Gavin Woodruff

Transposable Elements and the Impact of Genomic Autoimmunity www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Regulatory architecture controlling terminal differentiation of an interoceptive paraneuron in Caenorhabditis elegans journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Breaching the Weismann Barrier – a role of vitellogenin yolk proteins in nematode non-Mendelian inheritance www.frontiersin.org/journals/eco...

Genomic predisposition is associated with the direction of sex chromosome evolution www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1...

25 Years Since the First Microsporidian Genome Assembly, Insights on How Genomics Has Shaped Our Understanding of Parasites with the Smallest Eukaryotic Genomes www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

The Caenorhabditis elegans microbiome impacts microsporidia infection through nutrient limitation and spore inactivation www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#Adaptation is assumed to proceed by survival of the fittest. The study shows that #mutation bias can drive adaptation via survival of the likeliest, steering bacteria along divergent paths to resistance with major consequences for control strategies. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

From his review of John Dupre’s edited volume The Latest on the Best (MIT 1987). Krebs, J. 1988. Making the most of models. Nature 331, 126–127. doi.org/10.1038/3311...

Replicated evolution and environmental reversal reveal strong correlated response in a polyphenism doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Who needs chromatin anyway...? NOT THIS GUY! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/n

Species-specific barriers restrict virus spillover potential across the Caenorhabditis genus journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

New paper with Nick Davies and Kevin Foster in @natcomms.nature.com. We show that often neither selection against transposons’ deleterious effects nor exploitation by parasitic elements is sufficient to keep them in control. Only active host suppression does. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Big evolutionary events can fool phylogenetic analyses. A new approach combines phylogenetic regression with eigenvectors to reduce false positives and better account for the history written in genomes. doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Ecologically relevant low oxygen levels reduce unfertilized oocyte output in Caenorhabditis elegans www.micropublication.org/journals/bio...

Population structure and punctuated genomic hyper-diversity in Caenorhabditis briggsae doi.org/10.1093/molb...

Apical spectrin organizes cortical actin filament bundles to pattern C. elegans cuticle ridges journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...

The rights and wrongs of rescaling in population genetics simulations journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...

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]

Yay! Just saw that we got the cover of the August 1 MBoC! Woot! 🎉 Please check out our paper if you are interested in it the tubulin code or early development. www.molbiolcell.org/doi/10.1091/...

Super excited my new review on midbody remnants (MBRs) is out: "Condensates on the Move: Midbody Remnants as Large, Translation‐Competent Extracellular Vesicles" #extracellularvesicles #midbody #mitosis #condensates #translation #proteinsynthesis onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

🚨NEW PAPER 🚨 "Deconstructing empirical fitness seascapes across scales of granularity" published in #G3 (@genetics-gsa.bsky.social) 1/2 The fitness landscape has been among the most influential instruments in evolutionary theory for nearly a century. But we often treat them as fixed and static.

www.nature.com/articles/s41... how cool!

Avocados come in 2 varieties - A-types start each day female and switch to male midday. B-types do the reverse. In work just published from the last chapter of my PhD, we show this system evolved 40+million yrs ago and is regulated by alleles of 1 transcription factor www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A Fluorescent Dauer Marker in Caenorhabditis inopinata Enables Comparative Analysis of Dauer-Inducing Mechanisms www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How did octopuses evolve novel traits? Rishav Mitra, Richard Han, Trey Scott, et al serendipitously discover a unique ribosome adaptation that increases the accuracy of protein synthesis and evolved alongside their elaborate nervous systems vs deep sea relatives. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Caenorhabditis becei recombinant inbred lines (beRILs) reveal the scope of heritable variation within a gonochoristic nematode population www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Reading Runciman’s sneery review of one of the best books I’ve read in the past few years has further lowered my opinion of Runciman

Clever approach from @astavoe.bsky.social for those pesky lines that were integrated with Rol -- edit them back to nonRol! I wonder what else we could build from all the existing integrated arrays. Switch colors?

Just came across this remarkable interview with Marjorie Grene at age 94: www.thebeliever.net/an-interview... Two of my favourite bits, when Grene is asked about Rorty and about Lakatos: Rorty is just witty, but doesn't have a philosophy and Grene is quick to say that she did not kill Lakatos!

mRNA-Scaffolded Cytoplasmic Compartments www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Caenorhabditis tropicalis followed a unique evolutionary path to self-fertility doi.org/10.1093/gene...

Shubin closes with a reminder of the vital importance of shared evolutionary history in basic biomedical research: we’re learning how to cure human disease thanks to work on fruit flies, worms, and even fish

Excellent welcoming squad for the #Evolution meeting!! Five stars! ⭐️

I think this was one of the best talks I’ve heard! Evolution 2026 starting amazingly! @neilshubin.bsky.social #Evolution2026

Our paper on the evolution of cellular miniaturization is now out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... A short recap 🧵

! "Moreover, transphyletic transplantation experiments show that the blastopore lip of M. leidyi leads to the generation of a secondary body axis in embryos of the cnidarian Nematostella vectensis."

The new OrthoFinder paper is out now! In this new work, we introduce major advances in accuracy and scalability, allowing analysis on much larger datasets www.nature.com/articles/s41... github.com/OrthoFinder/...

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

Why are leaves the shape that they are? What controls intraspecific, genetic variation in leaf shape? New from my lab, in collaboration with many others, led by PhD student Amanda Peake: mapping the leaf shape polymorphism in Ipomoea hederacea.

🧨 New publication out (I think this one is 🌶️ ): Cerca & @stelkens.bsky.social - "The identity crisis of speciation genomics". academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...

How do alternative reproductive modes arise? In this @pnas.org paper, we show that hybridogenesis -where a haploid set of chromosomes is transmitted clonally across generations- acted as an intermediate step between sexual and asexual reproduction in stick insects. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

How predictable is evolution? Replicated C. elegans experiments show environmental differences and population bottlenecks jointly shape the repeatability of adaptation doi.org/10.1093/evle... Image credit: Wikimedia

Comparative transcriptomics reveals an extracellular worm Argonaute as an ancestral regulator of LTR retrotransposons academic.oup.com/gbe/advance-...

Our paper unpacking "fitness" is out doi.org/10.1093/gene.... How to define fitness depends on what question you ask. Selection acts on organismal vital rates, longer-term outcomes make sense for genetic lineages, models link them. "Invasion fitness" = speed, but sometimes probability matters more.

😀 Actually, what is a gain-of-function mutation? doi.org/10.1093/gene...

Put simply: It coordinates action in more varied and context-dependent ways across more complex environments, AND it regulates a more complex internal environment. Highly recommend this chapter from Sterling and Laughlin! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New book "A Primer for Experimental Evolution" with coauthors Michael Rose, Margarida Matos, and Joe Graves. www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook... A compact primer for students and colleagues interested in planning and designing experiments to address questions in evolutionary biology.

Microbial genetic screen identifies bacterial genes that compromise Caenorhabditis elegans reproductive fitness journals.asm.org/doi/full/10....