Ferdinand Marlétaz

Happy Hagfish Day! Today we’re celebrating hagfishes - hagfishes are ancient marine animals perhaps best known for their remarkable ability to produce large amounts of slime when threatened. When the slime hits seawater, it expands to form a gel which can clog a predator's mouth and gills.

Our paper’s out! 🐟👀 How does the four-eyed fish Anableps see in air and water at once? It expanded its air-facing ventral retina and redeployed existing opsins there. Congrats Louise Perez @perezlouise.bsky.social & Lina Shi! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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!

📣Our department is hiring a new group leader!📣 Want to start your team in a vibrant scientific environment in the center of Paris? I was very lucky to do that 10 years ago, reach out if you have any question. Apply by December 18th: jpi-recruitment-curie-umr3215-u934.curie.fr

Our new tool corpus makes biodiversity literature searchable by AI agents via MCP, with provenance to source text and figures. With @shchurch.bsky.social , Felipe Zapata, and Maciej Mańko. In @currentbiology.bsky.social - www.cell.com/current-biol... Code: github.com/caseywdunn/c...

Since the Nobel prizes were first awarded in 1901, few women have been recognized in the categories of physics, chemistry and physiology or medicine. In this year’s Nobel run-up, Nature shines a spotlight on female winners — and invites you to test your knowledge. 🧪

The average colour of Europe, one day at a time for two years. Scandinavia and the Alps turn white every winter, the green rolls north through spring, and Spain, Italy and Greece bake gold all summer. Data: NASA MODIS, Eurostat GISCO #dataviz #maps #Europe

Les chauves-souris présentent l’une des plus incroyables trajectoires d’évolution chez les mammifères. On en connaît plus de 1500 espèces ! Comment cette diversité est-elle apparue ? Pour le savoir, direction les grottes et les forêts de Trinité-et-Tobago. Reportage avec lemonde.fr

For those of you who, like me, missed the Vatican #EvoDevo: www.pas.va/en/events/20..., don't worry, there will be a more earthly local version next week (Friday) in Cambridge Dept of Zoology, program here: londonevodevo.co.uk. Can't promise cardinal vestments in the background though.

Glad to report the release/publication of PESCI, an efficient tools implementing ICC for interspecfic comparison of single cell dataset developped by #Eliseparey in the lab with the help of #laurapiovani github.com/eparey/pesci doi.org/10.1093/bioi...

An orange-tailed marsh dart damselfly peering through a leaf has won the 2026 BMC Ecology and Evolution and BMC Zoology image competition. The annual contest showcases the beauty of biodiversity and the science behind its conservation: spklr.io/63325ERtjJ #envecon #biodiversity

The #LondonEvoDevo goes to Cambridge! Kindly hosted by @emiliapsantos.bsky.social, mark on your calendars *October 2nd* at the Main Theatre in the Department of Zoology (Cambridge). Registration (£0.00): docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F.... All welcome to present: #PI #PhD #PostDocs, submit abstracts!

Sailing in @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social ready for summer, our study on the iconic Portuguese man o' war 🪼 is out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... We use (epi)genomics to understand a critter that fascinates me since childhood. Massive team effort with @obog.bsky.social, Cummins and Neely groups. 🧵

Congratulations to @kremnyovs.bsky.social, @tclebedeva.bsky.social and @hejnol.bsky.social - this is a fantastic paper. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Very happy to have been part of this collaboration.

Capolavoro 🎨 alert 🚨! What is the role of gene body methylation in invertebrates? Despite extensive speculation linking it to plasticity and environmental responses, its mechanistic effects and heritability remain unclear. Our take out in @natecoevo.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/

Hey look: A job! @echinerd.bsky.social and I are looking for a research technician to work on sea urchin development. If you are good at segmenting CT scans and want a chance to work on some super cool organisms, this job here at UCL is for you! apply now: bit.ly/4o2qccY

Had a smasheroony time at Walton-on-the-Naze with my fellow microscopy nerds today. I’m putting together a little reel about it. But in the meantime, here’s an amuse bouche… I saw a phoronid larva (horseshoe worm) with tentacles! The first time! #marineplankton 🦑 #zooplankton

Our work on Trichoplax locomotion and mechanosensing capabilities is out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social. Congrats Marvin Leria & all co-authors! authors.elsevier.com/c/1n8Ig3QW8S...

🚨 We discovered a new mode of Hox gene regulation in annelids! 🪱 A distal enhancer acts as a "global control region", lifting Hox genes from Polycomb repression. This is reminiscent of Hox gene control in vertebrates, but the two modes likely evolved convergently. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Please join the upcoming Jacques Monod Conference on the mechanistic and evolutionary basis of programmed DNA elimination in Roscoff, France. Deadline for abstract submission extended to May 20, 2026. cjm.sb-roscoff.fr/en/conferenc...

What do shrimp see? “These guys have completely different eye designs,” according to Dr. Jan Hemmi, a visual neurobiologist. Their large eye size tells Dr. Hemmi and his colleagues that eyes are pretty important to these animals. #designingthefuture3 Read more: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Did you know that today is #InternationalCrabDay? 🦀 Started by The Crab Museum, this holiday encourages people to share photos of crabs so we’d love to see the Crabby Darwins you’ve created in Everything is Crab! Here's one I made earlier…

Finding molecular tags that localise fluorescent proteins to the cell membrane was the goal of our latest paper, now published in Development @dev-journal.bsky.social. The tags act as address labels, sending proteins to the cell membrane, where they highlight the shape and arrangement of cells. 2/9

#DBfeature #InHoxWeTrust 🪲 Divergent Hox cluster arrangement in horned beetles retain conserved embryonic and adult expression patterns. by Erica Nadolski, Isabel Manley, Sukhmani Gill, Armin Moczek @ericanadolski.bsky.social tinyurl.com/ycxabrh5

Last day to submit an abstract! This is a meeting aimed at all career stages, but especially geared on early career scientists (PhD/postdoc), don't feel you need to have a perfectly polished story to present!

Pablo Villar et al discover male octopus mating arms are sensory organs used to find females, navigate internally to the oviduct & deliver sperm. From behavior to structure, these findings offer a framework for how sensory systems shape reproduction & species barriers www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Nice opportunity to join QMUL as a PhD student (or postdoc). Lee works on cool insect symbiosis projects, and I am co-supervisor on this one. Don't miss it if you're into microbiome / host-microbe interactions.

May 5th: if you are around London, please join the London #EvoDevo symposium at QMUL / Charterhouse campus, as usual we will have selected talks and post-event 🍻. A warm up for #EED2026 in Glasgow. Registration £0, more info here: londonevodevo.co.uk

So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).

BMC Biology is currently welcoming submissions of original research to the “Genome organization and evolution” Collection, which I am supporting as a Guest Editor. If interested check out the link: www.biomedcentral.com/collections/... Deadline: 26 March #GenomeEvolution @bmc.springernature.com

Our work on the evolution of the regulatory genome of echinoderms is now out in @natecoevo.nature.com. Led by my former PhD Marta Magri, Danila Voronov & Saoirse Foley. Great collaboration of Arnone, Hinman & Maeso labs, started long time ago with our missed José Luis Gomez-Skarmeta: rdcu.be/eXX8l

Anouk Necsulea, @maelledaunesse.bsky.social and myself are organising a symposium at SMBE this year. Send us all of your abstracts!!

Very happy to see this piece on the Tunicate Ciona published. Grateful to @alexandrejan.bsky.social and @chiaracastelletti.bsky.social for the Illustrations, and to @natmethods.nature.com for the opportunity to showcase our ever emerging model organism www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Out today, our take on 6-methyladenine #6mA evolution in Eukaryotes @natgenet.nature.com. We asked a simple question, is really DNA 6mA common across the eukaryotes? The answer is "yes" if you're a unicellular eukaryote 🦠, not so if you're multicellular 🐝🌱🍄. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/9

Gene annotations matter for downstream analyses: different structural gene-annotation pipelines yield markedly different orthology calls. We compare four strategies across species and argue for standards & QC before inference. Work led by @silviaprietob.bsky.social. Paper: doi.org/10.1093/bioi...

Pleased to share our latest paper led by @tomlewin.bsky.social, now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! We present the first chromosome-level genome of a phoronid and show that shared chromosomal fusions unite phoronids and bryozoans as sister groups. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Laurent Joly, historien. « L’union des droites on l’a déjà eue, c’est le gouvernement de Vichy »

Come join the #LondonEvoDevo network half day meeting, hosted at @ucl.ac.uk on Friday November 7th, 2025. Submit your abstract by Oct 27th (or your interest in joining) here: forms.gle/TRbdrCkQTcY2.... Friendly vibes and free registration. More info here: londonevodevo.co.uk.

Adding loops into a genome is a complicated and costly business for a cell. New findings suggest that it may be the reason that ancient life became complex. @philipcball.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/loops-of-dna...

Chaetognaths have lost gene body methylation and shifted #5mC back to Transposable Elements. This reversion to the ancestral state is coupled with a simplification of DNMT3 architecture. We posit that trans-splicing might compensate. It is an honour to have contributed to this 20y struggle ⛰️.

A genome sequence and single-cell atlas of a marine worm species point towards bursts of gene emergence, duplication and loss as the drivers of lineage-specific body traits go.nature.com/4oAI2nf

New Nature study (co-authored by Queen Mary researchers) reveals that arrow worms evolved unique organs by inventing brand-new genes — not just reusing old ones. 🧬🌊 🔗 www.qmul.ac.uk/sbbs/news/it... @qmulse.bsky.social

This surprisingly relaxing footage is from SIX MILES under the ocean – and it’s the deepest ecosystem yet discovered

To all post-docs: The Genome Biology dept ‪@embl.org has an Independent faculty position. Fantastic place to set up your lab –great package: core funding, fantastic Ph.D. students, cutting edge core facilities & great colleagues. Closing date Sept 19th embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/EMBL/j...