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Dario Riccardo Valenzano

@dvalenzano.bsky.social
1.1K followers 173 following 38 posts

I study the evolution of senescence. Scientific Director at the Leibniz Institute on Aging. Killifish, evolution, microbiome, and causal inference. Bringing molecular genetics into field work.🇪🇺🐟🦠🧬

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Reposted by Dario Riccardo Valenzano
Nick Stroustrup @nstroustrup.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Did you know that the cells of old animals contain much less mRNA than the cells of young ones? Let me share with you some results from an ongoing project in the lab, where we are finding that a progressive depletion of total mRNA abundance is a crucial part of aging 1/22
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Cologne Graduate School of Ageing Research @cga-age.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Do you want to start your PhD at the Cologne Graduate School of Ageing Research in 2027? 🗓️ Don't miss our deadline: November 3, 2026. To help you get started with your application, our wonderful PhD students and faculty members have some tips for you in our short video. Enjoy! 🍿
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Balance of the Microverse @microverse.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
MdB Sascha van Beek recently visited our partner institute @leibniz-hki.de last Thursday. Ute Hellmich @hellmichgroup.bsky.social and Miriam Agler-Rosenbaum, PIs in our Cluster of Excellence, gave insight into their research. Check out the full update from Leibniz-HKI: tinyurl.com/mw82bk3j
linkedin.com
#jenxplore | Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology - Hans Knöll Institute
Research 🤝 Industry 🤝 Policy Science is all about collaboration. That’s why we at the Leibniz-HKI were so excited to welcome Bundestag member Sascha van Beek on his summer tour focused on Neglected T...
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Harmit Singh Malik @harmitmalik.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Come be our colleague. I have been in this Division for 27 years (4 as a postdoc and 23 as a PI). It is an amazing place to work, collaborate, and be inspired. If you are applying to be an Assistant or Associate Professor this Fall, don't miss this deadline.
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Manx Neurobiologist @garyrlewin.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
For me this paper is a career highlight..truly astonishing biology! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
A queen odour mediates reproductive suppression in a eusocial mammal - Nature
Naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber) queens produce isopropyl myristate, a low-volatility ester that high-ranking animals detect and avoid, which alters prolactin and progesterone in other females t...
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
We're looking for a technician to work with us on the biology of aging. We work on killifish evolution, genomics, and microbiome in a fun and international environment. jobs.leibniz-fli.de/jobposting/9...
jobs.leibniz-fli.de
Technische Assistenz (m/w/d)
In der Forschungsgruppe von Prof. Dr. Dario Riccardo Valenzano wird ein Technischer Assistent (m/w/d) gesucht// The research group of Prof. Dr. Dario Riccardo Valenzano is looking for a Technical Ass...
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Netherlands Cancer Institute @nkinl.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
We are looking for a Junior Group Leader in Early Cancer Detection: an innovative scientist ready to build an independent research group and bring new ideas to one of our key research themes. Apply: www.nki.nl/news-events/... #tenure #vacancy #juniorPI #faculty #NKI
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William DeWitt @wsdewitt.github.io · 27/06/2026
Spectacular preprint led by @sydsat.bsky.social in @ohnolog.bsky.social lab, @uwgenome.bsky.social. Neutrophils precede gastrulation in killifish and rapidly patrol the yolk. (1/2)
doi.org
Early immune cell development precedes gastrulation in annual killifish
During embryogenesis, cell types arise in a predictable order because developmental regulators act sequentially. But how evolutionary changes in morphogenesis reshape the signaling environments that a...
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Tessa Montague @tessamontague.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
Do you know an outstanding aquarist? We're hiring a Senior Aquarist to help run our cephalopod facility at Columbia University. Our team maintains a colony of 250+ cuttlefish, develops new husbandry techniques (inc transgenics) & studies cuttlefish camouflage and social behavior. 1/3 [Pls repost!]
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Copenhagen colleagues. Mid-June we may need to process fresh Greenland shark gut samples for an exciting microbiome project. Would you, or someone you know, have bench space for my postdoc for a day? Longest-lived vertebrate, exciting microbiome data. Boosts welcome 🦈 #aging #copenhagen #microbiome
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
We are grateful to Ines Alvarez-Garcia at PLOS Biology for inviting this piece and shepherding it through review, and to the two reviewers, whose pushback genuinely sharpened the argument.
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
We lay out predictions and propose experiments. Short-lived models with tractable immunity (killifish, zebrafish, Drosophila) are a natural place to start. 🔗 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
journals.plos.org
Immune surveillance and microbial escape in the aging host: Why does the microbiome lose its balance?
Host-associated microbiomes are stable across most of the lifespan, but what drives late-life deterioration remains unclear. This Unsolved Mystery proposes interventions that restore immune surveillan...
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
This inverts the logic of most microbiome-targeted interventions in older adults. Restoring a diverse microbiome to a host that has lost the capacity to manage it provides the ecological complexity without the controls. Immune restoration may need to come first, or in parallel.
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
If the model is right, age-associated dysbiosis is not the microbes turning on the host. It is the host losing its grip on them. The more persistent competitors expand into the space surveillance had been holding open. Often these are taxa with pathobiont potential.
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Now the aging hypothesis. Immunosenescence is not uniform decline. The crude load-sensing arm stays on, even hyperactive: this is "inflammaging." The discriminating, dominance-braking arm erodes. Inflammation without precise control. The brake comes off.
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
To show the logic is sufficient, we built a simple model. Four microbes compete on a hexagonal lattice. Apply one rule: suppress whichever taxon dominates. The community stays diverse and stable. Remove the rule, a single winner takes over and diversity collapses.
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Microbiomes are remarkably stable across most of adult life, then deteriorate in old age. What is actually holding them together? Our proposal: immune surveillance. A framework inspired by immune oncology, applied to the microbial community at every mucosal surface.
journals.plos.org
Immune surveillance and microbial escape in the aging host: Why does the microbiome lose its balance?
Host-associated microbiomes are stable across most of the lifespan, but what drives late-life deterioration remains unclear. This Unsolved Mystery proposes interventions that restore immune surveillan...
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Thrilled to see this out today in PLOS Biology. With postdocs Siqi Liu and Flávio Costa, we ask why the gut microbiome loses its balance with age. It's an Unsolved Mystery piece: a framework, not a finalized account, with predictions we lay out for the field to test. 🧵
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Harmit Singh Malik @harmitmalik.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
There needs to be a giant billboard in every major American city that touts this. In any other era except this suicidal science administration, this would be a miraculous, wondrous thing.
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Ewan Birney @ewanbirney.bsky.social · 21/02/2025
Want to work in one of the most dynamic places in mathematical biology - in one of the oldest universities in the world - great colleagues, great science.
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EvoMG Program @evomg-bcn.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
🚨With some delay, we're excited to announce that our proposal for a MSCA Doctoral Network on Evolutionary Medical Genomics (EvoMG-DN) got funded! 🎉 🧬 14 labs and 2 companies across 7 European countries will be coordinated by the EvoMG Joint Program at @crg.eu & @upf.edu. europa.eu/!NNq63m
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Nature Aging @nataging.nature.com · 25/03/2026
🗞️Our March issue is live, with killifish artwork by Dario Valenzano on the cover!🎨Read work on senescence in mammary gland remodelling, structural protein changes as readouts of Alzheimer’s disease, the 201 Parkinson’s disease trial & more ✨https://nature.com/nataging/volumes/6/issues/3
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Zebrafish Rock! 🎃 @zebrafishrock.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
We are suckers for hand-drawn fish 😍 @dvalenzano.bsky.social 👏
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Zebrafish Rock! 🎃 @zebrafishrock.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
🤩
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Dmitri Petrov @petrovadmitri.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
I think this is our lab's first paper in a proper ecology journal. We are now card carrying ecologists!
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
Try AEGIS, break it, extend it, and tell us what questions you want it to answer next. Code is on GitHub: github.com/valenzano-la.... The best tool is one the community makes its own.
github.com
GitHub - valenzano-lab/aegis: Numerical model for life history evolution of age-structured populations
Numerical model for life history evolution of age-structured populations - valenzano-lab/aegis
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
This paper is the product of years of work by generations of lab members. Huge congratulations to Martin Bagič (lead), and to Arian Šajina and Will Bradshaw who built the foundations. AEGIS grew out of their collective effort and creativity.
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
AEGIS runs via a GUI, a webserver, or command line. You don't need to write code to ask deep evolutionary questions. It's built for students and researchers alike. Flexible, extensible, and fully documented.
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
Unlike analytical models, AEGIS is bottom-up. Aging, mortality plateaus, lifespan variation — these emerge from individual genomes interacting with the environment. Population-level patterns are outputs, not inputs. That's the point.
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
As a proof of concept, AEGIS replicates Michael Rose's classic Drosophila experiment: select for delayed reproduction, and delayed aging evolves. AEGIS reproduces this result in silico — and lets you extend it to ask questions the lab experiment hardly could.
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
AEGIS models how extrinsic mortality, ecological pressures, population size, mutation rate, recombination rate, and reproductive strategy together shape the evolution of lifespan and aging. Fast vs. slow senescence emerges from the simulation — it is not assumed.
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
🧵 Thrilled to share that AEGIS (Ageing of Evolving Genomes In Silico) is now published! AEGIS lets you run your evolution experiment in silico. Want to know how predation, population bottlenecks, or mutation rate shape lifespan? Run the experiment. No organisms required. 📄 doi.org/10.1371/jour...
doi.org
AEGIS: Individual-based modeling of life history evolution
Author summary Life history traits - such as lifespan, age at reproduction, and fertility - vary widely across species and environments and are shaped by evolutionary processes acting over long timesc...
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Evolution Letters @evolletters.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
Did you know that Evolution Letters now publishes reviews?! Our inaugural one is fantastic! Deep learning is opening new doors for evolutionary genomics, especially for nonmodel organisms with sparse or uncertain genomic data. doi.org/10.1093/evle...
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 22/03/2026
Thanks Leo - I hope you're well.
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 22/03/2026
Thanks Mo! How are you doing? Hope all's well.
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 22/03/2026
Aging killifish show systemic inflammation and accumulating DNA damage in progenitor-like immune cells, offering a window into the evolutionarily conserved mechanisms of vertebrate immune aging. Great work from Gabriele, @mdonertas.bsky.social, and the whole team. www.nature.com/articles/s43...
nature.com
Spontaneous aging-associated inflammation and genome instability in the immune system of turquoise killifish - Nature Aging
Turquoise killifish are naturally short-lived vertebrates that serve as a model system for aging. The authors show that killifish exhibit age-related transformation in the immune system, which rapidly...
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Princeton University @princeton.edu · 20/03/2026
Now at Princeton, @clairebedbrook.bsky.social and @ravi-nath.bsky.social led a study during their time as postdocs at Stanford that mapped the full arc of aging in individual vertebrates for the first time, finding that activity levels in young adults may serve as an early predictor of longevity.
yahoo.com
Daily movement and sleep patterns can predict lifespan with striking accuracy
Some fish, it turns out, are morning people. They swim hard during daylight, sleep mostly at night, and tend to live longer.
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
Litonotus is such a sophisticated hunter. It chases Euplotes and evaluates when to shoot its deadly dart. Euplotes, on the other hand, deploys unpredictable moves to elude the chase. Their strategies improve with experience. Whether associative or not, that looks like learning to me.
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
My vote goes for Litonotus lamella and Euplotes crassus.
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Manuel Irimia @mirimiam.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
🚨🧬🚨 We're looking for a specialized Research Assistant to spearhead a project aimed at exploring new RNA therapeutics in diabetes and other metabolic disorders. Junior or Senior, we're hoping to recruit a highly motivated and self-driven scientist interested in both basic and applied science. 🦄
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Elfride De Baere @elfridedebaere.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
Do you want to know more about how #killifish research can advance our understanding of retinal diseases? Have a look at Sofia Manzo's exciting work! Sofia is PhD fellow of the MSCA-DN @progret2024.bsky.social @cabd-upo-csic.bsky.social @jrmarmor.bsky.social #killifish #retinaldisease #aging 🧬👌🧬
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Bas E. Dutilh @bedutilh.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
The VEO Group at @uni-jena.de @microverse.bsky.social has an open position for a Bioinformatics Technician until the end of 2032! Join us to unlock the secrets of the Microverse from big datasets: jobs.uni-jena.de/jobposting/0...
jobs.uni-jena.de
Bioinformatics technician
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Will Shoemaker @shoestrapped.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
Happy to share my solo-authored Perspective "An Interpretation, Survey, and Outlook of Microbial Macroecology"! Making time these last few months to take stock of the patterns us microbial ecologists examine + models we invoke has been invaluable. Feedback welcome! ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
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Bas E. Dutilh @bedutilh.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
We have an open position for a bioinformatics/theoretical microbial ecology PhD student to study viral strategies in the global Microverse! Join us at the @microverse.bsky.social at @uni-jena.de, please apply through this link: jobs.uni-jena.de/jobposting/9...
jobs.uni-jena.de
PhD student bioinformatics: Viral strategies in the global Microverse
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Zebrafish Rock! 🎃 @zebrafishrock.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
For those interested!
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Aki Vehtari @avehtari.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
My dept has an open assistant professor position (DL 2nd Feb). Although the call indicates special interest in datacenter-scale computing systems research, any research area is applicable and this would be a great place also for someone doing Bayesian flavored research www.aalto.fi/en/open-posi...
aalto.fi
Assistant Professor in Computer Science | Aalto University
Candidates applying to this call are considered for Assistant Professor position only. Applicants are required to have a doctoral degree and a publication track record in top journals and conferences in a relevant field.
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Balance of the Microverse @microverse.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
Decode microbial balance with us! 🦠 Our new PhD & Postdoc positions explore: 📡 SIGNALS (Communication) 🏗️ STRUCTURES (Community assembly) 🔄 TRANSITIONS (Stability & tipping points) Become part of our interdisciplinary network in Jena. ⏳ Deadline: Jan 20, 2026
microverse-cluster.de
Jobs - Balance of the Microverse
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
Hugely proud of superstar postdoc Dennis de Bakker who was awarded the LIFE talent award 2025 at the FSU Jena.
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Dario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
Huge congrats!!
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Oded Rechavi @odedrechavi.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
Adding citations of people who might review the paper
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