iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Samuel Church @shchurch.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Amazing paper here that I am psyched to be a part of. Alvaro, @alexdemendoza.bsky.social @obog.bsky.social and team helped us resurrect the name Physalia utriculus for this widespread bluebottle, and now present some of the most comprehensive genomic work I have seen for any open ocean species

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Samuel Church @shchurch.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Happy to be back at #Evol2026, its been a fantastic meeting so far. I'll be presenting a poster on Tuesday about `corpus`: github.com/caseywdunn/c... a new tool for extracting data from biodiversity literature, in collaboration with @caseywdunn.bsky.social @fzapata.bsky.social and Maciej Mańko. 1/2

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Samuel Church @shchurch.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Super excited to have been part of the project using participatory science to study flower color variation, led by @patrickmckenzie.bsky.social!

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Patrick McKenzie @patrickmckenzie.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

So cool to see our work highlighted here! Thanks @botany.one ! And, re: the question “were you one of the observers in our dataset,” besides in the paper supplement, there’s a full list of them here: github.com/pmckenz1/mon...

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Casey Dunn @caseywdunn.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Ever wanted to assemble specific genes out of raw sequence reads? Try sharkmer, a tool for in silico PCR (sPCR) developed with @shchurch.bsky.social - academic.oup.com/bioinformati.... Feed it raw reads and primer sequences, it gives you amplicon sequences. Can work on a laptop in minutes.

academic.oup.com

Sharkmer: repurposing PCR primers for targeted genome assembly using in silico PCR

AbstractSummary. We introduce an in silico PCR (sPCR) method for the assembly of specific genomic regions spanned by PCR primers using raw sequence reads.

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Samuel Church @shchurch.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

@caseywdunn.bsky.social and I have a new tool for "in silico PCR" out in Bioinformatics: 🦈 sharkmer 🦈 With a subsample of raw reads and a few minutes, you can assemble your favorite barcode sequences! Try it out and let us know how we can make it better: github.com/caseywdunn/s...

github.com

GitHub - caseywdunn/sharkmer

Contribute to caseywdunn/sharkmer development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Ben Hopkins @brhopkins92.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Quick plug for our new resource, the Drosophila Species Stock Exchange. This is a database and mailing list that documents species currently in culture and the labs holding them. If you want to know more or sign up then please get in touch. See attached for more info and please share!

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Rebecca R Helm @rebeccarhelm.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

Need a break from EVERYTHING?? Come join our free public talk this evening, where NYU professor Dr. Samuel Church will tell us all about his hunt for new blue bottle (man-o-war) species 🪼🧪🌊🦑 7:30 PM (EST) Zoom link: u-tokyo-ac-jp.zoom.us/j/8337406906... Meeting ID: 833 7406 9068 Passcode: 430292

Cover of scientific journal "current biology" showing a man-o-war

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Jeremy M. Brown @jembrown.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Applications are now open for the 2026 Workshop on Molecular Evolution (MOLE)! www.mbl.edu/education/ad... Claudia Solis-Lemus and I will be holding an informational session on Zoom next Wed (1/21) from 10:30-11:30 AM Central for those interested: lsu.zoom.us/j/4968115684 Deadline to apply: 1/26

mbl.edu

Workshop on Molecular Evolution | Marine Biological Laboratory

The workshop serves graduate students, postdocs, and established faculty from around the world seeking to apply the principles of molecular evolution to questions of anthropology, conservation genetic...

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Casey Dunn @caseywdunn.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Our eLetter github.com/caseywdunn/s... responding to a recent Science paper was just posted. The paper found more genes with consistent support for sponge-sister than ctenophore-sister. We found several technical issues that, when corrected, reverse the conclusions and recover ctenophore-sister.

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Samuel Church @shchurch.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

The Church Evolution Lab (CEL@NYU) is hiring a postdoc! We have several new projects to study the genomic basis of biodiversity in model clades – especially Hawaiian Drosophila. apply.interfolio.com/179354 Come join our new group, you can study bugs and live in NYC! Feel free to share widely!

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Samuel Church @shchurch.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

It was amazing to be part of this cool natural history project led by @patrickmckenzie.bsky.social, and I’m so happy I can now say I have worked on plants!

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Li Zhao @lizhao.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Our NY area population genetics meeting is back and "upgraded", as Simons Foundation @simonsfoundation.org generously agreed to host. Please save the date: March 9, 2026. Look forward to seeing many of you from NY and beyond.

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Tom Iwanicki @iwanicki.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

In our last thread, we left the jelly-enjoyers of Bluesky with a cliff hanger ending, in what one eager onlooker described as soap opera science 😜 ... wait no more, we are back! Grab your popcorn shrimp and come with us on a journey spanning more than... bsky.app/profile/iwan...

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Samuel Church @shchurch.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

Still a few days left to apply for this Assistant Professor position in our department at NYU: apply.interfolio.com/175592 Please pass the word around, if you know of someone at the interface of ecology, evolution, and disease!

apply.interfolio.com

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

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Matt Rockman @wormsrock.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]

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Samuel Church @shchurch.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

The Church Evolution Laboratory (CEL@NYU) will be official as of Sep 1st: shchurch.github.io. We are recruiting at all levels, including a postdoc to work on evolutionary patterns and processes via comparative genomics in Hawaiian Drosophila. Please share widely!

shchurch.github.io

Church Evolution Laboratory

Department of Biology, New York City

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Samuel Church @shchurch.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

Such cool work by @rbabedon.bsky.social! These results came from his awesome senior thesis on Atlantic man-o-war dispersal. He found iNat (@inaturalist.bsky.social) records of young colonies, they look like tiny living bubbles before they grow into the sailing giants we sometimes see further North

a juvenile Physalia colony, a glassy bubble on the beach with a small tentacle, credit Ashley user arabella-31 via iNaturalist: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/256003990

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River B Abedon @rbabedon.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

Check out our preprint 🧪 on the origin & dispersal dynamics of a sailing ⛵ #siphonophore! We use #iNaturalist and particle tracking simulations to show that juvenile man o' war surface in the Gulf of Mexico & Straits of FL and disperse rapidly along the Gulf Stream 🌊 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

From surfacing to stranding: The origins and dispersal dynamics of a neustonic siphonophore

The siphonophore Physalia physalis regularly strands along the US East Coast, yet the dynamics driving its seasonal and geographic distribution in this region remain poorly understood. Building on a n...

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Yamuna Krishnan @krishnanyamuna.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

A big blow to All of Science, not just Harvard, not just the Fly community, not just Genetics. All of Science. Turbocharge was just switched off. Flies gave us so many insights.

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Pawel Burkhardt @pawelburkhardt.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

Marine biodiversity: Gone with the wind? Our dispatch out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social New research shows that wind and currents act as invisible barriers, reshaping our view of ocean connectivity. 🌊🪼 authors.elsevier.com/a/1lYLj3QW8S... @iramaegele.bsky.social @msarscentre.bsky.social

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Samuel Church @shchurch.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

Wish I could be at #Evol2025 this year! I’ll be starting a new lab at NYU this fall, and will be recruiting at all levels. Please spread the word if you know anyone who wants to work on evo. genomics, phylogenies, and comparative development of inverts (like Hawaiian Drosophila!) shchurch.github.io

Drosophila picticornis, a Hawaiian fly with patterned wings

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Samuel Church @shchurch.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Excited to share our study on sailing siphonophores, AKA bluebottles or man-o'-war! 🌊 we received hundreds of samples from scientists around the world, part of a huge effort to sequence genomes and test for multiple species 🧬 out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... 🦑🧪📌

Physalia megalista, a cnidiran with a gas filled float, raised sail, and long blue tentacles hanging below. Image credit: Dalila Destanović

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Patrick McKenzie @patrickmckenzie.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

New preprint out today! A really fun collaboration with @shchurch.bsky.social and Robin Hopkins in which we study flower color variation in Monarda fistulosa using iNaturalist data. We process >40,000 images and use them to phenotype flower color in >16,000 observations: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Figure 1: Steps with representative photographs of the flower color phenotyping pipeline. A) We exported all research-grade iNaturalist observations of Monarda fistulosa from GBIF. B) We used GPT-4o to classify each image as to whether it contained a flower. C) We trained a Roboflow semantic segmentation model on a subset of images and applied the trained model to extract “flower” pixels from each image in the dataset. D) We calculated the geometric median of each set of extracted pixels to represent the flower color phenotype from each image, and we paired this phenotype with the observation’s iNaturalist metadata for spatial analysis.

Figure 2: Spatial summary of Monarda fistulosa flower colors across North America. A) Map of the color of M. fistulosa flowers. Each square is a 200km x 200km cell with the color corresponding to the average median CIELAB color value of each observation in the cell. The dotted line denotes -100° longitude, separating eastern and western regions of the range. B) Boxplots summarizing LCh color components west and east of -100° longitude, with each box showing the median and interquartile range, and with the color of each box reflecting the geometric median CIELAB value from west and east, respectively.

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