Vincent CASTRIC
@vincentcastric.bsky.social
1.3K followers 480 following 61 posts
Evolutionary biologist @CNRS - European citizen 🇪🇺.
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Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
cygnusplantxray.bsky.social
I'm frequently asked if we can use XRM imaging to study Arabidopsis, and the answer is absolutely yes. The pollen grains were segmented using basic grayscale thresholding. This scan used the 4X lens, stayed tuned for results from the 20X.
@danforthcenter.bsky.social
@zeiss-microscopy.bsky.social
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
molbioevol.bsky.social
The MBE Best Student Paper award of 2024 goes to Julien Joseph (winner) and William S. Henriques (runner-up).

👏 Congratulations Julien and William for this recognition of your amazing work!

Check below for details on their research ⬇️
MBE Best Student Paper of 2024 award | Julien Joseph (Winner), William S. Henriques (Honorable mention)
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
crick.ac.uk
We're now recruiting early career group leaders at the Crick to lead ambitious research programmes and explore bold scientific questions.

Hear our Director, Edith Heard, explain why the Crick is a unique place for curiosity-driven research.

Apply now ➡️ www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
ewanbirney.bsky.social
A reminder that the PhD program for EMBL is open for winter recruitment round. If you want to understand life at a molecular level and have a quantitative science (you don't have to have done biology - we love our mathematicians/physcists/chemists!) apply www.embl.org/about/info/e...
Application – EMBL International PhD Programme
www.embl.org
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
jevbio.bsky.social
📣CALL FOR PAPERS!

Upcoming SPECIAL ISSUE: Evolution at species range edges

Guest Edited by Shengman Liu, John Pannell and Sophie Karrenberg

More information here: academic.oup.com/jeb/pages/ca...
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
jdmanthey.bsky.social
Our paper on the temporal genomics of Ethiopian birds
has been highlighted (and gotten the cover) in @genomebiolevol.bsky.social
Article: doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf163
Highlight: doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf175

w/ @bourgeoisyann.bsky.social, @lcampillo.bsky.social, and others not on bsky
Genome Biology and Evolution October 2025 cover image with a photo of an Ethiopian White-eye.
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
sheilateves.bsky.social
How does a “universal” transcription factor evolve to do species-specific jobs?
Our new preprint reveals how divergence in TBP’s domains shapes transcriptional specialization across eukaryotes.

Read it here 👉

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#MolecularEvolution #Transcription
Molecular determinants underlying functional divergence of TBP homologs
The TATA-box binding protein (TBP) is a highly conserved basal transcription factor and a core component of the pre-initiation complex (PIC) for all three eukaryotic RNA polymerases (RNA Pols). Despit...
www.biorxiv.org
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
speciationlab.bsky.social
dominance, epistasis, pleiotropy
three american football commentators sit at a table. their fashion sense is wildly diverse.
vincentcastric.bsky.social
rimaanabtawi.bsky.social
But, of course, the fuckwits.

Dame Sarah Mullally makes history as the first female Archbishop of Canterbury and the Sky news headline fails to name her but it’s ok, her husband is named.
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
tanjaslotte.bsky.social
*Postdoc in Evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University*
We are recruiting a postdoc for a large interdisciplinary project to investigate evolutionary drivers and genomic consequences of pollen evolution in response to pollination mode shifts in flowering plants. 1/5

su.varbi.com/what:job/job...
Purple pollen visible in a dissected flower of Linum grandiflorum, flowering flax, an insect-pollinated species.
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
pauldufour80.bsky.social
🚨 Master’s project!
Curious how birds find their way? 🧭🐦
Analyze decades of ringing data to study abnormal migratory routes and uncover what these deviations can reveal about the mechanisms guiding birds on their journeys. Drop me an email for details! #ornithology

www.vogelwarte.ch/de/wir/mitar...
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
philipcball.bsky.social
But I suspect that's not the common picture folks get of stuff like this - we think the protein is changed, rather than its regulation. Yet as we now know, it's very common for selection in metazoans actually to act via regulatory change. This is a neat example. 8/8
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
xian-chang.bsky.social
🦒Long read giraffe is out!🦒
Mapping long reads to pangenome graphs is ~10x faster than with GraphAligner, with veeery slightly better mapping accuracy, short variant calling, and SV genotyping than GraphAligner or Minimap2
biorxiv-bioinfo.bsky.social
Rapid, accurate long- and short-read mapping to large pangenome graphs with vg Giraffe https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.29.678807v1
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
gpotente.bsky.social
New preprint! In collaboration with @ergabiodiv.bsky.social, we explored the convergent #evolution of the S-locus #supergene controlling distyly in the #primrose family.

Link: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

#heterostyly #genomics #preprint #bioRxiv
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
mariemonniaux.bsky.social
Wow this is quite amazing - I know almost nothing on recombination, but always assumed that the more similar the sequences were, the more likely they would recombine, turns out it's the opposite!
chloegirard.bsky.social
🚨 First pre-print from my team !!

TL;DR: presence of polymorphism (sequence differences between the homologous chromosomes) can *increase* the local rate of recombination in Arabidopsis thaliana, turning cold regions of the genome hot (purple v. grey) !
The recombination frequency (cM/Mb) along chromosome 4 of A. thaliana (female meiosis). 

In full hybrids (grey), where polymorphism is distributed all along chromosomes, most crossovers occur in the regions surrounding the Centromere (Cen), and very few at chromosome ends (Tel: telomeres). 

In lines where polymorphism is restricted to chromosome ends (purple), the local recombination rate increases drastically, at the expense of the non-polymorphic regions (yellow).
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
official-smbe.bsky.social
🔁 Please share - we remind the SMBE community that the Call for Symposia for SMBE2026 in Copenhagen is open.

We invite you to submit a symposium proposal to help shape the scientific content of our annual meeting.

🗓️ Deadline: October 15th

More information: smbe2026.org/symposia

#SMBE2026
SMBE2026 | Final call for symposia
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
julien-bobroff.bsky.social
Nouveau hors série du Monde sur la quantique qu'on vient de sortir avec la formidable illustratice Camille Debard. Il est en kiosque, courrez l'acheter, vous y découvrirez toute la physique quantique, ses bases et ses dernières actus, illustrées avec... plein de petits chats, forcément ! @lemonde.fr
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
anurag-asclepias.bsky.social
The American searocket,
Cakile edentula, a sand loving semi-succulent #Brassicaceae. I knew this plant from the west coast; here on the shores of lake Ontario. Fruits have two-parts, one that breaks off and floats for water dispersal. immature silliques are edible, like radish pods
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC
Do you know ~60% of human SVs fall in ~1% of GRCh38? See our new preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2509.23057 and the companion blog post on how we started this project and longdust: lh3.github.io/2025/09/29/o.... Work with Alvin Qin
vincentcastric.bsky.social
Very happy to announce that the next POPGROUP meeting will take place in Lille on 7-9 January !

Follow ‪@popgroup2026.bsky.social for all updates.

📢 Please share widely ! 📢‬
popgroup2026.bsky.social
Exciting news!
The next #PopGroup meeting will take place in Lille 🍟, France, 7–9 January 2026 – just 1 hour by train from London, Brussels, and Paris.

This year, PopGroup will also host ALPHY, the annual meeting of Evolutionary Genomics.

More info: populationgeneticsgroup.org.uk

See you there !
Population Genetics group 59
populationgeneticsgroup.org.uk
Reposted by Vincent CASTRIC