Our paper is out in @Science! The Atlantic silverside spans Earth's steepest latitudinal gradient in coastal sea-surface temperature. Despite high gene flow, populations show clinal genetic variation in multiple locally adapted traits. doi.org/10.1126/scie...
Queen-only parasitic parthogenetic ant. Cool combination!
www.cell.com/current-biol...
MBE | Genomic comparisons and the adaptive basis of brain size plasticity and chromosomal instability in the Eurasian common shrew
Thomas et al. reveal that positively selected and differentially expressed hippocampal genes cluster near breakpoints in shrews, tying chromosomal rearrangements and accessible chromatin to adaptation and brain size plasticity.
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag006
📷 Christian Ziegler
#evobio #molbio
The neo-Ys are heavily rearranged and have unique gene losses. The neo-Xs are surprisingly colinear but are distinguished by Y-haplogroup specific inversions. The neo-Xs consist of an ancestral-X and three autosomal fusions.
Check out our paper on the neo-sex chromosomes in mountain pine beetle! We assembled THREE neo-Ys that are quite distinct and their corresponding neo-Xs .
Lethal epistasis maintains strong linkage disequilibrium between unlinked supergenes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.08.698410v1
New work from @miyapan.bsky.social and our team, bringing ant, bee, and wasp labs together. @chuanxinyu.bsky.social shows that the ANTSR locus we discovered in ants has determined sex for 150+ My across bees and stinging wasps 🐜🐝, despite virtually no sequence conservation 😮 doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
ANTSR seems to be the ancient master sex determining gene in Hymenoptera (as suggested by Pan et al. 2024)! So rad that a lncRNA is doing this!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
New in @currentbiology.bsky.social
"Genomic evidence of a complex supergene system linking dispersal to social polymorphism"
#Myrmecina_graminicola
Mona,S., Gay,E.J., Ducancel,J., Laso-Jadart,R., Chifflet-Belle, P., Doums,C. @isyeb.mnhn.fr @ephe-psl.bsky.social et al.
🐜 www.cell.com/current-biol...
Complementary sex determination (CSD) in bees and ants. Top left: Single-locus CSD is likely to be the predominant mode of sex determination in Hymenoptera. CSD loci have been identified in two species: the honeybee Apis mellifera and the invasive ant Linepithema humile. The tree shows evolutionary relationships between these species and Osmia bicornis, the main subject of this study. The origin of Hymenoptera is estimated as 386 million years ago and the common ancestor of Apoidea and Formicoidea is estimated as 153 million years ago. Top right: Under single-locus CSD, females are heterozygous at the CSD locus, whereas males are haploid and therefore hemizygous. A large number of CSD alleles are expected to segregate in outbred populations. A small proportion of homozygotes at the CSD locus are produced by chance, when parents share an allele, which results in the production of sterile diploid males. Middle: An O. bicornis nest consists of a row of cocoons in a tube. The mother lays fertilized diploid eggs deepest in the nest and unfertilized haploid eggs closer to the entrance. Eggs develop into adults inside cocoons. Diploid eggs typically develop into females whereas haploid eggs become male. A small proportion of diploids that are homozygous at the CSD locus develop into diploid males, which occur amongst females and are larger than haploid males. Bottom: A male and female red mason bee mating. Photo by Marie Louise Huskens.
#Haplodiploid inheritance is found in all species of #Hymenoptera. @mwbstr.bsky.social &co map the #sex determining #gene of the red mason #bee to the ANTSR gene region, suggesting a shared, ancient origin of #SexDetermination in bees & ants >150 Mya ago @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/47COEtH
2 year postdoc position in evolutionary genomics available at the University of California, Riverside in the Purcell Lab
2 year postdoc position in evolutionary genomics at University of California, Riverside in the Purcell Lab! 🧬🐜
How many chromosomes can an animal have?
In our paper out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social we show that the Atlas blue butterfly has 229 chromosome pairs- the highest in diploid Metazoa! These arose by rapid autosome fragmentation while sex chromosomes stayed intact.
www.cell.com/current-biol...
ggplot2 ethusiasts, new update just dropped! 🔥🔥🔥
I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN.
It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package.
Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats
A common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species
go.nature.com/4mOb5T9
Check out our latest preprint in Formica ants! We investigate how the sex ratio supergene evolved. We find that a colony-level sex ratio supergene evolved twice! This likely occurred as a result of recombination between the the ancestral queen number supergenes present in Formica. 🧬🐜🧬🐜🧬🐜
Led by Jessica Purcell. The team included @giuliascarparo.bsky.social , Madison Sankovitz, Mari West, Zul Alam, and Alan Brelsford.
There were ~10% of colonies showing mismatches between supergene genotype and phenotype, but we only observed this at one site. This raised the possibility that environment may override supergene control of colony queen number.
Colonies with single queens were more common in the north, but the queen number polymorphism was present throughout the gradient. The supergene haplotype frequency reflected this as the frequency also varied with latitude.
We sampled Formica podzolica colonies across a latitudinal gradient between Alaska and New Mexico. Surprisingly, Formica podzolica has SIX(!) common supergene variants that are differentiated by three distinct cassettes.
Excited to share some of the latest work coming from the Formica ant supergene system 🐜🧬! This project represents many collection trips and years of work!
doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Very pleased to see this officially out - Genome Architecture and Speciation in Plants and Animals. With @siluwang.bsky.social, @dortizba.bsky.social and Loren Rieseberg. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
The #EditorsChoice for this month from EIC @maxreuter.bsky.social is
"Unexpected absence of a multiple-queen supergene haplotype from supercolonial populations of Formica ants" by
@g-lagunasrobles.bsky.social et al
academic.oup.com/jeb/article/...
Thanks to Zul Alam and Alan Brelsford for their work on this! (4/n)
Taken together, these results suggest that supercoloniality isn't as simple as having the multi-queen supergene haplotype. (3/n)
We find that the multi-queen haplotype is missing from a supercolonial population. Additionally, we find a similar pattern with the multi-queen haplotype being absent in one supercolonial species, but present in another. (2/n)
Is supercoloniality a simple extension of polygyny?Supercolonies, networks of interconnected nests with many queens, have been proposed as a natural extension of multi-queen nests. In many Formica ants, a supergene determines whether a colony has a single queen or many queens. (1/n)
Thanks to Zul Alam and Alan Brelsford for their work on this! (4/n)
Taken together, these results suggest that supercoloniality isn't as simple as having the multi-queen supergene haplotype. (3/n)
