Last week at #SMBE2024, grad student Hannah Verdonk presented her work on the Multiclass Synonymous Substitution (MSS) model implemented in HyPhy! Her poster detailed how MSS estimates relative rates for synonymous codons to explore selection on codon usage. Fantastic, Hannah!

Excited to have been selected to receive the This account is no longer active. from National Cancer Institute. Thank you for all the support and mentorship from Melnick Lab Chris Mason Sergei Pond

Watch Alexander G Lucaci's presentation on "Quantifying natural selection in coding sequences" given last week at the MetaSUB Research 2024 conference in Tokyo! He features application and technical description of the BUSTED and aBSREL methods. youtube.com/live/jcA_lwcGb…

Watch Hannah Verdonk's talk entitled "MSS: A codon model with Multiple classes of Synonymous Substitutions" at #Evol2024. She highlights the impact of using independent pairs of synonymous substitution rates on diverse datasets. youtu.be/X1ZQIXi9vAY?si…

1/ Genome-wide (and other) positive selection screens in genomes may be severely biased by alignment and other errors. biorxiv.org/content/10.110… we (Avery Selberg, Nathan Clark nclark.bsky.social, Maria Chikina, Anton Nekrutenko 🇺🇦, Steven Weaver, Alexander G Lucaci, Tim Sackton) propose a simple fix.

👋 For the next two weeks, we will highlight our GSEA recipients - we start with Hannah Verdonk, PhD student Temple University Hannah works on improving bioinformatic tools to account for weak selection on synonymous codon usage. 💻 More on Hannah ⬇️ and follow her: Hannah Verdonk

I'm honored to receive the Graduate Student Excellence Award and excited to present my research in Beijing this summer!

RNA Viromes of subways and other urban biomes by Alexander Lucaci! #RdRpSummit2025

I'm so grateful to be speaking alongside so many other talented graduate students! Looking forward to sharing ideas and connecting at SMBE - hope to see you there!

Recent work Ecological interactions and genomic innovation fueled the evolution of ray-finned fish endothermy science.org/doi/full/10.11…

Congrats Dr. Avery Selberg! Minus the Error: Testing for Positive Selection in the Presence of Residual Alignment Errors elifesciences.org/reviewed-prepr…

1/8 Excited to share our new paper in Science Advances! We investigated the evolution of endothermy in ray-finned fishes by integrating phylogenomics, ecomorphology, fossil occurrence, and comparative genomics across 205 marine vertebrates. 👉 science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Even more coauthors for this great paper! Carole C. Baldwin, Guillermo Ortí, Lily C. Hughes, Sergei L. Kosakovsky Pond, Ricardo Betancur and Dahiana Arcila Congrats all!! 👏👏

Glad to see Alex Lucaci sharing work built with HyPhy at EEBG 2025. Always great to see the tools in use by folks who know them inside and out.

Just now catching my breath after a fantastic #SMBE2025 a few weeks back. I’m deeply grateful to the local organizers and to Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution for the Graduate Student Excellence Award and for the chance to share my work. It was an honor to present among such brilliant researchers.