S. Lorena Ament
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loreament.bsky.social
S. Lorena Ament
@loreament.bsky.social
Evolutionary biologist interested in genomics, speciation, reproductive strategies, fungi, and biodiversity. And cats! She/her
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Happy to see this out! "Reconstructing NOD-like receptor alleles with high internal conservation in #Podospora anserina using long-read sequencing", now in ‪@microbiologysociety.org‬! 🧬

Keep reading for a simple explanation 🧵 1/n
#Fungi #Allorecognition
www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...
Reconstructing NOD-like receptor alleles with high internal conservation in Podospora anserina using long-read sequencing
NOD-like receptors (NLRs) are intracellular immune receptors that detect pathogen-associated cues and trigger defence mechanisms, including regulated cell death. In filamentous fungi, some NLRs mediat...
www.microbiologyresearch.org
I submitted this ms to a journal about a 1.5 months ago, and the status remains "Awaiting Referee Assignment". The editor says they are struggling to find a second reviewer... Are these waiting times normal? Should I offer a fresh list of potential reviewers or is that inappropriate? 💔 #postdoclife
NOD-like receptor genes evolve under diversity-enhancing mechanisms in a fungal species complex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.29.679196v1
December 12, 2025 at 9:10 AM
Reposted by S. Lorena Ament
Are you excited about pangenomics? If so, join us in Edinburgh on 8-9th June to discuss the latest methods & insights from using these approaches across biodiversity! More details here:

royalsociety.org/science-even...

Organised together with @henrylnorth.bsky.social & @joanameier.bsky.social!
Pangenomics transforms evolutionary biology | Royal Society
This Theo Murphy meeting organised by Dr Joana Meier, Dr Henry North and Dr Charlotte Wright, will showcase cutting-edge pangenome tools, applied uses of pangenomes which are transforming health and a...
royalsociety.org
December 10, 2025 at 9:15 PM
Would you say that Neurospora crassa is declining as a model organism for fungal biology?

💛 No way, that orange fun-guy is alive and well!
🔴 Yeah, not so many people work with it nowadays ...
🔵 Neuro-who?

📅 Ends: December 31, 2025, 10:03 PM UTC

📊 Show results
December 10, 2025 at 9:06 PM
Reposted by S. Lorena Ament
Whoop! New preprint has dropped - led by the amazing @trevormugoya.bsky.social. We developed a SV-calling and benchmarking platform called SaVor and test it on 1,165 Arabidopsis thaliana short read whole genomes. Do check out the paper, and try SaVor on your own data: github.com/ChabbyTMD/Sa...
December 1, 2025 at 8:53 PM
Reposted by S. Lorena Ament
A recent shift in centromere size and DNA content in Podospora pseudocomata co-occurs with the loss of a fungal genome defense system https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.02.690432v1
December 3, 2025 at 2:31 AM
Reposted by S. Lorena Ament
What if we could autocomplete DNA based on function?

Today in @Nature, we share semantic design—a strategy for function-guided design with genomic language models that leverages genomic context to create de novo genes and systems with desired functions. 🧵

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
November 19, 2025 at 4:31 PM
"When the female bugs lay their eggs, they rub the cultivated hyphae across the egg mass. The hyphae grow to envelope the eggs and physically exclude attentive parasitoid wasps until the bugs hatch."

#fungi #symbiosis
Defensive fungal symbiosis on insect hindlegs
Dinidorid stinkbugs were reported to possess a conspicuous tympanal organ on female hindlegs. In this study, we show that this organ is specialized to retain microbial symbionts rather than to perceiv...
www.science.org
November 10, 2025 at 10:05 PM
Wow O_o
Wound healing is a hallmark feature of all life, including single cells. In a new preprint, Ambika Nadkarni @biochembika.bsky.social investigates a new dimension in cellular wound healing: how cells recover AFTER the wound has been closed

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
November 10, 2025 at 9:58 PM
Reposted by S. Lorena Ament
Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp....

genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.
GitHub - hadley/genzplyr: dplyr but make it bussin fr fr no cap
dplyr but make it bussin fr fr no cap. Contribute to hadley/genzplyr development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
November 6, 2025 at 11:25 PM
Our paper was included in the Collection "Microbial Genomics of Eukaryotes" from the @microbiologysociety.org 🧬 😁

#genomics #longreadsequencing

www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/micr...
October 24, 2025 at 6:55 PM
Wooo!
NOD-like receptor genes evolve under diversity-enhancing mechanisms in a fungal species complex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.29.679196v1
October 1, 2025 at 5:47 AM
Reposted by S. Lorena Ament
How do species diverge? Could the relative immobility of plants increase their likelihood of speciating in the same place?🧵
September 22, 2025 at 2:11 PM
Reposted by S. Lorena Ament
Hybridization and introgression are major evolutionary processes. Since the 1940s, the prevailing view has been that they shape plants far more than animals. In our new study (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
), we find the opposite: animals exchange genes more, and for longer, than plants
September 12, 2025 at 7:55 AM
"Rapid establishment of species barriers in plants compared with that in animals" by Monnet et al
#Speciation

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Rapid establishment of species barriers in plants compared with that in animals
Speciation, the process by which new reproductively isolated species emerge from ancestral populations, results from the gradual accumulation of barriers to gene flow within genomes. To date, the noti...
www.science.org
September 12, 2025 at 7:34 AM
I think their point is “they occur more in the populations where they are adaptive”, which makes me uncomfortable haha. Having said, I haven’t read the paper carefully and I didn’t understand their method on a quick scan.
September 6, 2025 at 11:24 AM
Reposted by S. Lorena Ament
What causes viral transmission bottlenecks? This study uses barcoded virions to show that in the case of #influenza A #virus, early within-host replication dynamics (rather than a reduced inoculum population) drive loss of diversity during transmission @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4ngicDK
September 3, 2025 at 7:52 AM
Reposted by S. Lorena Ament
🌎👩‍🔬 For 15+ years biology has accumulated petabytes (million gigabytes) of🧬DNA sequencing data🧬 from the far reaches of our planet.🦠🍄🌵

Logan now democratizes efficient access to the world’s most comprehensive genetics dataset. Free and open.

doi.org/10.1101/2024...
September 3, 2025 at 8:39 AM
Reposted by S. Lorena Ament
Check out our new paper on adopting a trait-based framework for protist diversity! We make the case for a unified protist trait database, how to build it, and how it could transform research on protist ecology and evolution.
#protistsonsky
Hello there 🦋
Happy to share our piece "Towards a trait-based framework for protist ecology and evolution" in @cp-trendsmicrobiol.bsky.social

Let's build a unified trait 📏 database to unlock transformative insights into protist 🔬 ecology 🌍 and evolution ⏳

▶️ doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

#protistsonsky
September 3, 2025 at 8:47 AM
Sclerotina and its weird-ass arrangement of different chromosomes in two separate nuclei still follow normal meiosis, it turns out.

#fungi #meiosis

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Normal meiosis in the fungus Sclerotinia sclerotiorum despite the irregular distribution of haploid chromosomes between two nuclei - Nature Communications
The fungus Sclerotinia sclerotiorum distributes its 16 chromosomes irregularly between two nuclei within single ascospore cells. Here, the authors show that chromosomal segregation and genetic recombi...
www.nature.com
August 27, 2025 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by S. Lorena Ament
I'm super bummed to be missing #ESEB2025 @eseb2025.bsky.social due to a cancelled flight! Here's a quick overview of my talk "Gene- and genome-focused perspectives on microbial pangenomes" slated to be part of The Evolution of Microbial Pangenomes -- which I recommend you attend tomorrow (Fri) !
1/n
August 21, 2025 at 4:57 PM