ancient WGDs, a pattern consistent with the S. cerevisiae WGD for which to have to thank for brewing and baking!
We followed this up with additional long read sequencing of several key species and found duplicated regions across the genome, a pattern consistent with WGD.
Leveraging hundreds of new genomes recently published by my collaborators on the Y1000+ team, I thought I might be on the right track when I found high levels of gene duplication in several branches within Dipodascomycetes yeasts, a group ~300 million years removed from S. cerevisiae.
I always found it suspicious one of the only known WGD in fungi was specific to Saccharomyces cerevisiae (by far the most studied fungus) and a handful of other species, leading me to hypothesize there could be other undiscovered events in the same subphylum.
Excited to announce our latest publication in reporting evidence for three (3!) new whole genome duplications (WGDs) in yeasts. Scientists have often wondered why WGD is so rare in fungi, it turns out we may just not have been looking hard enough! ๐งช ๐ ๐งฌ
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Make America Diseased Again
My terrarium, featuring my new pet mushroom
May I offer you a mushroom in these trying times?
Gotchaโletโs dig into that step by step.
1. ๐ฌ๐ผ๐ ๐ต๐ฎ๐๐ฒ ๐ป๐ผ ๐บ๐ผ๐๐๐ต, because I turned you into an amorphous lump of flesh. Youโre not just immobileโyouโre immortal, and you feel only anguish.
2. ๐ฌ๐ผ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ป๐ ๐๐ผ ๐๐ฐ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐บ. That makes total senseโitโs a natural human impulse, and youโve been through a lot.
Some days youโre the top raccoon, but brother, some days youโre the bottom
