iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Mark Bitter @markcbitter.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

New Perspective w/ @petrovadmitri.bsky.social and Paul Schmidt! We ask what evolution-in-action studies tell us about an old question: what genetic variation matters for fitness, and what maintains it? ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

ecoevorxiv.org

Common, consequential, and actively maintained: a neo-balance view of genetic variation

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Elisa Visher (they/she) @evisher.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Why did nobody tell me that Zuk et al 2006 came in picture book form!?

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Holly Bik @hollybik.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

My favorite news from the past week - Tyrannosaurus Rex was *warm blooded*!!! And they figured this out using isotopes from tooth enamel 🤯https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeb7653?referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fgo.bsky.app%2F

science.org

The body temperature of Tyrannosaurus rex

Despite an extensive history of study, quantitative constraints on the thermophysiology of Tyrannosaurus rex remain limited. Here, we derive a thermodynamically based determination of T. rex body temp...

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

What's behind this tidal wave of epidemics? In the largest study ever conducted on emerging infectious diseases, we show that the popular explanation - "our relationship with nature is out of balance" - doesn't hold up. Out now in Nature, after half a decade of work: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

The anthropogenic fingerprint on emerging infectious diseases - Nature

Emerging infectious disease outbreak risks are ubiquitous worldwide, and highest in landscapes where people, livestock and fragmented natural ecosystems coexist, but detection and data ...

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Siobhán O'Brien @siderophile.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

really enjoyed this, finally some really solid data on the question of whether cross-feeding actually matters in soil. A great mix of wet-lab experiments and genomics that feed into each other beautifully.

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Karen Shih @karenyshih.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Really excited to share that work from my PhD is now on bioRxiv! We ask: Is the transcriptional response to high tumor mutational burden (TMB) consistent across cancers, or does it vary by cancer type? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

biorxiv.org

Transcriptional Response to Tumor Mutational Burden Is Consistent Across Cancer Types

Tumor mutational burden (TMB) shapes tumor transcriptional state, but studies typically describe this response as an average effect pooled across cancer types. Whether that average reflects a consiste...

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Elisa Visher (they/she) @evisher.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Thanks y'all for the wonderful time at the inaugural year of the Function of Evolving Systems GRC. I'm already excited for future conferences to come! To that end, here's a list of all the attendees (that I could find) if y'all want to keep up with what folks are doing bsky.app/profile/did:...

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Eli Mehlferber @emehlferber.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Hey all! Happy to finally join everyone here on Bluesky, and also to share the culmination of my longest-running postdoc project, now on bioRxiv: “Apparent generalism in Pseudomonas aeruginosa is underpinned by convergent cryptic specialization.” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Nicole Nova @nicole-nova.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

A fundamental question in disease ecology remains unresolved: How can an acute, immunizing virus persist in nature? Theory says viruses like measles need huge pools of susceptible hosts. Our new preprint offers an answer. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

biorxiv.org

Persistent, Multi-Species Outbreaks and Long-Range Transmissions of a Measles-Like Virus

Canine distemper\---|a measles-like disease with high mortality and presently without a cure\---|poses a major threat to wild and domestic carnivores globally. Domestic dogs are generally considered t...

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Dmitri Petrov @petrovadmitri.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

Very proud of this contribution. Beautiful and hyper careful work by @jahemker.bsky.social showing that not all long read assembles are created equal and at times it really does matter to have enough not just long but very long reads. Curious what you all think!

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

James Hemker @jahemker.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

Proud that this work is now published! We hope it helps orient future #Nanopore long-read sequencing studies hunting for structural variants Also really happy to share eight new high-coverage (>100x) long-read read pools and assemblies with the #Drosophila community! doi.org/10.1093/g3jo...

doi.org

Manual validation finds ultra-long-read sequencing best enables faithful, population-level structural variant calling in Drosophila melanogaster euchromatin with nanopore

Abstract. The increasing accessibility of long-read sequencing and the rapid development of automated variant callers are promoting the generation of popul

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Dmitri Petrov @petrovadmitri.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Registration is open for the inaugural GRC conference in the Function of Evolving Systems. Aug 9-14, 2026, Waterville Valley. Truly stellar speaker lineup. Student/postdoc fellowships are available! Please come join us! www.grc.org/function-of-... @joybergelson.bsky.social

grc.org

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

This was probably meant to be a late-night post: I spent eight months working on a stunt blog about a $200 sandwich. Or, no, I did an end-of-year post about my mental health and the federal funding crisis. I'm not sure which. Maybe you can figure it out. www.carlsonlab.bio/thoughts/epi...

carlsonlab.bio

Epic chicken sandwich — The Carlson Lab

Invocation to Sandwich: April 22, 2025 The madness creeps in for the first time as a Master’s student in my lab is telling me about her job hunt. Did you know that Epic – yes, that Epic, the electron...

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Helen Czerski @helenczerski.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

Oh, I love this. A new species of sea anemone was discovered recently that parks itself on top of a hermit crab shell like a hat. It seems to feed partly off the crab's faeces, but it also excretes a hard shell that extends the crab's home. In return, it's carried around the seafloor like a king.

Pictures of a pink sea anemone sitting on top of a hermit crab shell.

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Courtney Ellis @courtneyellis.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Them: Ooh, I’m so excited to go birding with you! It sounds like such a magical nature practice! Me: *takes them to the sewage pond behind the Walmart* Them: Hm, wow, ok

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Jeremy Yoder says no war @jbyoder.org · 11/11/2025

"Specialist" and "generalist" are surprisingly slippery categories— biology abhors a binary— but quantifying the shared evolutionary history of plants eaten by insects introduced to North America let these authors predict their plant-damaging impacts

buff.ly

What Is a Specialist? Quantifying Host Breadth Enables Impact Prediction for Invasive Herbivores

Herbivores are commonly classified as host specialists or generalists for various purposes, yet the definitions of these terms, and their intermediates, are often imprecise and ambiguous. We…

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

HittingerLab @hittingerlab.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

New work led by members of the @rokaslab.bsky.social! ☺️ 1,154 yeast genomes in the Saccharomycotina subphylum were surveyed for their relationship between reduced gene repertoires broadly associated with genome stability functions and elevated evolutionary rates.🧬 academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

academic.oup.com

Stable hypermutators revealed by the genomic landscape of genes involved in genome stability among yeast species

Abstract. Mutator phenotypes are short-lived due to the rapid accumulation of deleterious mutations. Yet, recent observations reveal that certain fungi can

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Sophie Jean Walton @sophiejwalton.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Super excited that the bulk of my PhD work is now preprinted! Here we used whole-community competition, or coalescence, experiments to quantify selection acting on genetically diverged strains within larger communities. (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Dmitri Petrov @petrovadmitri.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

Very excited about this work by @mrazo.bsky.social in collaboration with www.madhavmani.com bsky.app/profile/mraz... I am so lucky to be able to collaborate with such brilliant people! Learned a lot. This is our first foray into ML approaches and I am quite taken with their power 1/n

madhavmani.com

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Manuel Razo @mrazo.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

1/n 🧵 Excited to share our new paper! We developed a framework to reveal hidden simplicity in how organisms adapt to different environments, particularly focusing on antibiotic resistance evolution. #EvolutionaryBiology #MachineLearning

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Oliver Meacock @olimeacock.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Our framework explaining why ecological interactions change between contexts is out in Ecology Letters! A lovely collaboration with @saramitri.bsky.social which provides experimentally-testable links between the physiology and ecology of microbes. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Environment‐Organism Feedbacks Drive Changes in Ecological Interactions

Ecological interactions are central to our understanding of the composition and function of communities, but attempts to use them as a theoretical foundation for experimental ecology have been confou....

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Jenn Coughlan @jenncoughlan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Prepping to teach intro evolution for the first time- what are everyone's favorite misconceptions about evolution? I've got a few: - evolution happens to individuals - evolution happens because it's needed - evolution is hierarchical/directional/has an end point

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bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology @biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

Genetic shifts in viral populations: how sudden vs gradual changes in host species composition affect the stability and dynamics of genetic variability in viral populations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/202…

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Dmitri Petrov @petrovadmitri.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

It is that time of the year again when @odedrechavi.bsky.social and I do our annual “your favorite paper of the year” thread. Now only on Bluesky! Please link to your favorite paper in the comments and say a few words why you loved it so much. Happy holidays and happy reading!

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Oskar Hallatschek @ohallats.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

After a long and winding odyssey, excited to finally drop anchor in open-access waters. This preprint shows how neutral allele frequency time series can illuminate disease transmission rates between communities— key for epidemic fore- & backcasting. medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Grant Kinsler @grantkinsler.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

Do mutations that drive evolution improve many traits or few? Does this change over the course of evolution? Excited to share our work in PLOS Biology exploring these questions in the first 2 adaptive steps w/ Yuping Li, @gsherloc.bsky.social, @petrovadmitri.bsky.social 🧵 doi.org/10.1371/jour...

doi.org

A high-resolution two-step evolution experiment in yeast reveals a shift from pleiotropic to modular adaptation

Evolution is expected to involve mutations that are small and modular in effect, but recent findings suggest that mutations early in an adaptive process can have strong and pleiotropic effects. This s...

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Delighted to share this paper out via Virus Evolution: academic.oup.com/ve/advance-a... in which we develop and assess a quantitative method to infer phage and bacterial mutations driving changes in infection phenotypes arising in coevolutionary dynamics. a 🧵 about people (and some science)

Predicted infections with phage/host mutation models

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Reposted by Elisa Visher (they/she)

Dr. K. Lotterhos @drk-lo.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

American Society of Naturalists has its biennial conference in Asilomar CA on January 3-7 2025. evolutionary ecology, ecological genetics, behavioral ecology, and more - plenty of rooms, consider attending! Small format (~200 people) makes it a great place to network! asnasilomar2025.org

asnasilomar2025.org

ASN Asilomar 2025

The American Society of Naturalists invites graduate students, postdocs, faculty and other professionals from ecology, evolution, behavior, genetics, physiology, and associated fields to join us for o...

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Paulina Arancibia @pauliarancibia.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

This is amazing! All the science starter packs in one same place. Big thanks to the author 🧪🌎

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arsweeny.bsky.social @arsweeny.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

Interested in fitness consequences of the gut microbiome in the wild? Keen on being involved with an iconic long-term study system? Check out a PhD opportunity working on Soay sheep microbiomes! Info below and feel free to contact with q's. e4-dtp.ed.ac.uk/e5-dtp/super...

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