iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Darrin T. Schultz

voigtvision.bsky.social @voigtvision.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

🤩 It's time for some invertebrate eye candy! 🤩 Here's a ctenophore (or comb jelly) stained with phalloidin by John Alexander Salazar Hernandez & imaged on an exaSPIM built by Kaelin Wulf of the team of @adamkglaser.bsky.social as part of the FHL Functional Biodiversity course #microscopy

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Darrin T. Schultz @dts.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Our new paper in Science Advances asks how animals' genomes have changed since their origin from a common ancestor over 600 million years ago, and what patterns in their DNA have arisen in the churn of speciation and extinction. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Five-panel diagram explaining fusion-with-mixing in chromosome evolution. Red and blue represent two different ancestral chromosomes throughout.

A, Fusion-with-mixing: a red chromosome and a blue chromosome fuse into one half-red, half-blue bar. Down the page, successive rows show inversions, drawn as X-shaped crossings between rows, progressively interleaving the two colors until the bottom bar is finely striped. A widening gray wedge labeled Entropy runs alongside an arrow marked Time plus evolution, pointing down.

B, Independent regulation: two separate chromosomes, one red and one blue. In each, a regulatory element, drawn as an oval, acts by an arrow on a gene within its own chromosome only.

C, FWM and novel regulation: on a fused, mixed chromosome, a red gene and a blue gene now sit next to each other across an inversion breakpoint. Red and blue arrows show regulatory elements reaching across it to act on the other chromosome's gene.

D, Regulatory entanglement: an extensively mixed chromosome, finely striped. Below it, a row of alternating red and blue genes is linked by a dense web of crossing curved arrows, so many overlapping regulatory connections that unmixing the chromosome would break them.

E, Emergence of entangled loci: a five-species phylogeny. A red and a blue chromosome fuse at an ancestral node, and helical icons on later branches mark continued mixing. Colored boxes mark four new red-blue regulatory interactions arising after inversions. Species A keeps its two chromosomes separate. In species B through E, the two earliest interactions, cyan boxes 1 and 2, are present in every descendant lineage, while later ones, yellow 3 and magenta 4, appear in fewer.

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Darrin T. Schultz @dts.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I'm thrilled to share that I've started as an Assistant Professor in Biological Sciences and the Oceans Research Center at Lehigh University! I'm building a group in evolutionary genomics to study the origin of animals, and to use those concepts to better understand human disease. More: evogeno.me

Darrin Schultz, a man with curly dark hair and tortoiseshell glasses, smiling at the camera in a brown blazer over a blue patterned shirt with sunglasses hooked on the collar, standing in front of a stone wall.

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Darrin T. Schultz @dts.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

One thing I'm doing since joining the Tan Lab @ Stanford is working on the computational stack of 3D genome research. I put Dip-C v1.0 out as a release! This is an archive of the original Python 2 code from the single-cell 3D genomes in Science, Nat Struct Mol Biol, and Cell (2018–2023). 🧬

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Reposted by Darrin T. Schultz

Pawel Burkhardt @pawelburkhardt.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

Even more excited — our paper is featured on the cover of Science Advances! Huge thanks to @alexandrejan.bsky.social who took this incredible photo of a ctenophore (aka comb jelly) and the editors. Here’s the cover 👇 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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Darrin T. Schultz @dts.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

A little late, but there is a fun new chapter in my life! I joined Longzhi Tan's lab at Stanford Neurobiology in November, and am now working on single-cell 3D architecture, neurodegeneration, and aging. Excited to bring a comparative genomics perspective to these topics. 🧬 Tan lab: 3dgeno.me

3dgeno.me

Tan Lab @ Stanford

Longzhi Tan's Laboratory of 3D Genomics at Stanford Neurobiology studies single-cell 3D genome architecture in development and aging by developing next-generation in vivo multi-omic assays and algorit...

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Darrin T. Schultz @dts.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

When you zoom out from individual genes to consider the context of whole chromosomes across animal diversity, animal evolution takes on a different look. Oleg Simakov and I published a review in @annualreviews.bsky.social on topological approaches in comparative genomics. 🧬 doi.org/10.1146/annu...

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Reposted by Darrin T. Schultz

Thibaut Brunet @thibautbrunet.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating). A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)

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Darrin T. Schultz @dts.bsky.social · 07/12/2023

Our paper on the octopus genome made the cover of G3! 🐙 Congrats to my mentee Dalila Destanović, Eve Seuntjens, and the CNAG team in Barcelona! Photo courtesy of David Stohlmann - a graduate student at the University of Vienna. academic.oup.com/g3journal/ar...

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