[Please share widely]
Come work at the U. of Oslo. We are advertising a 3-year postdoc in Evolutionary and Comparative Genomics. If working with plant evolution in the Galápagos, pangenome and structural variants sounds exciting for you - this may be your chance!

https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/277333/postdoctoral-research-fellow-in-evolutionary-and-comparative-genomics

One thing I appreciate about 'modern times' is that we are emphasizing kindness more: we should be kinder reviewers, colleagues etc.

This also opens the door for 'signaling', and it makes me disappointed seeing people copy-pasting AI mumbo-jumbo under 'lab values' on websites.

... and found that for larger orders, there are very Scalesia-specific TE clusters when compared to the outgroup.

TL;DR

No evidence for TE release in hybrid pops
No evidence for TE control in different climatic niches

Why?
These are very TE-rich genomes ( 80% of the genome are TEs), perhaps they hit some cap.
Removing individual TEs from genomes may not confer a selective advantage when genomes are large.

Thank you for reading!

When clustering TEs and making an upset plot (a Venn diagram), we find that most clusters are present in every species, and a minority is species-specific (Fig 03).

We found little variation in TE counts on the genomes when considering super families (Fig 04).

When looking at transposable element accumulation through time we find that all - but a single individual - hav esimilar TE accumulation dynamics through time.

TL; DR No variation in time of accumulation

In this paper we test two hypotheses:
- Whether hybrid populations have more TEs than non-hybrid populations (genome shock hypothesis)
- Whether lineages in different climatic niches have different TE compositions (arid species may have selective pressures to reduce genome size)

We focused on Scalesia, an adaptive radiation on the Galápagos with variation in ecological niches (zones) and soils.

We observe no differences in terms of TE classes when doing comparative phylogenomics.

📰🧬🔛 New pre-print on transposable element (#TEs) evolution, #Galápagos, and #Scalesia.

"Genomic stability in the Galapagos Scalesia adaptive radiation: Consistent transposable element accumulation despite hybridization and ecological niche shifts"

📎🎓PhD Research Fellow in Evolutionary Genomics and Island Biology at the Univ of Oslo to work w/ me

All info you need to know is here:

https://jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/268466/phd-research-fellow-in-evolutionary-genomics-and-island-biology

Read more about us and what we're doing here http://islandevolution.github.io

>> Please retoot << Thank you

Very happy to announce that the Research Council of Norway has awarded me a 'Young Researcher Talent' grant to work on diversification dynamics and genomics of Galápagos plants.

If you're excited about this, there will be a PhD position out soon.

Here's DALLE's depict of the work

No specific accumulation of TEs through time (using genetic divergence as a proxy for time).

No specific accumulation of TE families (y-axis) on different species (x-axis).

Using comparative phylogenetics we found no specific accumulation of repeats or TEs across lineages.

However, we did not find an association between TE accumulation and the phylogeny of Tetragnatha.

Hawai'i is a natural laboratory, with its islands being arranged by age.

We tested whether populations of spiders in islands had more and/or younger TEs.

We expected this as colonization of novel areas results from bottlenecks, which in turn can diminish the power of selection.

New paper 📰

Consistent accumulation of transposable elements in species of the Hawaiian Tetragnatha spiny-leg adaptive radiation across the archipelago chronosequence

https://academic.oup.com/evolinnean/article/3/1/kzae005/7681133

Join us for a one-day symposium on "Perspectives on Speciation" at the Linnean Society of London on 11 April 2024 or online. We also have a special issue on speciation on the Evolutionary Journal of the Linnean Society.

All info
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/perspectives-on-speciation-hybrid-meeting-tickets-728342330517

👨🏽‍💻🧬🪶 We have a PhD opportunity available in Oslo with @markravinet - Repeated thermal adaptation, ecological genomics, house sparrows.

Excellent system / lab / department / team / salary.

Please help us reaching candidates by retooting 🔀 :)

https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/257247/phd-research-fellow-in-evolutionary-ecology-genomics

New paper 🌻

Fruit wings accelerate germination in Anacyclus clavatus

https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajb2.16272

The presence of lateral membranous expansions in fruits, conveniently named wings, is thought to aid dispersal. We show that it accelerates germination by increasing water absorption

This work was done with the collaboration of multiple peeps. It used low-coverage illumina data, not shiny genomes were used! This was done thanks to
@clementgoubert 's brilliant pipeline, dnaPipeTE, and thanks to his constant support :)

The % of young TEs was even across volcanos.

This shows that population fluctuations (expected in island populations which frequently undergo bottlenecks) did not change te TE landscape on the genome :)