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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Feedback on a *rejected* grant. Quo vadis?

José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

V happy about this one (@brentcemerson.bsky.social @biodiversitysmns.bsky.social @hernmoral.bsky.social)et al Species have survived on oceanic islands for Mya despite occupying small geographic areas, facing environmental calamities and having low Ne. We discuss this w/ a focus on conservation. 1/2

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

It's a wrap #smbe2026. We displayed work on Ancestral Recombination Graphs in hybrid speciation (Alex Mackintosh), an admixed lineage in Gorgona island (Geraldine Rueda-Muñoz), theory of niche conservatism (Martin Eriksson) and GWAS sample size (Diego Salazar). Ready for the next conference!

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

2) Incidentally, we reveal that this dominance of genomic data has led to an overreliance on genomic concepts and metrics in speciation research. 🔍

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

1) We began by reviewing the field, showing that genomic approaches now dominate recent literature. 📰

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

🧨 New publication out (I think this one is 🌶️ ): Cerca & @stelkens.bsky.social - "The identity crisis of speciation genomics". academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

We just published a review 🗞️😁: ‘The ecology of adaptive radiation’ revisited: A 25-year reflection Dolph Schluter’s book inspired the interest in adaptive radiation, and we wanted to revisit it. academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a... 1/5 🧵

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

Look where we are, EU. 💀 We constantly talk about promoting science, increasing the investment in science, having a technology-driven economy, surpassing the US and China with modern tools. The image below is the evaluation report from a friend, who did not get a #MSCA grant despite scoring 94.4%.

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

Florian Schimdt, PhD student in the group, is in Cabo Verde collecting Diplotaxis sp. . 🇨🇻 Cabo Verde is my favourite country on earth because of its people, culture and biodiversity. 1/3

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

📰 Starting this friday with some positive news: Our publication "Pangenomes as a framework for adaptive radiation, speciation, and adaptation" came out today in the American Journal of Botany! bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1537...

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

A present from one of my scientific heroes - Juan Manuel Guayasamin; Reptiles of the Galápagos 🦎🐍🐢

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Species in the Galápagos are really fascinating. Opuntia echios from two different islands separated by only 100 meters. Both plants have lenified, meaning they are quite old, but their height difference is remarkable for a single species. Natural selection or plasticity?

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

We found no accumulation over time or specific groups of TEs.

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

🔍 Despite rapid speciation, niche shifts, and hybridization, we found no significant TE accumulation differences across species or hybrids. 🌵 Even in arid-adapted lineages—where genome downsizing may be expected—TEs didn’t decline.

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Absolutely love this. From: "The what, how, and why of trait-based analyses in ecology" in ECOGRAPHY Guillerme et al

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

Here am I using dozens of my working hours to move plants around countries to do science; while rich people can just pluck off random plants and take them to space without a care in the world.

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

This has the German and Colombian flags but represents my experience (🇵🇹/🇳🇴🇸🇪) 😅 Source: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

New paper out 📝✨ "k-mer approaches for biodiversity genomics" We discuss k-mer spectra, sex determination, allopolyploid subgenome separation, among other topics - and offer a large tutorial list Link to paper: genome.cshlp.org/content/earl... Link to all tutorials: github.com/KamilSJaron/...

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

Now, what's interesting is how they are present on the the breakpoints: tandemly repeated. Notice the attached figures here - the alignments of these transposable elements just show some wacky patterns. Paper led by a stellar master student, Robin Aasegg Araya!

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

We identified and quantified TEs and repeats in breakpoint regions in different inversions in the cod, finding that breakpoints are enriched for the same TE classes.

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

Filip Kolar killing it in one of our departmental seminars. You're consuming polyploids all the time!

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 02/10/2024

... and found that for larger orders, there are very Scalesia-specific TE clusters when compared to the outgroup.

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 02/10/2024

When clustering TEs and making an upset plot (a Venn diagram), we find that most clusters are present in every species, and a minority is species-specific (Fig 03). We found little variation in TE counts on the genomes when considering super families (Fig 04).

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 02/10/2024

When looking at transposable element accumulation through time we find that all - but a single individual - hav esimilar TE accumulation dynamics through time. TL; DR No variation in time of accumulation

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 02/10/2024

We focused on Scalesia, an adaptive radiation on the Galápagos with variation in ecological niches (zones) and soils. We observe no differences in terms of TE classes when doing comparative phylogenomics.

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 02/10/2024

📰🧬🔛 New pre-print on transposable element (#TEs) evolution, #Galápagos, and #Scalesia. "Genomic stability in the Galapagos Scalesia adaptive radiation: Consistent transposable element accumulation despite hybridization and ecological niche shifts"

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 30/09/2024

📎🎓PhD Research Fellow in Evolutionary Genomics and Island Biology at the Univ of Oslo to work w/ me All info you need to know is here: jobbnorge.no/en/available... Read more about us and what we're doing here islandevolution.github.io >> Please share << Thank you

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 11/09/2024

V happy to announce that the Research Council of Norway has awarded me a 'Young Researcher Talent' grant to work on diversification dynamics and genomics of Galápagos plants. If you're excited about this, there will be a PhD position out soon. Here's DALLE's depict of the work

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 03/06/2024

No specific accumulation of TEs through time (using genetic divergence as a proxy for time).

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 03/06/2024

No specific accumulation of TE families (y-axis) on different species (x-axis).

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 03/06/2024

Using comparative phylogenetics we found no specific accumulation of repeats or TEs across lineages.

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 03/06/2024

However, we did not find an association between TE accumulation and the phylogeny of Tetragnatha.

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 03/06/2024

Hawai'i is a natural laboratory, with its islands being arranged by age. We tested whether populations of spiders in islands had more and/or younger TEs. We expected this as colonization of novel areas results from bottlenecks, which in turn can diminish the power of selection.

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 03/06/2024

New paper 📰 Consistent accumulation of transposable elements in species of the Hawaiian Tetragnatha spiny-leg adaptive radiation across the archipelago chronosequence academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 23/01/2024

New paper 🌻 Fruit wings accelerate germination in Anacyclus clavatus bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... The presence of lateral membranous expansions in fruits, conveniently named wings, is thought to aid dispersal. We show that it accelerates germination by increasing water absorption

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 09/01/2024

Dracaena draco - the Canary Islands dragon tree 🐲🐉🏝️

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 04/01/2024

The % of young TEs was even across volcanos. This shows that population fluctuations (expected in island populations which frequently undergo bottlenecks) did not change te TE landscape on the genome :)

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 04/01/2024

... No association through time ...

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 04/01/2024

... No association at the super-family level ...

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 04/01/2024

Results: We did not find an association between TE evolution and the phylogeny nor islands nor volcanos.

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 04/01/2024

We benefited from the volcano age and the chronosequence of island emergence, and tested: "the hypothesis that population reductions associated with new island colonizations––and intra-island volcano colonizations–lead to an increase of TE accumulation in spiny leg Tetragnatha."

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 04/01/2024

So - there's this idea out there that TEs do it all on genomes, facilitating evolutionary change. Theory suggests that TEs should change their numbers on the genome based on population size changes. We looked at the Tetragnatha adaptive radiation in Hawai'i to see this.

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 09/10/2023

We also found some instances of hybridization + some highly different regions on the genome associated with the seed. Putting it all together - it seems like there is been a big lineage that is beginning to structure and showing some signatures here and there ...

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José Cerca @naturalselection.bsky.social · 09/10/2023

When looking at SNPs only present at a given island, we found that only 1.7 - 7.4% of the SNPs were private to some island ...

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