Federico Lopez

Not only a vital defeat of the far right, but also a win of inestimable value for the planet.

New paper from my lab out in Proc B 🎉 : Developmental bias of body size and caste by the fire ant social supergene doi.org/10.1098/rspb... @horacezhl.bsky.social

Exclusive: A new analysis refutes James Watson’s claim that he was the first to recognize the significance of the famed photograph 51. https://scim.ag/4rTKck8

Putin apologists want you to buy that: -An alleged off-the-books 1991 verbal promise outweighs a signed 1994 treaty -Democratic countries formerly occupied by Russia asked to join an anti-Russia alliance for no reason -Ukrainians don't want freedom, an American tricked them into it with cookies

Mullin et al. use WGS from 101 museum specimens of British/Irish moss carder bumblebees from 1894-2019 to reveal a dramatic drop in genetic diversity: ∼24.6% decrease in heterozygosity and a 2.86-fold increase in ROH 🔗 academic.oup.com/mbe/article/... 📷 Gavin Broad #societyjournal #naturalhistory

📄 Bumblebees use and repair artificial honeypots 🐝 "[W]e asked whether bumblebees would use artificial 3D-printed honeypots... Bees readily used the complete artificial honeypots and completed the partial honeypots to produce a variety of resulting structures." doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... ⬇

President of the Royal Society Paul Nurse responds to the Russian attack on Ukrainian Academy of Sciences: royalsociety.org/news/2026/09...

🚨 UPD: A woman was killed and at least three others were injured after Russian forces struck the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in central Kyiv.

📄 Transposable elements as evolutionary catalysts of ant macrodiversity 🐜 "...TEs associate with expansions of odorant receptors and other key gene families..." ⬇ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This is horrifying. Fourteen people were murdered and 121 injured, including 22 children as russia attacked the largest mall in Kryvyi Rih on Friday afternoon. 29 people are in severe condition.

New online! Genetics and genomics of hybridization

A unifying framework for the evolution of metazoa and social insects, two major evolutionary transitions | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A major strength of T2T genomes is that they cleanly resolve heterozygous variation, complex repeats, and segmental duplications that are lost with short reads, including nearly 400 medically relevant genes, the MHC, and most of the Y chromosome. What have we been missing? [8/15]

For the past 30 years, “whole-genome sequencing” has been a misnomer. Today the T2T Consortium publishes a dozen papers heralding a future of truly complete genomes for humans and nearly any vertebrate 👨‍🔬🐒🐦🐀🦒🐎🫏🐹🐟 (sorry, no salamanders): www.cell.com/consortium/t... 🧵[1/15]

When you write a book that promises to recalibrate a person's relationship w/wildlife, they're okay w/that idea for bears, deer, & maybe even spiders. But NO ONE wants to talk about yellowjackets. cc @humanbyweight.bsky.social @corriemoreau.bsky.social 🧪 www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti...

📄 The floral illusion: A parasitic beetle mimics the scent of flowers to attract bees 🪲🐝 ⬇ doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Ants normally use about 24% of their energy for brain functions, but when food-deprived, this percentage nearly doubles to 45%. Preferential energy allocation to the brain has previously been found in humans and other mammals. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/kVkU50ZwbrB

📄 Queen bees offload pesticide burden to eggs when social buffering is overwhelmed 🐝 ⬇ www.cell.com/current-biol...

📄 Haplodiploidy alone does not predict the evolution of eusociality 🐜🐝 ⬇ www.cell.com/current-biol...

Our latest contribution on #regulatoryevolution in which we show that the shape of fitness functions and the distribution of mutational effect sizes jointly limit adaptation by regulatory mutations. Led by @simonaube.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📄 Species-specific brain transcriptomic responses to clothianidin and sulfoxaflor in pollinators 🧬🐝🪰🦋 ⬇ www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

📄 Adaptive molecular convergence is pervasive across deep time and largely decoupled from phenotypic convergence 🧬⏳ ⬇ www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Our new paper is out! Congrats to all involved. Dosage compensation and meiotic sex chromosome inactivation are maintained under relaxed selection | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Just had a great zoom with a very talented undergraduate student from another country I would love to recruit. I really don't love telling students not to come here, but because our funding and visa situation is so volatile I can't in good conscience recommend a PhD in the US.

Preprints don’t change much after peer review — and are rarely retracted. go.nature.com/4pebHmM

Our new paper is out in @nature.com! We uncovered how a naked mole-rat queen 👑 controls an entire colony: a natural contraceptive scent that suppresses reproduction in other females! A remarkable mammalian parallel to bees and ants! 🐝🐜 @garyrlewin.bsky.social youtu.be/enfv3zJrWKM?...

Nature research paper: A queen odour mediates reproductive suppression in a eusocial mammal go.nature.com/4fiVIzv

Apollo 3: Multi-Species Genome Curation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.08.730970v1

Foley & Murphy reveal that UCEs and BUSCO loci are not sampled randomly from the genome and are underrepresented in mammalian sex chromosomes and other low-recombining genomic regions. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag155 #societyjournal #evobio #molbio

Some of the nation’s top research universities are shrinking doctoral programs because of uncertain federal funding. (Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/u...

High-resolution reconstruction of cell-type-specific transcriptional regulatory processes from bulk sequencing samples - @weillinstitute.bsky.social @cornelluniversity.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📄 Inhibitory modulation of age-dependent behaviour through dsx-expressing cells in honeybees 🐝🧬 ⬇ doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

minibwa-0.4 released with minor improvement and a few fixes to typos. Also a new blog post on "minibwa is the new bwa-mem": lh3.github.io/2026/07/04/m...

NEW RESEARCH 🔍 #Aging and early life adversity are associated with increased mortality risk. But how similar are they at the molecular level? We investigated #epigenetic profiles across tissues in macaques and you can find the full story in our @science.org article! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Our paper is out! 📣 we find that molecular measures of genetic variation do not predict heritable genetic variation across species - important implications for the application of genomic data for conservation! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

📄 Ancient inversion polymorphisms are locally adaptive in a widespread butterfly species 🦋🧬 ⬇️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Our new genome annotation method relies almost entirely on transcriptome and alignment evidence, and as a result outperforms pretty much all other de novo pipelines. Check out the just-published paper led by Aleksey Zimin: rdcu.be/frSOg

One of our top-rated posts on @altmetric.com this past week was published open access in @natcomms.nature.com. You can read 'Nesting behaviour predicts heat tolerance evolution and climate vulnerability in bees' here: spklr.io/63321E3xQ1

The 2026 Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics has been awarded to the R Project. #RStats www.rousseeuwprize.org/2026

A new Science study shows that bumble bees can position a ball underneath a fake “flower” to reach a reward, suggesting they can exhibit spontaneous problem-solving and challenging the notion that such advanced cognitive abilities are exclusive to large-brained vertebrates. https://scim.ag/4vs08dC

The first single-cell three-dimensional lamprey brain atlas reveals that the vertebrate common ancestor already had a highly regionalized brain, and subsequent neuronal specialization likely drove vertebrate brain diversification. Learn more this week in Science: https://scim.ag/4whLqXp

Minibwa is a hybrid of bwa-mem and minimap2 and the successor of bwa-mem for short-read mapping. ~4X/2.5X as fast as bwa-mem/bwa-mem2 for WGS reads at comparable accuracy. Native support of directional bisulfite-seq. Applicable to long reads. Preprint at arxiv.org/abs/2606.15357

Academic freedom assessment across the world. The US is on a steep decline, below >120 countries www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-...

The heaviest Russian air attack on Kyiv in two weeks saw several people killed and the Pechersk Lavra monastery, a symbol of Ukrainian spiritual and cultural history, catch fire, authorities said.

Nineteen russian ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and Shahed drones are raining down on Kyiv right now. This is horrific. The UNESCO-listed Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra has been targeted. A thousand years of Ukrainian history, faith, and culture are once again under attempted destruction.

Brault et al. propose guidelines for standardized π estimation, systematic reporting of summary statistics, and the adoption of richer metadata to ensure that population genomic data remain comparable and reusable across a wide range of systems. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/... #genome #evolution

New Article! Structural variant calling using Sniffles2

"Phylogenomics beyond the “bag-of-genes” model" by Siavash Mirarab & colleagues "[T]he time is ripe for a paradigm shift in phylogenomics to account for genomic position in all analyses." FREE till July 16th at authors.elsevier.com/a/1nAUrcQbJI...

📄 OrthoFinder: improved phylogenetic orthology inference with enhanced accuracy and scalability 🧬🖥️ ⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...