Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 01/10/2026I'll get back to first round of applications soon, if you are interested make sure to submit your interest before Oct 5! 021
Reposted by Melike DönertaşMelike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 16/09/2026📢 We are hiring at METU! One postdoctoral researcher (wet lab) and four PhD/MSc students (computational) for our TÜBİTAK 2232-A project on healthy ageing and neuroprotection, expected to start in March 2027. Applications are through: donertas-group.github.io/join_us please share 🙏 046
Reposted by Melike DönertaşDmitri Petrov @petrovadmitri.bsky.social · 17/09/2026We are searching for an Assistant Professor in Evolutionary Biology! Looking for colleagues asking fundamental questions relating to evolutionary processes and drivers of evolutionary patterns. If you think it is you, please do apply! And please repost. facultypositions.stanford.edu/jobs/assista...facultypositions.stanford.eduAssistant Professor in Evolutionary Biology - Stanford University, California, United StatesThe Department of Biology at Stanford University seeks applicants for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Evolutionary Biology. A successful candidate will conduct research that asks fundamental que... 5151191
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 16/09/2026📢 We are hiring at METU! One postdoctoral researcher (wet lab) and four PhD/MSc students (computational) for our TÜBİTAK 2232-A project on healthy ageing and neuroprotection, expected to start in March 2027. Applications are through: donertas-group.github.io/join_us please share 🙏 046
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 17/07/2026Super happy to share that I closed the loop and returned where my journey started.. This time as a faculty at METU Informatics Institute. Thanks so much to everyone who supported my journey so far! Looking forward to continue our collaborations & starting new ones 💪🤩 193
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 02/07/2026my take-home: analytical methods can only address what the study design makes possible. some issues are easy once you see them, others are tough challenges. this is a simplified take. the full review is detailed with caveats & a checklist: febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... (10/10)febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.comFEBS PressThe gut microbiome changes with age and associates with age-related morbidity and mortality, establishing it as a potential biomarker and intervention target for ageing. Realising this potential requ.... 020
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 02/07/20265) causal inference - association is not causation. to claim the microbiome drives aging rather than just tracking it, we need appropriate designs (longitudinal, interventions, or causal inference methods) whose biases don't all point the same way. (9/10) 110
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 02/07/20264) aging clocks / ML - many microbiome aging clocks look impressive but are largely cohort/batch detectors in disguise. test them on a truly independent cohort and the performance often collapses. (8/10) 110
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 02/07/20263) within-host variability - a single stool sample is one snapshot of something that shifts at different scales, and differences between people widen with age. one measurement often hides the signal, given the single-timepoint sampling practical constraints usually force. (7/10) 110
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 02/07/20262) selection / survivor bias - the older people in our studies are disproportionately the healthy ones; the frail are underrepresented or already gone. we may be describing resilience, not aging. (6/10) 110
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 02/07/2026…and older people also take more medications, which reshape the microbiome - sometimes more than age itself. an "aging signal" can quietly be a "medication signal". (5/10) 100
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 02/07/2026our review centres on 5 challenges central to our projects: 1) confounding - age never comes alone. a 70-yo grew up in a different world (diet, antibiotics, birth mode) than a 30-yo, so you can't cleanly tell "aging" apart from "generation". (4/10) 100
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 02/07/2026in our studies, using staggered cohort designs to control for these issues, we often see results that challenge even the most "established" microbiome-aging signals. that was a turning point - it pushed us to read the literature, and our own data, far more critically. (3/10) 100
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 02/07/2026when we first started working with the microbiome, what surprised me most was that the methodological challenges we kept hitting, especially collinearity, show up everywhere, in both human & model organism data. and yet they're barely mentioned. (2/10) 100
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 02/07/2026excited to share our new review on robust microbiome–aging research - with some personal context on why we wrote it 👇 (1/10) febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.comFEBS PressThe gut microbiome changes with age and associates with age-related morbidity and mortality, establishing it as a potential biomarker and intervention target for ageing. Realising this potential requ.... 160
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 22/05/2026Our group has a new home on the web that does the work justice ✨ donertas-group.github.io Huge thanks to Prasoon for building it 🙏donertas-group.github.ioDönertas GroupDönertas Group Website 040
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 11/05/2026Check out our new review on evolutionary genetics of ageing 🔥 rdcu.be/fh3VU @natrevgenet.nature.com @leibnizfli.bsky.social @ihaucl.bsky.social 0317
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 09/04/2026Every time a journal makes me convert my .csv/.tsv supplementary files to Excel, a little piece of open science dies🥀 RIP reproducibility, my floating-point precision, and at least a dozen genes that are now formatted as dates. 926619
Reposted by Melike DönertaşDario Riccardo Valenzano @dvalenzano.bsky.social · 22/03/2026Aging 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.comSpontaneous aging-associated inflammation and genome instability in the immune system of turquoise killifish - Nature AgingTurquoise 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... 44716
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 05/02/2026maybe now i can finally learn german - just built a telegram bot that pings me every 30min with random prompts to make me speak, tracks my personal errors & resurfaces them until i get it right 3x, has conversation memory, 16k SRS cards & voice support. Hallo, Welt 🇩🇪 👋 040
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 22/01/2026It's a super nice snapshot of where the field stands and where we think it's heading. Thanks to the Nature Aging editors for bringing our perspectives together! 000
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 22/01/2026Almost everyone agreed we need better biomarkers and a shift toward prevention rather than treating diseases one by one. Several of us also emphasised the need for longitudinal cohorts and warned against overpromising. 100
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 22/01/2026Reading through everyone's responses, a few recurring themes emerge: epigenetic clocks and multi-omics have transformed how we measure aging. But translation from model organisms to humans remains hard, and effect sizes that look dramatic in mice often don't hold up in people. 100
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 22/01/2026Nature Aging @nataging.nature.com turns 5 and asked ~50 researchers to reflect on the field. I am honored to contribute alongside colleagues whose work has shaped how I think about #aging science. Past, present and future perspectives on the science of aging www.nature.com/articles/s43... 1146
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 03/01/2026Our work led by wonderful Jing Lu and contributed by İsmail Güderer, Tayyaba Alvi, and Mark Olenik; funded by @carlzeissstiftung.bsky.social Feedback is most welcome! 🙌 @leibnizfli.bsky.social 000
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 03/01/2026I was expecting our cell-identity loss / divergence-convergence story (elifesciences.org/articles/68048) to be related to cellular senescence. After seeing the entropy results from SA-β-gal+ cells, not so sure anymore... will explore more!!elifesciences.orgInter-tissue convergence of gene expression during ageing suggests age-related loss of tissue and cellular identityCross-sectional transcriptome analysis of mice, covering the whole lifespan, reveals that inter-tissue divergence during development is accompanied by a weaker but widespread convergence during ageing... 100
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 03/01/2026With all the caveats like the original data being regeneration/injury-associated senescence, SA-β-gal+ being only one aspect, excited to see what we have discovered in the re-analysis of this paper. beyond "senescence is extremely complex and heterogeneous", 100
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 03/01/2026The classifier detects age-associated senescence increase in most cell types. Senescent cells show reduced transcriptional entropy consistent across most cell types, except MSCs, which showed higher entropy in senescence and were enriched in young ages. 100
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 03/01/2026ML features seem to trace senescence progression along pseudotime. IGF signaling emerges as a directional axis: senescent FAPs & myeloid cells → satellite cells. Taking predicted SA-β-gal+ status as senescence, we applied the classifier to Tabula Muris Senis limb tissue 👇 110
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 03/01/2026p16, p21, Tgfb1 barely distinguish SA-β-gal+ vs - cells at single-cell level (AUC ~0.5; coin flip territory). Even curated gene sets don't agree and show cell-type dependency. ML classifiers achieve superior performance in the held-out biological replicate. 100
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 03/01/2026Super happy to share the first research paper from our group! 🎉 We asked if the transcriptome helps us predict SA-β-gal status using Moiseeva mouse senescence atlas data 🐭 Spoiler: single gene markers don't perform well, ML can make a difference 👇 doi.org/10.64898/202...doi.orgIntegrative transcriptomic identification of cellular senescence beyond marker limitationsCellular senescence lacks a universal marker and varies across cell types, tissues, and stressors, complicating identification. Using SPiDER SA-β-gal labeled single-cell RNA-seq from regenerating mous... 1111
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 27/12/2025Happy to share that this is now out in Microbial Ecology 🥳 Huge thanks to the whole team, especially @sultanova.bsky.social 🙌 link.springer.com/article/10.1... @leibnizfli.bsky.social @uniofeastanglia.bsky.sociallink.springer.comAge-Dependent Gut Microbiota Dynamics and Their Association with Male Life-History Traits in Drosophila melanogaster - Microbial EcologyGrowing evidence suggests that the gut microbiota is closely intertwined with life-history evolution in a wide range of species, including well-studied model organisms like Drosophila melanogaster. Al... 081
Reposted by Melike DönertaşWolfgang Huber @wkhuber.bsky.social · 01/12/2025Join EMBL's Interdisciplinary Postdoc Programme! 3 years funding, self-designed interdisciplinary project co-led between EMBL PI and PI in one of EMBL's actual, prospect or associate member states. In particular: AI&Theory, use mathem. models, physics principles and AI www.embl.org/about/info/p...embl.orgEIPOD-LinC Fellowship Programme – Postdoctoral Programme 22021
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 25/10/2025Still, since the world seems to have kept turning without my replies, I’m adopting a slower, more intentional approach to email & communication from now on. There’s a lesson in everything, if we pay attention to it. 😅 050
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 25/10/2025I hereby declare email bankruptcy. If you’ve written to me in the past months and haven’t heard back — it’s not you, it’s the inbox. I recently discovered that hundreds of messages had been flagged as spam and never reached me. 👇 171
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 06/10/2025(4/4) Late registration + poster submissions remain open until we hit capacity. 👉 Register: amc25.leibniz-fli.de/registration/ 👉 Full program: amc25.leibniz-fli.de/speakers-pro... #Microbiome #Aging #Ageing #SystemsBiology #Metagenomics #Neuroscience #AMC2025 #Jenaamc25.leibniz-fli.deRegistration – AMC2025 010
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 06/10/2025(3/4) 🤝 Networking & “Meet the Speaker” sessions 🔭 “Voyager” dome show at the Zeiss-Planetarium Jena 🍴 Conference dinner with integrated networking 🥇 Awards for best poster, talk, and “top connector” 💼 Sponsor interactions + sponsor bingo 👇amc25.leibniz-fli.deRegistration – AMC2025 100
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 06/10/2025(2/4) 🗣️ Keynotes: Karine Clément, Niranjan Nagarajan (online), Gianni Panagiotou 🗣️ Invited talks: Eran Blacher, Reena Debray, Daniel Erny, Christoph Kaleta, Yvonne Nolan, Veronica Witte, Bahtiyar Yilmaz 🗣️ Fantastic selected talks from abstracts 📊 Interactive poster sessions 👇amc25.leibniz-fli.deRegistration – AMC2025 100
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 06/10/2025#AMC2025 is almost here (Oct 28–29, Jena) and we’ve opened a few more seats! If you work on host-microbiome interactions, aging, or age-related diseases, bring a poster and join this amazing crowd! amc25.leibniz-fli.de/registration/ ✨ Highlights 👇 🧵 (1/4) 221
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 19/07/2025Come find us if you are interested in applications of computational biology and statistical methods on #aging and #microbiome research! Looking forward! #ISMBECCB2025 (3/3) 000
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 19/07/2025I will then participate in the ISCBSC Symposium, joining a panel discussion on multi-omics, organised by the amazing student group of ISCB. Tayyaba Alvi and Mark Olenik will be presenting their posters in the Microbiome and Machine Learning COSI tracks. #ISMBECCB2025 (2/3) 100
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 19/07/2025We are in Liverpool for the #ISMBECCB2025! Tayyaba Alvi, Mark Olenik and I will be delivering a tutorial on Mendelian Randomization on the first day of the conference. (1/3) 100
Reposted by Melike DönertaşDilek Koptekin @dilekopter.bsky.social · 26/06/2025Happy to share our new study from my PhD on the spread of farming across Anatolia and into the Aegean and then into Europe. @compevohumang.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 👇🏽science.orgOut-of-Anatolia: Cultural and genetic interactions during the Neolithic expansion in the AegeanWest Anatolia has been a crucial yet elusive element in the Neolithic expansion from the Fertile Crescent to Europe. In this work, we describe the changing genetic and cultural landscapes of early Hol... 36128
Reposted by Melike DönertaşLeibniz-Institut für Alternsforschung - Fritz-Lipmann-Institut @leibnizfli.bsky.social · 23/06/2025📢 REMINDER ‼️ AMC - Abstract submission deadline: June 30, 2025 The Aging and Microbiome Conference 2025 #AMC2025 will take place from October 28-29, 2025 in #Jena. Join us for the latest developments and exciting discussions on #microbiome & #aging. 📅 amc25.leibniz-fli.de/registration/ 156
Reposted by Melike DönertaşMelike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 16/06/2025📢 Update! The abstract submission deadline for the #AMC2025 Aging and Microbiome Conference has been extended to June 30, 2025! 🔗 amc25.leibniz-fli.de 📌 Jena, Germany 📆 Oct 28-29, 2025 132
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 17/06/2025I'm attending #ISMBECCB2025 in Liverpool, United Kingdom from July 20-24. Who else is going? Register here and don't miss it! invt.io/1bxb8kd9bquinvt.ioI'm participating the ISMB/ECCB 2025 conference, join me!Register now 020
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 16/06/2025📢 Update! The abstract submission deadline for the #AMC2025 Aging and Microbiome Conference has been extended to June 30, 2025! 🔗 amc25.leibniz-fli.de 📌 Jena, Germany 📆 Oct 28-29, 2025 132
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 07/06/2025A blood-based epigenetic clock for intrinsic capacity predicts mortality and is associated with clinical, immunological and lifestyle factors - Nature Aging www.nature.com/articles/s43...nature.comA blood-based epigenetic clock for intrinsic capacity predicts mortality and is associated with clinical, immunological and lifestyle factors - Nature AgingFuentealba and colleagues build and validate a DNA methylation clock of intrinsic capacity (IC) to bridge resource-intensive clinical assessments of IC with molecular readouts of aging, highlighting… 000
Melike Dönertaş @mdonertas.bsky.social · 26/05/2025Read the full study here: biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We'd love feedback- especially from folks working on microbiomes, host aging, or evolutionary ecology! DMs open, feedback welcome!biorxiv.orgAge-dependent gut microbiota dynamics and their association with male fitness traits in Drosophila melanogasterGrowing evidence suggests that the gut microbiota plays a key role in shaping life history in a wide range of species, including well-studied model organisms like Drosophila melanogaster. Although rec... 010