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Victor A. Albert

@plantgenomes.bsky.social

670 followers 250 following 59 posts

Professor, University at Buffalo | plant genomes, polyploidy, organismal radiations, phylo/population genomics, carnivorous plants, holocentric chromosomes, evolution of biosynthetic gene clusters; https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=dLniyH0AAAAJ& .. more

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Victor A. Albert @plantgenomes.bsky.social · Feb 20

Sea sandwort (Honckenya peploides) genome update - first Nanopore flow cell looking pretty good. Dormant shoots were collected from under beach sand in Denmark. A salt tolerant species that was the first plant to appear on the volcanic island Surtsey (Iceland), which erupted out of the sea in 1963.

Reposted by Michael D. Petraglia, Victor A. Albert

Chris Stringer @chrisbstringer.bsky.social · Jan 1

Archaeologists Stunned by 115,000-Year-Old Human Footprint Discovery in the Most Unexpected Place
dailygalaxy.com/2024/12/1150...

Archaeologists Stunned by 115,000-Year-Old Human Footprint Discovery in the Most Unexpected Place

Deep in the sands of the Arabian Peninsula, scientists unearthed an ancient lakebed harboring a secret that could transform our understanding of human history. Human footprints, preserved for over 115...

dailygalaxy.com

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Reposted by Victor A. Albert

Mike Barker @barkerms.bsky.social · May 11

Looking forward to the Jacques Monod Conference on polyploidy this September in Roscoff, France! Registration is open until May 19! #polyploidy

cjm.sb-roscoff.fr/en/conferenc...

Evolutionary and ecological genomics of polyploidy in plants: temporal dynamics across scales of biological organization from molecules to ecosystems | CNRS - Conférences Jacques Monod (CJM)

cjm.sb-roscoff.fr

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Victor A. Albert @plantgenomes.bsky.social · May 10

See Derek Taylor’s and my eLetter in #Science critiquing the #proteomic evidence ostensibly supporting the Penghu 1 mandible as a #Denisovan - at the end of www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Reposted by Victor A. Albert

Jonathan Wendel @jonathanfwendel.bsky.social · May 7

Polyploidy Conference: www.insb.cnrs.fr/fr/evolution...
Registration deadline is fast approaching! (May 19th)

Evolutionary and ecological genomics of polyploidy in plants: temporal dynamics across scales of biological organization from molecules to ecosystems

Roscoff (Bretagne), France, September 15-19, 2025Deadline for application: May 5, 2025

www.insb.cnrs.fr

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Victor A. Albert @plantgenomes.bsky.social · Apr 7

Our paper on a chromosome-level genome of the carnivorous #butterwort plant #Pinguicula gigantea and other species is now published on bioRxiv ! Exciting to get this project close to done 😀 See the preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Reposted by Victor A. Albert

👻Sewall Fright🎃 @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · Mar 22

Cool new work! Some lineages experiencing ancient whole-genome duplications seem to hold on to their duplicate genes for a really long time & keep accumulating homoeologous exchange events! Runs counter to early models where gene loss is expected to be rapid post-WGD academic.oup.com/gbe/advance-...

A class of allopolyploidy showing high duplicate retention and continued homoeologous exchanges

Abstract. We describe four ancient polyploidy events where the descendant taxa retain many more duplicated gene copies than has been seen in other paleopol

academic.oup.com

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Reposted by Victor A. Albert

NPR @npr.org · Feb 26

The plant, formally known as Ovicula biradiata, is especially notable for being the simultaneous discovery of a new species and genus. It was found with help from the community science app iNaturalist. By @jamesdoubek.bsky.social

Meet the 'wooly devil,' a new plant species discovered in Big Bend National Park

www.npr.org

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Reposted by Victor A. Albert

bioRxiv Plant Bio @biorxiv-plants.bsky.social · Feb 23

Triploidy is prominent in the duckweed Lemna minor complex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.18.638736v1

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Reposted by Victor A. Albert

John Hawks @johnhawks.net · Feb 21

Looking at new criticism and response of an argument for selection in ancient DNA data, I reflected on the huge extent that immunity now matters in our understanding of human evolution.

johnhawks.net/weblog/anoth...

Another look at selection and the Black Death

An exchange of comments probes the story of the EPAS2 gene, balancing selection, and resistance to Yersinia pestis.

johnhawks.net

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Reposted by Victor A. Albert

Chris Stringer @chrisbstringer.bsky.social · Feb 19

Tracing human ancestors back a million years www.newscientist.com/video/246925...

Chris Stringer is tracing human ancestors back a million years

Chris Stringer is tracing human ancestors back a million years, but pinpointing when exactly Homo sapiens emerged is even more complex

www.newscientist.com

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Victor A. Albert @plantgenomes.bsky.social · Feb 14

FYI, we run PSMCs against self-Masurca assemblies of Illumina reads, as well as against our reference genome. Clermontia spp. are rather poorly divergent which makes the reference genome approach OK, so long as coverage OK. Mapping Cyanea, Delissea and Brighamia to Clermontia not advisable ;)

Victor A. Albert @plantgenomes.bsky.social · Feb 14

Will be happy to talk shop w you about other findings we have .. trees, PCAs, F3 analyses, NeighborNet (all of these just complementary w each other and ADMIXTURE) .. but also PSMCs

Victor A. Albert @plantgenomes.bsky.social · Feb 14

Here’s the other - needs some manual adjustments tho. This work done by expert PhD student Michaela Richter 😀

Victor A. Albert @plantgenomes.bsky.social · Feb 14

Here’s one haplotype .. 14 chrs

Victor A. Albert @plantgenomes.bsky.social · Feb 14

Still working on it! We just generated two new assemblies - phased haplotypes - using HifiAsm with the ONT flag plus our HiC reads. Such a big step means we need to re-call our SNPs .. on both haplotypes, independently

Reposted by Victor A. Albert

Andrew Hipp @andrewlhipp.bsky.social · Feb 12

Here, a celebration of Apocynaceae (dogbanes, milkweeds, swallow-worts etc.) fruits and flowers tucked into a phylogenetic study. Remarkable diversity.

www.frontiersin.org/journals/eco...

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Reposted by Victor A. Albert

Chris Stringer @chrisbstringer.bsky.social · Feb 12

Rapid evolution of prehistoric dogs from wolves by natural and sexual selection emerges from an agent-based model | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Rapid evolution of prehistoric dogs from wolves by natural and sexual selection emerges from an agent-based model | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Wolves are among the earliest animals to be domesticated. However, the mechanism by which ancient wolves were domesticated into modern dogs is unknown. Most of the prevailing domestication hypotheses ...

royalsocietypublishing.org

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Reposted by Victor A. Albert

Nature @nature.com · Feb 12

Giant ground sloths? Armadillos?

Who - or what - cut these ancient sandstone tunnels in Brazil?

Read the full story: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A man wearing a hard hat shines a torch at the inner wall of a sandstone tunnel. The tunnel is covered in scratches

Three people face away from the camera, shining torches on the inside of tunnel walls. One of the people points towards something on the wall

Two people crouch inside a sandstone tunnel, one of them points towards the inner wall. They are both wearing hard hats.

A photograph taken from the inside of the mouth of a tunnel. Outside the tunnel, we see green foliage.

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Reposted by Victor A. Albert

Matthew Hahn @3rdreviewer.bsky.social · Feb 10

New paper led by @glom.bsky.social!

"Unprecedented female female bias in the aye-aye, a highly unusual lemur from Madagascar"

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journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

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Reposted by Victor A. Albert

PLOS Biology @plosbiology.org · Feb 10

Aye-ayes are clearly unusual, but @glom.bsky.social @3rdreviewer.bsky.social &co show that they also have an unusual pattern of #MutationBias; older females transmit more mutations than males. This is a first for mammals, raising questions about other #lemurs 🧪 @plosbiology.org plos.io/40SR4kj

Top: A picture of the aye-aye named Elphaba. Image credit: David Haring, Duke Lemur Center. Bottom: Pedigree structure of the aye-ayes used in this study. The 18 individuals sequenced in this study are shown: males as squares and females as circles. Two individuals (IDs 100937 and 100935) appear multiple places in the pedigree, each time connected by a dashed line. Elphaba is at the bottom right.

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Reposted by Victor A. Albert

John Hawks @johnhawks.net · Feb 9

The discovery that Africa is the birthplace of human evolution: Marking 100 years since Australopithecus africanus transformed our understanding.

www.nature.com/articles/d44...

The discovery that Africa is the birthplace of human evolution

Marking 100 years since Australopithecus Africanus transformed our understanding.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Victor A. Albert

Chris Stringer @chrisbstringer.bsky.social · Feb 9

The Archaeology of Cannibalism: a Review of the Taphonomic Traits Associated with Survival and Ritualistic Cannibalism link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The Archaeology of Cannibalism: a Review of the Taphonomic Traits Associated with Survival and Ritualistic Cannibalism - Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory

Taphonomic studies of osteoarchaeological human assemblages have mainly focused on establishing recognisable markers that allow us to discriminate between humanly induced modifications from natural ca...

link.springer.com

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Reposted by Victor A. Albert

Annals of Botany @annbot.bsky.social · Feb 9

🎉🆕📰🎉: Phylogenomic analysis of target enrichment and transcriptome data uncovers rapid radiation and extensive hybridization in the slipper orchid genus Cypripedium

doi.org

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Victor A. Albert @plantgenomes.bsky.social · Jan 18

The Droseraceae issue arises if one wants a monophyletic Drosera

Victor A. Albert @plantgenomes.bsky.social · Jan 18

The NeighborNet doesn’t help much to discern admixture vs other sources of homoplasy; it’s a summary of all splits that may imply any source incongruence. It does reflect the admixture graph in this case. Also in the Stachys/Hawaiian mint case I posted

Victor A. Albert @plantgenomes.bsky.social · Jan 18

Oops, I meant is Nepenthes a monophyletic taxon sister to Droso/Triphyo+Ancistro or is it paraphyletic to Droso/Triphyo+Ancistro .. both. Sorry 😬

Victor A. Albert @plantgenomes.bsky.social · Jan 16

For example, in this study I’ll be publishing soon, what is the monophyletic taxon to which Nepenthes belongs? Nepenthes itself is monophyletic - but does it form a clade with Drosophyllum/Triphyophyllum+Ancistrocladus, or a clade with “Droseraceae”? Neither. A NeighborNet reveals the same

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Victor A. Albert @plantgenomes.bsky.social · Jan 16

Panel (a) here shows why the NeighborNet in panel (e) is the way it is - tree-defying allopolyploidies. In fact, any new phylogenomics study (e.g., based on Angiosperm353 loci) that includes allopolyploids .. and that publishes only trees… is, sadly, immediately “wrong”

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Victor A. Albert @plantgenomes.bsky.social · Jan 16

Please don’t 100% ignore this paper because of its NeighborNet 🥹😅 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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