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Julian Catchen

@jcatchen.bsky.social

942 followers 263 following 28 posts

associate professor, dept. of evolution, ecology, & behavior, UIUC. computational biologist and population genomics practitioner.

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Julian Catchen @jcatchen.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

Our EEB department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is hiring an assistant professor in evo-devo. See go.illinois.edu/EEBAsstProf for details. Please share!

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Julian Catchen @jcatchen.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Finals start tomorrow here at UIUC. You may have seen the NYMag article outlining how pervasive AI has become in student course work, how it's degrading the learning experience. I wrestled with it all semester in my own course. But OpenAI knows the effects, and they known exactly what they are doing

Electronic sign in a UIUC campus building advertising free ChatGPT use during finals

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Julian Catchen @jcatchen.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

If you want to search and/or visualize how a set of long reads lay down on a reference genome -- whether to check a gene annotation, for assembly error, or another reason, Gio Madrigal's Klumpy can help you do it. Excited to see it on the cover! (and online: catchenlab.life.illinois.edu/klumpy/)

Molecular Ecology Resources journal cover image of the Klumpy algorithm.

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Julian Catchen @jcatchen.bsky.social · 16/02/2024

We built Klumpy – a combined k-mer search and visualization tool, written in Python – to help us find and verify antifreeze genes in fishes and we have since used it for a lot more.

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Julian Catchen @jcatchen.bsky.social · 24/10/2023

I have been having a lot of fun revising private allele analysis in #Stacks from #RADseq data. What are private alleles? Given SNPs in a set of populations, a private allele is found only in a specific population. 1/n

Chromosome genome scan showing private alleles from two species in a hybrid population

Zoomed in 1Mbp region showing private alleles having introgressed into hybrid populations (dark blue vertical lines)

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