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Avril Harder

@avril-m-harder.bsky.social
154 followers 201 following 5 posts

Computational biologist, Evolutionary Analysis Group @ HudsonAlpha Genome Sequencing Center · working from Birmingham, AL · evolution, genomics, plant pangenomes. Opinions mine.

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Reposted by Avril Harder
Human Pangenome Reference Consortium @humanpangenome.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Pangenome coordinates can be complex... Shredtools offers a new approach using exact matches to query pangenome data efficiently. Its tools can extract syntenic regions across hundreds of genomes, making pangenome-scale exploration more accessible. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42465356/
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Navigating the pangenome coordinate system with Shredtools - PubMed
Existing notions of pangenome coordinates rely on hard-to-compute multiple sequence alignments. On the other hand, pangenome-wide exact unique matches (multi-MUMs) can be computed efficiently, and represent conserved stretches of columns in the underlying MSA. We introduce Shredtools, which uses mul …
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Joint Genome Institute @jgi.doe.gov · 11/08/2026
The sorghum pangenome, available on the JGI’s Phytozome portal, opens more possibilities to breed sorghum and other crops for biofuels and bioproducts. Learn more in the latest episode of Genome Insider: 🖥️ 🧬🌱 @danforthcenter.bsky.social
jgi.doe.gov
A Spectrum of Sorghum | Joint Genome Institute
Hear from Nadia Shakoor (Donald Danforth Plant Science Center), John Lovell (HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology), and Jeremy Schmutz (head of the JGI’s Plant Program, HudsonAlpha) about how a sor...
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Reposted by Avril Harder
Joanna Rifkin they/them @joannarifkin.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Looking forward to #Evolution2026! If you're there, come say hi! Or better yet, come here my talk on Tuesday in collaboration with the phenomenal @avril-m-harder.bsky.social on why pangenome graphs are a lifesaver for evolutionarily important structural variation!
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John Lovell @jotlovell.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
We are often asked whether pangenomes are worth the hassle. The files can be large and methods to explore them are much more challenging than linear references. Earlier this week, we preprinted a clear example of how and why pan-genome graphs are so important for trait discovery.
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New Phytologist @newphyt.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
✨ Paper spotlight ✨ (🧵 1/7) Structure and sequence evolution in the pennycress (Thlaspi arvense) pangenome nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Fig. 3 Macrosynteny and genome structure across the Brassicaceae.
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Joanna Rifkin they/them @joannarifkin.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
Very excited to announce that the final version of this is live now at @nature.com!! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
A sorghum pangenome reference improves global crop trait discovery - Nature
A pangenome reference for the phenotypically diverse crop sorghum aims to help accelerate future efforts to breed crops that are better adapted to changing environments.
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John Lovell @jotlovell.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
We’re excited to share the Pan-genomes Doorstep Meeting @ #PEQG26! Join this 3-hour workshop on evolutionary applications of pangenomics, covering construction, analysis, phylogenetics, annotation & graph QC. Register separately or as an add-on to PEQG: genetics-gsa.org/peqg-2026/do...
genetics-gsa.org
Pan-genomes Meeting - 2026 Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics Conference
Visit our website to learn more.
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Adam Phillippy @aphillippy.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
"Sure, bedtools is great and happily used by literally everyone, but, it could be bedder" That takes some serious courage. Kudos Brent and @aaronquinlan.bsky.social !
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Tom Near @tjnear.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
1/2 #NearLab @chasedbrownstein.bsky.social described Birmingham Darter Etheostoma birminghamesnse in April 2025 It is under threat from a mega data center. A petition was filed yesterday by the @biologicaldiversity.org to review the species for protection under the ESA www.wbrc.com/2025/11/14/n...
wbrc.com
National conservation group joining fight against proposed data center
A national conservation group is joining their fight, saying the center will have a major impact on a fish population found only in this area of Alabama.
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Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 28/09/2025
New — with @joannarifkin.bsky.social, @jotlovell.bsky.social, @spicybotrytis.bsky.social, and many more — we created seven new high-quality genomes and explored pangenomic variation in the emerging oilseed crop pennycress (Thlaspi arvense). 1/
biorxiv.org
Structure and sequence evolution in the pennycress (Thlaspi arvense) pangenome
Summary · Eukaryotic genomes harbor many forms of variation, including nucleotide diversity and structural polymorphisms, which experience natural selection and contribute to genome evolution and biod...
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Avril Harder @avril-m-harder.bsky.social · 26/09/2025
Another hit from @alabamarivers.bsky.social and Southern Exposure
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Axel Visel @axelvisel.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
🌿Plant pangenomes🌿 have a LOT of genomic presence-absence-variation. Or do they??? A new @jgi.doe.gov preprint by @tomasbruna.bsky.social @jotlovell.bsky.social @avril-m-harder.bsky.social Avinash Sreedasyam takes a closer look www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A two-panel Scooby-Doo meme. In the top panel, Fred pulls the mask off a villain labeled “Presence-absence-variation in plant genomes.” In the bottom panel, the unmasked villain is revealed to be “Annotation artifacts.”
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Gautam Shirsekar @coevolution.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
'Hoods are out!!! Big thank you to @plantevolution.bsky.social for the support throughout. Luisa, @kdm9.bsky.social , @aconga.bsky.social , @hajkdrost.bsky.social it was intellectually stimulating ride with you, so congratulations!!!! #diversity #NLR #immune #pan-genome #graphs #networktheory
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Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra @jrossibarra.bsky.social · 12/08/2025
my new idea is to look at runs of homozygosity (ROH) only for mutations that are restricted to heterozygous state in other pops, suggesting they are low freq. and enriched for deleterious stuff. a good measure of inbreeding. I call my new statistic
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John Lovell @jotlovell.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
This began as a @jgi.doe.gov Community Science Program (CSP) project in 2017 with the goal of uniting the diverse sorghum breeding and mapping populations in the framework of a 'pangenome'. Thanks to a huge efforts across many stakeholders, the article was preprinted today. A 🧵 w/ what we found:
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John Lovell @jotlovell.bsky.social · 21/07/2025
🚨 We're looking for a #postdoc to join our team at the Center for Bioenergy Innovation at Oak Ridge National Labs, TN 🚨 Project: Advance poplar bioenergy by understanding adaptive trait/genomic variation — breeding/pop gen/bioinformatics Apply by 18-Aug Apply here: jobs.ornl.gov/job/Oak-Ridg...
jobs.ornl.gov
Postdoctoral Research Associate - Plant Systems Biology & The Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI)
Postdoctoral Research Associate - Plant Systems Biology & The Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI)
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Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 10/06/2025
Ok, fine I'm willing to admit it now: Mimulus is interesting www.authorea.com/doi/full/10....
Fig. 3 | DEEPSPACE synteny map highlighting positions of centromeric repeats. Collinear blocks between the same chromosomes are shown as transparent ‘braids’ and chromosome segments are visualized as color-gradient rectangles along an x-axis that scales each genome by its physical size. Regions that do not map between chromosomes are visualized as black ‘wedges’ in the map. These can be due to ineffective unique mapping in highly repetitive centromeres (e.g. Chr 9 IM62-IM767), expansion of centromeric arrays (e.g. Chr 11 IM62-IM767) or sequence presence/absence. The orange-blue color gradient indicates regions that are gene-rich (blue) or centromeres (orange); fully saturated colors indicate that all sequence in those intervals is masked by that annotation type. White regions have neither genes nor Cent728 repeats, and are likely repeat-rich pericentromeres.Fig. 4 | Exploration of the pan-genome graph. A 2.34-2.37Mb on chromosome 1 is a complex region in the genome that illustrates how the pan-genome graph handles large scale presence594 absence variation. Here, any variants smaller than 52bp are excluded so that the large insertion deletions in this region are apparent. Haplotypes containing similar sequences are binned in the transparent rounded rectangles (“nodes”), divergent but syntenic/orthologous sequences have stacked nodes, and deleted sequences show the path outside of a node. B The first exon and the first 28bp of the first intron of a gene with family members across all four genomes is shown as an example of how SNPs and INDELs appear at the base pair level in a sequence graph. C The positions of aligned sequence retained in the graph (colored following the tubes in panels A-B) and that which is un-alignable and clipped (black) are presented in a pan-genome anchored by IM62.
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Dr Andrew Mahon @andyantarctica.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
That time in 2013 when this crabeater seal decided to see what this noisy orange menace was doing in its territory....In 2013 near Peter I Island in #Antarctica on our research cruise (LMG 13-12). Bonus (the 'wait for it' at the end): amazing sunset/sunrise around 1am that night :) 🧪🌎🦑🐧🇦🇶
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John Lovell @jotlovell.bsky.social · 14/05/2025
Wow, the cover looks great! Nice work Patrice and @roederlab.bsky.social The GENESPACE plot uses our new @jgi.doe.gov Pennycress and Brassica rapa genomes built in collaboration with @spicybotrytis.bsky.social & Katie Greenham, hosted on phytozome
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Reposted by Avril Harder
Casey Bergman @caseybergman.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
Clever new BUSCO-like method to evaluate the quality of pangenome graphs www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
PG-SCUnK: measuring pangenome graph representativeness using single-copy and universal K-mers
Motivation Pangenome graphs integrate multiple assemblies to represent non-redundant genetic diversity. However, current evaluations of pangenome graph quality rely primarily on technical parameters (...
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Wes Larson @wes-larsonak.bsky.social · 22/04/2025
Quick break from the doom and gloom for science! We're really proud of this one. We found that two major effect loci on duplicated versions of the same ancestral chromosome play a major role in run timing diversity across four species of salmon (pink, chum, sockeye, coho) shorturl.at/GISX2
shorturl.at
Diversification of large-effect loci in a duplicated genomic region leads to complex phenotypes
Whole genome duplication provides evolutionary opportunities to increase biological complexity and phenotypic diversity by selective retention of duplicated genes. We identify a small genomic region a...
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Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
longcallD is a new variant caller for genomic long reads. It jointly calls phased small and structural variants. Single binary, one command line for the whole process. Comparable accuracy to mainstream callers. Great work by Yan Gao. github.com/yangao07/lon...
github.com
GitHub - yangao07/longcallD: A local-haplotagging-based small and structural variant caller
A local-haplotagging-based small and structural variant caller - yangao07/longcallD
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Avril Harder @avril-m-harder.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
Post a warning.
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Adam M Novak @adamnovak.graphs.vg · 18/03/2025
"Our results reveal substantial differences between pipelines, with many inversions either misrepresented or lost. Most notably, recovery rates remain strikingly low, even with the most simple simulated genome sets, highlighting major challenges in analyzing inversions in pangenomic approaches."
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John Lovell @jotlovell.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
Our paper on the past, present, and genomics-enabled future of American chestnut (Castanea dentata) tree breeding for resistance to invasive pathogens is on BioRxiv. 🧵with some background and a few things we found 👇 bsky.app/profile/bior...
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UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute @ucscgenomics.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
A new version of our variation graphs (vg) tool, "Boccaleone," is now available! Updates include: 🔵 HiFi and Oxford Nanopore read support to the Giraffe read mapper 🔵 Faster read sorting 🔵 New Unix manual page Link: github.com/vgteam/vg/re...
VG logo
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Mike Schatz @mikeschatz.bsky.social · 11/01/2025
Welcome to Day 2 of #PAG32 | #PAG2025. Today's cant miss session is Comparative Genomics hosted by Vijay Tiwari and John Lovell. It is 10:30 - 12:40 in Pacific A. pag.confex.com/pag/32/meeti...
pag.confex.com
Comparative Genomics
The availability of genomes for many plant and animal species provides opportunities to compare genomes. These comparisons provide insights into the variability of genome structure and content within ...
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Laramie (Smith) Aközbek @laramiemckenna.bsky.social · 08/01/2025
Are you headed to #PAG32 and interested in plant reproduction? 🌼 Come check out my talk in the “Sex Chromosomes and Sex Determination” session on Saturday! I’ll be talking about ancient ZW sex chromosomes, the impact of polyploidy on sexual system evolution, “leaky” dioecy, and much more.
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Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 17/08/2024
What's better than one polyploid genome? Twelve polyploid genomes! We report a pangenome of the hexaploid oilseed crop Camelina sativa and investigate pangenomic variation and genome evolution in a complex allopolyploid genome. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A) Summary of Camelina sativa progenitors and allopolyploid formation. B) Synteny between Arabidopsis thaliana and the three Camelina sativa subgenomes
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John Lovell @jotlovell.bsky.social · 29/03/2024
Our groups' goal is to produce genomes that are useful; this does not always mean 'telomere-to-telomere' assemblies. The hybrid sugarcane genome is a nice example of this. The article is out this week in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Comparative genomics plot of sugarcane
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Noah Reid @noahreid.bsky.social · 07/02/2024
@ksamuk.bsky.social pointed this out on the other site, but I don't see much discussion here. GATK will now encode missing genotypes as "0/0", or homozygous ref, instead of "./." in VCF files. To identify sites with missing data, you'll have to check the DP field.
gatk.broadinstitute.org
GenotypeGVCFs and the death of the dot
If you have been keeping up with our GATK release notes, then you know that we have been rolling out a number of backend changes, tools, and features to GATK that we are hoping will improve the eff...
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John Lovell @jotlovell.bsky.social · 30/01/2024
🚨We're hiring🚨 We are looking for a scientist to bridge the gap between genomics and breeding, focusing on traditionally under-invested crops and regions. It's physically located at Colorado State University in beautiful Ft. Collins, CO. Pls share! hudsonalpha.applicantpro.com/jobs/3211389
hudsonalpha.applicantpro.com
HudsonAlpha - Staff Scientist - Genome Sequencing Center - Huntsville, AL
Position: STAFF-SCIENTIST: Evolutionary gen
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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 04/01/2024
A new study shows that flowers have evolved over the past three decades to have less sex—potentially in response to the disappearance of bees. It could be a death spiral for some species. Here’s my story. 🧪 Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/s...
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