For the second year I'll be running Sciencebatter as part of Stoneybatter Pride of Place festival #dublin
Sat 20th June 12-2 with interactive science from 11!
1/ New paper out in Nature Communications!
We studied the salivary amylase gene, AMY1, in Indigenous Andean populations and found evidence that high AMY1 copy number rapidly increased in frequency, likely through recent positive selection.
doi.org/10.1038/s414...
bbc.com/audio/brand/...
Now free for all archaea lovers to hear!
The salivary amylase gene exhibits copy-number variation linked to dietary shifts. Here, the authors describe an adaptive expansion of the amylase gene in Indigenous Andean populations coinciding with...
Postdoctoral job announcement: come to Cambridge and work on population genetic modelling with environmental and ancient DNA, jointly with @gamzeandgursoy.bsky.social and me. Details at www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/55580/ - applications by June 16th.
This is awful to hear, describing how Sean Eddy (HMMER, infernal, pfam, rfam) has been defunded. The letter said his work
"had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated,"
www.npr.org/2026/05/21/n...
Research Associate in Population Genetics Modelling and Environmental DNA (Fixed Term) in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.
www.jobs.cam.ac.uk
Even with federal grants largely restored, scientists say the Trump administration is still preventing those funds from reaching them. The consequences, they say, are already becoming clear.
One week left to apply to join us in sunny Montpellier as a group leader!
Kevin Daly
A scary new move against science and towards autocracy: OMB wants to grab the power to approve or cancel any and all federal grants, at the whim of its Director, Russell Vought: stevensalzberg.substack.com/p/a-dangerou...
We now have genome browsers on our UCSC mirror at genome.senckenberg.de for the 1033 mammal and 866 bird assemblies, showing spliceAi, reference-based and ref-integrated TOGA2 tracks.
Tables with links to all browsers are genome.senckenberg.de/TOGA2Mammali... & genome.senckenberg.de/TOGA2Aves.html
sPYce is now published in Nature Ecology and Evolution!
sPYce is a method to integrate single-cell regulatory data across species, without requiring whole-genome alignments between species.
More below ⬇️
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Aylwyn Scally
Buzz Baum
Now out in Genome Medicine link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Work led by the brilliant Elle Loughran (not on bsky) on the evolution of hypodiploid tumours, who is heading to Montpellier this week to start a postdoc with @aline-muyle.bsky.social!
The new rules proposed by Trump's henchman Russell Vought would destroy US science
This paper presents sPYce, a method that integrates single-nucleus ATAC-seq data across species, allowing for comparison of gene regulatory evolution across species.
