Incredible! Inducing #endosymbiosis reveals the mechanisms & challenges of this process🧫🍄 Implanting bacteria into a #fungus shows how adaptive #evolution can stabilize host-#bacteria interactions and lead to functional metabolic transfers

It looks like I never posted anything (*but see below) on what are probably the most surprising results my lab obtained so far. Anyway, this work—led by an outstanding former PhD student Sarah Ardell in collaboration with Milo Johnson—is now published: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

ONE microscopy not only allows 3D reconstructions of protein molecules but also reveals details in GABAA receptors that X-ray crystallography and cryo-EM missed, yet AlphaFold predicted. More here: nature.com/articles/s4158… Nature Biotechnology. Our GABAA receptor work owes everything to

Yann LeCun Sebastian S. Cocioba🪄🌷 Although you don't cite our critical paper (same time) where we showed you could fold into correct 3D structural topology from the inferred contacts. This is the paper showed the power and gave a nice strong premise for developing AF - journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…

A Suite of Foundation Models Captures the Contextual Interplay Between Codons biorxiv.org/content/10.110… In the canonical genetic code, many amino acids are assigned more than one codon. Work by us and others has shown that the choice of these synonymous codon is not random, and

The genetic architecture of protein interaction affinity and specificity nature.com/articles/s4146… by Guillaume Diss @AlexBendel_ + Andre Faure @ajfaure.bsky.social

DateLife: Leveraging Databases and Analytical Tools to Reveal the Dated Tree of Life academic.oup.com/sysbio/article… Society of Systematic Biologists

Proud mentor moment: PhD candidate diler haji was interviewed for the Tiny Matters podcast about his work on co-evolution—from “the age of the dinosaurs” to “gaba receptors and terpenes.” He did such a terrific job! You can listen here: open.spotify.com/episode/6dMx6F…

We've open sourced Google DeepMind's SynthID, a tool that allows model creators to embed and detect watermarks in text outputs from their own LLMs. More details published in nature today: nature.com/articles/s4158…

Cool to see a rather convincing case of macroevolutionary morphological-biomechanic trend caused by the arms race of giant cicadas and the earliest birds during the Jurassic-Cretaceous transition: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… cc: opit

A tree stump and human finger print

My entire team wrote an opinion paper about Common misconceptions of speciation research. Each section is written by 1-2 team members. The bulk of the writing happened during two writing retreats. It was a lot of fun and I am very happy with the result. academic.oup.com/evolinnean/art…

New paper! Exploring the interaction between two convergent lizards who evolved separately on different Caribbean islands and were introduced to south Florida. Read all about how character displacement could play out in real time in the wild! 🦎🦎🦎 nature.com/articles/s4146…

The Evo 1 paper is now published!

Could one envision a synthetic receptor technology that is fully programmable, able to detect diverse extracellular antigens – both soluble and cell-attached – and convert that recognition into a wide range of intracellular responses, from transgene expression and real-time

🚨April Wei and colleagues present the Genotype Representation Graph (GRG), a compact data structure that encodes 200,000 human genomes in just 5-26 GB per chromosome and allows efficient genome wide analysis. nature.com/articles/s4358… 🔓rdcu.be/d2wSa

マレーシア•サバ州の✨セミ✨

Excited to report that Joy Bergelson (bergelsonlab.org) and I will be running a brand new GRC conference on the Function of Evolving Systems in the summer of 2026. The 2028 one will be chaired by Mikhail Tikhonov (physics.wustl.edu/people/mikha...) & Alvaro Sanchez Lab! Stay tuned!

It was spring 2020. I was a professor and had recently learned I’d successfully been awarded early tenure. At the tail end of a series of talks at other universities, a colleague had invited me to give a seminar at a stellar department that was an unusually great fit for my

Today in nature we report a systematic strategy to activate & identify gene sets in plants. We identify 8 new genes from the yew tree's Taxol biosynthetic pathway, enabling us to engineer tobacco with 17- & 20-gene pathways to Taxol precursors baccatin III and dBz-deoxy-Taxol. a