Avery Davis Bell

Now published @genomebiolevol.bsky.social: our paper showing that the genes for critical, ancient components of protein synthesis machinery - tRNAs - are bombarded with mutations, leading to remarkable allelic diversity that likely has functional consequences! academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

Come be my colleague! My department (Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech) is hiring a tenure-track professor in the area of Computational Genetics. The job posting is here: tinyurl.com/5fxwcds3

New work from our lab! We've developed a culturing pipeline for generating clonal and axenic strains of Blastocystis, a prevalent human gut eukaryote with some intriguing links to health. Using this pipeline, we uncovered multiple strains of the same subtype coexisting within a single host.

Significant news in the ongoing dismantling of NSF. Fewer and fewer left to direct an agency whose decisions on what to fund (or even whether to use their budget at all) increasingly reflect the administration's political priorities rather than the prioritization of investigator-initiated research.

"Some women have health. Others, not so much. This is due to the varying fluoride levels in tap water." buff.ly/ycFDqJW

Most importantly, we will remain adaptive. No-one knows what the world will look like in a few years, and our approach may change. Our primary goal is to maintain a service that benefits the community. That includes authors and readers (human and machine), whose desires may sometimes conflict 7/n

We don't want to penalize AI use but note it is enabling generation of both AI slop and submissions that are technically correct but of no use to the research community. It has always been our policy to decline such 'facile' submissions; they are just easier to generate now (to pad CVs). 4/n

How we are approaching AI at openRxiv - new blog post prompted by growing adoption by researchers, submission patterns, and questions from the community openrxiv.org/approach-to-... 1/n

We found that the most gendered experience wasn’t work-life balance, the focus of most retention efforts. It was feeling devalued, in formal evaluations, but particularly in everyday interactions. Unlike every other topic, the gender gap in devaluation was larger among more senior faculty.

We wanted to understand why academics leave their jobs (doi.org/10.1126/scia...). We asked: “Tell us your story: what needs/needed to be different about your position?” I thought we would get a few hundred responses and I’d learn a bit more about the context of academic retention for myself.

Meet me in the public square I guess

Most animal species pack sperm DNA with protamines instead of histones. Protamines are essential for male fertility. They are among the fastest-evolving genes in animals. That makes little sense. We think we know why, in a new paper led by @ching-hochang.bsky.social. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Please share! My lab is recruiting a postdoctoral scholar in evolutionary development. For more details feel free to email me.

This preprint rocks. Check out new info about one of the coolest regions of the human genome, plus join me in being so gratified that data I generated in grad school is being used by smart people to investigate fascinating topics! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Hard to think of anything less abstract and more materially consequential than being pregnant

The people closest to the problem are the people closest to the solution… And here we have Trump making sure that the systems stay the way they are by keeping those closest to the solutions AWAY FROM POSITIONS WHERE THEY COULD HELP SOLVE THE PROBLEMS.

I memorized my multiplication tables up to 20 x 20 in a classroom with a rack of calculators hanging on the wall. There are clear benefits to learning stuff the hard way first. This is … just not a difficult or controversial pedagogical point, I think?

Trump's pick to lead the FDA, Heidi Overton, says the FDA, CDC, and NIH need to be "reformed" to fund more "conservative-based" research instead of peer-reviewed and evidence-backed medical science. #Trump #Overton #Science #StandUpForScience #FDA

Stories of science funding being cut, labs shutting down and scientists losing jobs have flooded the media under Trump's administration. These six graphics show how those changes have affected U.S. biomedical research. n.pr/4ycseLJ

Senior (full professor) hiring in my department requires a positive vote from the existing full professors. Yet such a hire can have an enormous impact (positive or negative) on younger colleagues. Why do we keep calling asst profs “the future of the dept” but not including them in its shaping?

Out today in Nature: sex without crossovers. Rhynchospora tenuis makes pollen, fertilises and sets seed, yet 0 crossovers in 10,997 pollen nuclei. Chromosome drive and ~87% seed abortion rebuild the mother's genotype, so the offspring are clones. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

This is just rude. The highs are still in the upper 80s or low 90s - AS THE WEATHER REPORT RIGHT ABOVE THE OFFENDING SENTENCE SHOWS. Tell my sweat/heat rash 'it's starting to feel like fall'

New preprint led by Zoe Rudnick: bramble 🌿 RNA-seq quantification makes you pick a side. Align to the transcriptome and your quantifier is happy, but reads from unannotated transcripts get misassigned to annotated ones. Align to the genome and you keep discovery, but limit quantification choices.

The implementation phase: moving away from investigator-driven research (i.e., led by experts) towards administration priorities (i.e., selected/steered by political appointees). The evidence that such narrowing of scope leads to a greater flourishing of ideas? 🦗-s www.science.org/content/arti...

I want you all to note the unions that stepped up to the plate to protect international students when universities wouldn't:

America: where I had to wait to be dying enough during an inevitable miscarriage at 18 weeks to get lifesaving abortion medication....but also some people think there's somehow abortions in the water?!

The 2026 @aaup.org Faculty in the South Survey shows deep fears about the impact of government intrusion into curriculum and the future of higher ed. An Alabama professor wrote scholars at the top of their fields are fleeing the South and academia. Let's dig into the results. 1/x

I’m looking to hire an NIH funded postdoc to join our lab here at Davis (please RT). Ongoing areas of interest include: 1) polygenic signals of selection from time series, ARGs, GWAS, etc 2) The interpretation of GWAS, polygenic scores, & sources of confounding

Okay but here's the actual final version going into service in today's lecture

We came up with a simple model to explain the presence of MAVs. If the F1 zygote inherits a lesion from a parental gamete, and that lesion segregates unrepaired for at least 5 embryonic cell divisions, it could generate multiple de novo alleles in the F1 germline.

How long does DNA damage last? @aaronquinlan.bsky.social and I found evidence that lesions are transmitted from parent (P0) to offspring (F1) in C. elegans. If they segregate unrepaired for multiple cell divisions, lesions generate multi-allelism in the F1 germline. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I'm only a few days into being an AAAS Policy Fellow, but if any of tweeps here are interested in applying, I'm glad to share about my application experience and what it's been like so far. Only 2% if my cohort are "senior" (>15 years post-PhD), but it's a great opportunity for experienced faculty!

Less immediately, I am hearing that NIH is overwhelmed with applications (not surprisingly) and they are sufficiently short-staffed in CSR that they will continue with the only discussing 1/3 (rather than 1/2) of the applications. There apparently will be a Notice about this soon. 3/3

"On the day the administration released the new strategic plan, which didn’t reflect the committee’s work, they called for volunteers to form a committee to start drafting the next new strategic plan." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/pro...

Wow, what a day for (me to find) cool new studies using single sperm sequencing! Here, Li, Sudmant, et al finding de novo mobile element insertions! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Amazing new work showing NCO events in sperm and other tissues! (even though I no longer work on sperm & meiosis, it'll always remain a subject dear to me) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Richaud et al. report loss-of-function alleles of the gtnt-1 orthologs are found at low frequency in C. elegans and C. briggsae, demonstrating repeated molecular evolution leading to parallel evolution of viral resistance. 🔗 academic.oup.com/mbe/article/... #societyjournal #celegans

Is there a pro-science version of the Pioneer Fund that will send copies of Adam’s book to academics across the world, so we’ll finally stop hearing the “you have to engage with scientific racists” refrain?