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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾

@xgrau.bsky.social
766 followers 1K following 254 posts

Evolutionary biologist. Postdoctoral Fellow & LCF Junior Leader at CRG (Barcelona). «Ara mateix enfilo aquesta agulla amb el fil d’un propòsit, que no dic, i em poso a apedaçar» xgrau.github.io & ecoevo.social/@xgrau

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Reposted by Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾
Thea F. Rogers @theafrogers.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
🧵 Out today in Nature Communications! How did an ancient reshuffling of the genome shape 3D genome architecture and gene regulation in squid, cuttlefish & octopus? 🦑🐙 We combined Micro-C, RNA-seq & ATAC-seq across species, developmental stages & tissues. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-77625-7
doi.org
Genome reorganisation and expansion shape 3D genome architecture and define a distinct regulatory landscape in coleoid cephalopods - Nature Communications
How genome organisation contributes to the evolution of biological complexity is poorly understood. This study shows evolutionary changes in 3D genome architecture rewires gene regulation in coleoid c...
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Will Ratcliff @wcratcliff.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Out today in @nature.com: our review on how single cells evolve into multicellular organisms. With Ozan Bozdag, @kaitong25.bsky.social, Peter Yunker, and @matthewherron.bsky.social. rdcu.be/9ZuiKow9twKa For an overview, check out the video below.
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BES Evolutionary Ecology Group @bes-evolecol.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
We are so excited to announce Arvid Ågren as our next webinar speaker on the 21st October at 3:30PM (BST). @arvidagren.bsky.social works on genomic conflict—the selective tensions within every cell and how they are resolved. Register (for free) here: www.britishecologicalsociety.org/content/evol...
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Wendy Miller @burrowingowl.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Good morning! 🪶
Angry burrowing owl couple glaring out from inside their cave.
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Marc Cerdà Domènech @elpiratavell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
1/ 🧵 Amb tota la pluja que ha caigut, alguns elements d'anàlisi que crec que són importants sobre el canvi climàtic i com l'estem afrontant (o no). 👇 liniaxarxa.cat/noticies/sud...
liniaxarxa.cat
El sud de l'àrea metropolitana viu un episodi de pluges històric que deixa fortes inundacions
L'episodi de pluges ha impactat amb força aquesta nit a la zona metropolitana sud, amb desenes d'avisos als Bombers.
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Mar Albà lab @maralbalab.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
We are recruiting!! EU-funded PhD position to study the evolution of small proteins - from noise to function Apply before Oct 22 albagroup.researchmar.net/positions www.orfeus-dn.eu @grib-barcelona.bsky.social @prbb.org @researchmar.bsky.social @official-smbe.bsky.social @sciencehr.bsky.social
albagroup.researchmar.net
Mar Albà 's evolutionary genomics LAB: Open Positions
work with us at the evolutionary genomics lab
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The €15 capuccino from San Marco is definitely adaptive (for someone).
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Reposted by Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾
Earth BioGenome Project 🌍 @ebpgenome.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
🎥🧬 Every living thing has a story. Every genome helps us read it. The Catalan Initiative for the Earth BioGenome Project is building high-quality reference genomes for the biodiversity of the Catalan-speaking territories. Cada ésser viu conté una història. Watch the video ⬇️ lnkd.in/gcfWsMDS
English Alt Text:
A great cormorant stands on the ground in a natural habitat, facing left with its long bill extended. The background is softly blurred, while bilingual English and Catalan text overlays introduce the message that every living thing has a story and highlight the Catalan Initiative for the Earth BioGenome Project.

Català (Text alternatiu):
Un corb marí gros dret en un entorn natural, mirant cap a l'esquerra amb el bec llarg estès. El fons és desenfocat i la imatge inclou text superposat en anglès i català que transmet que cada ésser viu té una història i presenta la Iniciativa Catalana per a l'Earth BioGenome Project.Photo 2 (Bearded Vulture)

English Alt Text:
A bearded vulture perches on a rocky outcrop with its wings partially spread, showing its striking black, cream, and rust-colored plumage. Bilingual English and Catalan text explains that every genome tells a story and that every species carries millions of years of evolutionary history in its DNA.

Català (Text alternatiu):
Un trencalòs està posat sobre una roca amb les ales parcialment obertes, mostrant el seu característic plomatge negre, crema i ataronjat. La imatge inclou text en anglès i català que explica que cada genoma explica una història i que cada espècie conserva milions d'anys d'història evolutiva en el seu ADN.
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This is a very important insight, it's great to see it backed up by some numbers.
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
«We demonstrate how little information is contributed by depauperate lineages to ancestral state reconstructions at the root node of major clades». «[accuracy] is determined primarily by the species-rich clade and, specifically, by the distance separating that clade from the root».
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
We've been called worse…
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Reposted by Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾
Andrew Roger @andrewjroger.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
So you are using IQ-TREE to estimate a tree for "deep time" phylogenetics using amino acid alignments. There is a lot of confusion about how to test model fit. Here are some suggestions.
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Reposted by Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾
Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo @multicellgenome.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
We have a new branch in the family tree of animals: Atreyea- a previously unrecognized lineage among the closest unicell relatives of animals. Led by @konsmitsi.bsky.social & @freejakoba.bsky.social together with a fantastic team of collaborators. 🔗 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... #protistsOnSky
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Judith Mank @judithmank.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
So very, very happy to see this out @plosbiology.org : Ancient inversion polymorphisms associate with sexually selected traits across natural guppy populations. Beautiful work by two very clever and talented coauthors, Yuying Lin and @vdbijl.bsky.social . journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... 1/
journals.plos.org
Ancient inversion polymorphisms associate with sexually selected traits across natural guppy populations
Genomic inversions spanning many genes can persist for millions of years. This study of Trinidadian guppy populations reveals how both ecological conditions and mate choice help maintain this hidden l...
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Megan Dennis @mydennis.bsky.social · 14/02/2025
A little late on this, but finally got around to reading this review on genome assembly. Found it both comprehensive and accessible. Made it recommended reading for members of the lab and the genomics grad students I am teaching. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Genome assembly in the telomere-to-telomere era - Nature Reviews Genetics
In this Review, Li and Durbin discuss how to generate telomere-to-telomere assemblies for large haploid or diploid genomes using currently available data types and algorithms, and outline remaining ch...
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It may hold the key to Linear-P.
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Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG) @crg.eu · 21/09/2026
The CRG's 2027 PhD call is now open! We have multiple, fully-funded positions across fifteen different research groups. Successful candidates will spend four years pursuing cutting-edge questions at our labs in Barcelona. Deadline is 22 November. www.crg.eu/en/content/t...
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
del teu poema, aferrissadament clivellar pedra de silenci opac dona rèptil, dona monstre, dona drac, com el cactus, com tu, supervivent. Furgant per les llivanyes i juntures, Maria-Mercè Marçal
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Furgant per les llivanyes i juntures d’aquesta paret seca, entre mac i mac d’oblit, entre les pedres dures de cega desmemòria que endures, et sé. I em sé, en el mirall fidel
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The Public Domain Review @publicdomainrev.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
“Frustules of Diatoms”, a cyanotype from 1870 by Austrian botany professor Julius Wiesner. Diatoms are a microalgae found in oceans, waterways, and soils, and generate about 20 to 50% of the planet's oxygen. Available as a print in our online shop: publicdomainreview.org/product/f...
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
And they should be mandated to disclose it, as it’s the case with any significant industrial accident…
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Pawel Burkhardt @pawelburkhardt.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Lovely to see several pieces of our ctenophore work featured in this beautiful new story from @quantamagazine.org 🪼 Great piece by @mstarling.bsky.social, also featuring work by @stevehaddock.bsky.social, @arnausebe.bsky.social & @hejnol.bsky.social. www.quantamagazine.org/ctenophores-...
quantamagazine.org
Ctenophores Aren’t Just Beautiful. They’re Biological Wonders. | Quanta Magazine
Comb jellies are helping answer fundamental questions in biology, from how the earliest nervous systems evolved to how bioluminescence works.
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
The lovely pictures really distract from the text…
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Alexis Stamatakis @stamatak.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
The RAxML-NG v2.0 preprint is out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... v2.0 features integrated model testing, fast branch support metrics, automatic parallelization, phylogenetic difficulty prediction, genotype evolution models, to name but the most important features. And it is A LOT FASTER of course
biorxiv.org
RAxML-NG 2: Automatic model selection, novel tree search heuristics, and fast branch support metrics
RAxML-NG is a widely used tool for maximum likelihood based phylogenetic inference. In the seven years since the last RAxML-NG publication, we have continuously improved and extended the code. Here, w...
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
@ianakim.bsky.social 👀
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Shikhara Bhat @shikharabhat.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Precisely my fear for eco-evo. People often delude themselves into thinking they understand a theoretical result in eco-evo without delving into the maths because they understand the statement and think conceptual intuition is enough. Theorists are forced to do HW, AI tools encourage sidestepping it
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David Maddison @bembidion.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
The Tree of Life Web Project is back online! tolweb.org Thanks to Travis Wheeler (@wheelerlab.org), Danny Mandel, and Andrew Lenards, the original programmers for ToLWeb, for retooling the code to work on a modern OS! It is hard for me to believe it lives again.
tolweb.org
Tree of Life Web Project
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
And what a project! Congrats 🙂
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Charlotte Wright @charlottewright.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Delighted this huge team effort is out! By surveying >20,000 people from >100 countries, we used to butterflies to show that aesthetic biases distort scientific research & environmental policy. Understanding this bias is a key step towards more balanced decision-making 🦋 www.doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...
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ICRS International Coral Reef Society @icrs.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
The Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2025 report is out! 📊🪸 Peer-reviewed by ICRS, it tracks global hard coral & macroalgae cover over 44 years. ➡️ Swipe for key takeaways! 💬 What’s happening on your local reefs? Share what you see below!
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Javier del Campo @fonamental.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Coral bleaching looks like a reef-scale catastrophe. But it starts as a breakdown between single cells. Published in @microbiomej.bsky.social, led by @ambonacolta.bsky.social we watched it at that scale for the first time: the first single-cell transcriptomics of a bleaching coral 🪸 #CoralReefs
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Thibaut Brunet @thibautbrunet.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
"Practical computing for biologists" is one of the clearest textbooks I read as a student. A phylogenetic textbook by the same author is an instant must-read!
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Hear hear!
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Biodiversity Pics @biodiversitypix.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
🦤 Dodo-studiën Amsterdam, J. Müller, 1917. [Source]
Historical illustration titled "Dodo-studiën" from Amsterdam, 1917, depicting two dodo bird studies side by side. The left image is a detailed line drawing showing a plump dodo with a large curved beak, small wings, stout legs, and a tufted tail, standing on a decorative ledge. The right image is a darker, less detailed silhouette of a dodo with similar posture and features, emphasizing the bird’s rounded body and distinctive head shape. Both images highlight the extinct dodo’s unique physical traits as understood in early 20th-century ornithological studies.
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Veronika Meduna @veronikameduna.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
An abrupt glacier collapse triggered the Nepal floods. In a warming climate, the "Himalayas are especially vulnerable, because the steep slopes of many of these very tall mountains are made of permafrost", writes Levan Tielidze @monashuniversity.bsky.social theconversation.com/tsunami-of-d...
theconversation.com
Tsunami of dirt: what caused Nepal’s deadly glacial flood?
The glaciers of the Himalayas aren’t safe from climate change. The sudden collapse of a glacier looks to have triggered disaster in Nepal.
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Cate Macinnis-Ng @loraxcate.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Uh oh! www.theguardian.com/environment/...
theguardian.com
World’s oceans hit hottest temperature on record in August
Average sea surface temperature outside polar regions was 21.1C on Saturday, latest data finds
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Andy Baxevanis @baxevanislab.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
New in Cell: Corals didn't invent a new way to house their algal symbionts — they co-opted an old one. The symbiosome turns out to be built from repurposed lysosomal machinery, with one transporter (SLC26A11) essential for symbiosis. 🪸 @pcleves.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
cell.com
Co-option of lysosomal machinery shapes the evolution of the intracellular photosymbiosis supporting coral reefs
Corals harbor intracellular algal symbionts in specialized organelles that enable them to build diverse reef ecosystems. Corals and other cnidarians have repeatedly evolved this symbiosis through the ...
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Janina Rinke @jannelrinke.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Excited to share that our paper on Horizontal Gene Transfer is now out in its final form in @gigascience.bsky.social! 🥳 By analysing 163 high-quality ant genomes, we show that HGT from bacteria is widespread across the ants and likely has adaptive functions! doi.org/10.1093/giga... 🐜📸: Alex Wild
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Laura Bertola @lauradbertola.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Estimation of Contemporary and Recent Effective Population Size from Genomic Data www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
annualreviews.org
Estimation of Contemporary and Recent Effective Population Size from Genomic Data
Effective population size (Ne) is a crucial parameter in the fields of evolutionary biology, conservation biology of endangered species, and selective breeding of domestic animals and crops, as it qua...
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Daan van den Broek @daanvandenbroek.com · 19/08/2026
The worst of Europe’s extreme atmospheric heat is gone, but it certainly left a signature in the ocean. A new attribution study finds: - the current event in the Mediterranean ~2°C warmer due to antropogenic global warming. - seas off western Europe 1.3–1.4°C than without AGW.
Data visualisation of sea surface temperature anomalies from Copernicus, based on Copernicus Marine Service data for 13 August 2026. (dark) red tones indicate areas where sea surface temperatures were above the long-term average. The largest anomalies, reaching approximately 6°C above average, were recorded in the western Mediterranean Sea, particularly in the Gulf of Lion off the coast of southern France. Values above 5°C were also recorded in the Atlantic off the Iberian Peninsula. Cooler-than-average waters are visible in parts of the Aegean Sea. Source: eu-space.europa.eu.
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Rebecca R Helm @rebeccarhelm.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
“AI adoption raises homework scores by 18% and reduces completion time by 30%, but lowers monthly exam scores by 20% within six months”
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
«In this lies the biggest logical flaw of our time — the assumption of an equivalence between social behaviours and state power.»
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
«[The] left never has political power, and so its energies become trapped in the realm of culture […]. When a political movement is deprived of executive means […] it becomes trapped outside policy and exercises its power in the only venues it can. It is a feature of weakness, not strength.»
theguardian.com
Here is the news from the US: Woke 1.0 is over. But what did progressives do wrong? | Nesrine Malik
A movement with safety, dignity and equality at its heart has been blamed for the rightwing backlash. But within it were principles worth carrying forwards, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik
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Gen Wojcik @genandgenes.bsky.social · 24/04/2025
I wrote about how we must stand and fight against the threat of eugenics. Fueled by white nationalism and scientific racism, these beliefs are factually wrong and ethically abhorrent. This fight includes supporting efforts to diversify our workforce & science. To stop now would be a deep betrayal.
nature.com
Eugenics is on the rise again: human geneticists must take a stand
Scientists must push back against the threat of rising white nationalism and the dangerous and pseudoscientific ideas of eugenics.
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Sardinia is a rich but economically underdeveloped country. Its future may not lie in strong industrial development, but it can certainly be something better than a rentier economy based on tourism and ecological & social dislocation.
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Roope Kaaronen @roopekaaronen.net · 25/03/2026
Throwback to a year ago. 🪢 We asked a simple question that nonetheless had never been answered: what kinds of knots have humans tied across cultures? (How) have knots evolved over millennia? We used some fun maths (knot theory) to provide an unambiguous answer. Thread:
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
No sé si sol ser així, però en aquest contingut patrocinat no s’hi especifica qui el paga.
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Alex de Mendoza @alexdemendoza.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Sailing in @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social ready for summer, our study on the iconic Portuguese man o' war 🪼 is out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... We use (epi)genomics to understand a critter that fascinates me since childhood. Massive team effort with @obog.bsky.social, Cummins and Neely groups. 🧵
the indo-pacific bluebottle (Physalia utriculus)
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Sean Montgomery @seanamontgomery.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Glad to see this out at last! Check out Arnau's summary below for all the highlights
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Xavier Grau-Bové 🌾 @xgrau.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
And they turned out to be right, in the end…
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