🚨Preprint from our lab🚨
How and when did TADs emerge during evolution? 🐁🐟🪰
HINT: the diversification of CTCF regulation and functions enabled new mechanisms of 3D chromatin folding 🧬
With Liene Astica & @rdacemel.bsky.social
Link:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Bluetorial 1/15👇
Half a century ago, King & Wilson proposed that humans differ from chimpanzees mainly through changes in gene regulation. In our new preprint, we used AlphaGenome to map such changes genome-wide, across tissues of the human body! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Applications open for the TREE NERC DTP in London www.trees-dla.ac.uk/news/we-are-...
We have a cool PhD project on echinoderm fossils and genome architecture evolutions with @imranrahman.bsky.social Feel free to drop a line to inquire!
A weekend read for folks who want to get away from AI, Russian diesel, execution porn, and all that, and just read about some science.
www.quantamagazine.org/how-does-lif...
Interested in joining our lab (dunnlab.org) and YIBS as a postdoc? I'm looking for someone to work on siphonophores, diversity in the open ocean, or natural history. If that's you, please reach out this week to discuss a nomination for the Donnelley Postdoc Fellowship - yibs.yale.edu/donnelley-fe...
Our paper on the dynamics of Asgard archaea (Promethearchaeota) is now out in Nature!
Huge thanks to the reviewers for helping make the manuscript stronger.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Two “Lokis” stained for Lokiactin (FastAct, magenta), reaching toward each other to celebrate 🎉
#archaea
Happy to share results of the @bat1kgenomes.bsky.social phase 1, providing reference genomes covering 21 bat families. New insights into bat phylogeny, ancestral genome reconstruction, European origin & ancestral echolocation. Great work by a team of 100+ colleagues www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Super excited to share my postdoctoral work at @imbavienna.bsky.social@viennabiocenter.bsky.social -
We discovered that some retrotransposons, or "jumping genes" 🧬, are able to spread from cell to cell via a new viral infectivity route.
A short thread: 🧵👇 (1/7)
The CRG's 2027 PhD call is now open! We have multiple, fully-funded positions across fifteen different research groups. Successful candidates will spend four years pursuing cutting-edge questions at our labs in Barcelona. Deadline is 22 November. www.crg.eu/en/content/t...
Must admit, ever since I was a kid, I’ve dreamt of seeing microscopy images of #protists in @lemonde.fr
Today, protists are everywhere, and several images were taken by the team. And seeing #ichthyosporeans there too?! 🥹
One step closer to showcasing the beauty of the invisible microbial world. 🔬✨
Very excited to share the new preprint from our lab on transcriptional memory and immune priming! Herculean effort from first authors Linhao and Jenia. Epigenome-engineering experiments provide evidence that H3K4me3 plays a causal role!
doi.org/10.64898/202...
21627 applications. Nothing to celebrate here. Impossible to evaluate fairly & safely. Neither the science (too diverse & possibly LLM generated) nor the soft criteria (likely LLM generated). Without an interview stage - a security risk!
marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/whats-new/ne...
Do you want to label the nuclear envelope? Do you work on a non-model species? Try Concanavalin A!
We tested ConA on various species across the eukaryotic tree and find it is a very useful ExM-compatible marker for the NE and ER.
Read all about it in our preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧬🔬 Why are enhancers transcribed and how does that impact gene regulation? I’m really excited to share our new paper in @science.org showing that noncoding RNAs control the timing of gene activation in embryos. With Mike Levine #ScienceResearch@columbiamed.bsky.social
A few highlights below... 🧵👇
🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨
Choanoflagellates reorganize their global cytoskeletal architecture within seconds to explore confined microspaces. This is the main PhD work of the amazing @maitefreired.bsky.socialwww.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
A tread 🧵⬇️
We watched piRNAs and transposons across development, saw them dance tightly and wrote a paper about it.
It's so cool to see it online and we will make a thread about it all very soon. Stay tuned :-)
Here it is! Bonsai. Now there is really no more excuse for using t-SNE/UMAP. Bonsai not only makes cool pictures of your data. It actually rigorously preserves its structure. No tunable parameters. Incredible work by @dhdegroot.bsky.social.
I'm so excited about this!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Our new paper in Science Advances asks how animals' genomes have changed since their origin from a common ancestor over 600 million years ago, and what patterns in their DNA have arisen in the churn of speciation and extinction. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
I'm thrilled to share that I've started as an Assistant Professor in Biological Sciences and the Oceans Research Center at Lehigh University!
I'm building a group in evolutionary genomics to study the origin of animals, and to use those concepts to better understand human disease.
More: evogeno.me
The shared principles of human and bacterial antiviral immunity
An honor to highlight remarkable discoveries from many labs over the past 12 years that unite previously disparate fields of how animal cells and prokaryotes defend against viruses.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...rdcu.be/fzwyB
Our study on giant transposons Starship 🚀🧬 in the genome of the lichen fungus Xanthoria is now out in @pnas.org! What did we find out about Starships in #lichen fungi? 👇Updated thread below 🖥️ 🧪 🦠 🧫 #SymbioSky 1/6
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
new preprint from our group led by Talleh Almelli -- important for folks doing single cell on malaria parasites or other organisms with hyperdiverse gene families. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
What happens when evolution adds an extra pair of eyes?
Male mayflies evolve an extra pair of dorsal compound eyes, the Turbanate eyes, thought to help males detect females during mating swarms.
we have investigate how this remarkable evolutionary novelty develops.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Update: scE2G is now online at Nature Genetics!
Since the preprint, we added a new benchmark on a fully held-out CRISPR dataset. scE2G continues to show state-of-the-art performance, reinforcing that it generalizes well
nature.com/articles/s41588-026-02695-8
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Final thoughts: this work was possible thanks to the protistologists who discovered and cultured these species. Many key cultures are now lost or accumulating mutations after decades growing. Sustained efforts will be needed to reverse this and enable future evolutionary cell biology studies.
Thanks to all coauthors: Julen Mendieta, Ewa Księżopolska, Jim Renema, our beloved proteomics experts Cristina Chiva and Eduard Sabidó @crg.eu, and David Lara, with whom this whole iChIPing adventure of weird species began back when we were young and full of optimism at @weizmann.ac.il
H3K79 methylation is the most peculiar case: in some species associated with active transcription, whereas in others linked to repression. In Acanthamoeba even K79me1/2/3 have different associations, possibly explained by the evolution of different Dot1 paralogs.
The next challenge is to move from chromatin states to their effectors: identifying the proteins that read, implement and connect these states to reveal how changes in chromatin factors shaped the evolution of genome regulation. @seanamontgomery.bsky.social is on it!
What we find? Active chromatin states are remarkably conserved, H3K4me and acetylations mark active promoters, while H3K36me3 tracks active gene bodies. The chromatin architecture of transcription runs deep in eukaryotic evolution.
In contrast, repressive chromatin states varied substantially. Different lineages used distinct combinations of H3K9, H3K27 and H3K79 methylations to mark silent genes and TEs. This may reflect the long evolutionary history of conflicts between eukaryotic genomes and parasitic genetic elements.
A few years ago we showed that many histone post-translational modifications and the enzymes that deposit or remove them are ancient and broadly conserved across eukaryotes.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Now we ask if these conserved marks have a conserved functional readout.
We developed a multiplexed ChIP-seq method (iChIP2) to profile 12 marks across 12 species, including some of our favorite protists. In some cases, these represent the first chromatin landscapes for entire eukaryotic lineages.
Thrilled to post thread re: new single-cell lineage of mouse embryo reconstructed w/ DNA Typewriter. One animal, zygote to late organogenesis (E13.5). Tree has 1,340,794 transcriptionally profiled, annotated tips (cells), 1,142,588 dated internal nodes, rooted at zygote
1/n
We're hiring 4 postdocs at @unibo.it to study nervous system evolution. Seeking expertise in single-cell genomics, molecular or developmental biology in ctenophores, cnidarians, echinoderms, flies or human stem cells. 2+2 yrs contract. Deadline: 26 Aug. Please share! bandi.unibo.it/s/apos7/proc...
Open position in our lab for a research engineer. The applicant must hold a PhD in life sciences and have demonstrable experience in molecular biology and biochemistry. For more info: emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...
So happy to share our new paper out now in @natmicrobiol.nature.com! We establish Pirsonia-Coscinodiscus as a model pathosystem and uncover how this tiny parasite infects and kills bloom-forming marine diatoms 🌊🦠 rdcu.be/fuQyF
🚨 Job Alert - Please share 🙏
Interested in 3D gene regulation in development & evolution? 🤓🧬
💥 Our lab at @cabd-upo-csic.bsky.social is expanding!
✅ 4 years fully funded PhD position
💻🧪 Experimental or computational backgrounds welcome
👇 Details below
#PhDPosition#PhDOpportunity#AcademicJobs
The third chapter in our coral single-cell trilogy is here.
After mapping cell type diversity in Stylophora (Levy 2021) and exploring facultative symbiosis in Oculina (Levy 2025), we now uncover cell type-specific responses to heat stress.
Find out more in @xgrau.bsky.social's thread below.
I'm happy to share our latest on #coral single-cell biology: a transcriptomic timecourse of heat stress in Stylophora pistillata, from bleaching to recovery 🪸🌊
This project was spearheaded by Shani Levy and carried through in @arnausebe.bsky.social's lab at @crg.eu.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🎨 job alert 🐠
Come join us! We have two positions open! These are part of our @erc.europa.eu funded project on the mechanisms underpinning convergence of colour patterns in cichlid fishes! Closing date: 16th August.
Postdoc: www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...
Technician: www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...
Our News & Views article “Body-plan organizer in comb jellies hints at animal ancestry” now published in @nature.com 🎉
We discuss fascinating work revealing organizer activity in comb jellies & the evolution of animal development.
rdcu.be/fsLWq@ruthstyfhals.bsky.social@msarscentre.bsky.social