Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Joseph Guhlin

WA Orchids @wa-orchids.bsky.social · 11h

Research into orchid seed germination shows the importance of deadwood and wood-decaying fungi: 🪵🪾🍄🍄‍🟫

“For conservation, our results mean that protecting orchids in the wild is inseparable from protecting deadwood and its fungi”
#orchids #fungi #nativeplants #germination

John Holmes @jhaue.bsky.social · 11h

Deadwood brings wild orchids to life: Study uncovers important carbon flux in the ecosystem phys.org/news/2025-10... via @physorg_com

Deadwood brings wild orchids to life: Study uncovers important carbon flux in the ecosystem

Orchid seeds are as small as dust and do not provide any nutrients for the young plant to grow. The adult plants are known to rely on a certain type of fungi that develop structures within the plant's...

phys.org

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Reposted by Joseph Guhlin

April Wei @aprilwei.bsky.social · 19h

Excited to preprint our latest work (w/ Drew DeHaas, Zhibai Jia, Leo Speidel) on using ARGs for demographic inference. w/ applications using data from 1000 Genomes Project. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Inference of complex demographic history using composite likelihood based on whole-genome genealogies

Accurate parametric inference on complex demographic models is a continuing challenge in population genetics. Ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs) provide richer information than simple population ge...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Joseph Guhlin

Rob Patro @robp.bsky.social · 18h

Have you recently completed (or finishing soon) a PhD in CS or a related discipline? Do you want to do research advancing the theory & practice of algorithmic genomics & build tools that people love to use? I'll be looking to hire a postdoc! Official ad coming soon:
docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Postdoc Description.docx

Title: Postdoctoral Associate Summary statement: The postdoctoral research associate is responsible for developing novel computational methodology for high-throughput sequence genomics tasks, as well ...

docs.google.com

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Reposted by Joseph Guhlin

Alex Crits-Christoph @acritschristoph.bsky.social · 2d

The full language is even worse, asking to ban gene drives and microbes as well. Would exclude work like this on modified mosquitoes: www.npr.org/2024/01/26/1...

I love the IUCN, but also, they have no political authority, this is just a suggestion. Not a good one though!

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Joseph Guhlin @josephguhlin.bsky.social · 7d

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

Bridging forward-in-time and coalescent simulations using pyslim

Ancestral Recombination Graphs (ARGs) provide an expressive and compact way to represent genetic variation data generated by simulations embedded within its genealogical history, and it can dramatical...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Joseph Guhlin

Chris Martine | Plants are Cool, Too! @martinebotany.bsky.social · 7d

Excited to begin the search for the next (6th) Burpee Post-Doctoral Fellow in Botany here in my lab at Bucknell! Funded research and teacher-scholar training embedded in the primarily undergraduate institution (#PUI) environment.

#iamabotanist

Details (+ application portal) here:

lnkd.in/eVsbe7K5

Photos of past Burpee postdocs with some of our great students at Bucknell.

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Reposted by Joseph Guhlin

Maria Akopyan, PhD @akopyan.bsky.social · 16d

Now published in Cell! We found that ~15% of SNPs from divergent refs did not liftover as SNPs in the gray fox ref—half mapped to monomorphic sites, half failed to map. Co-authored with Matthew Genchev, @elliecat.bsky.social, and @jazlynmooney.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Reposted by Joseph Guhlin

Gaurav Sablok - I will immediately accept submitted job offer @omicscode.bsky.social · 18d

I saw previously the useR extendr package for RUST 🦀 integration and these links are very good m.youtube.com/watch?v=tRm-... and www.ericburden.work/blog/2021/04... and blog.schochastics.net/posts/2025-0... . I went through all and these are enough for having a clear understanding.

R and Rust - getting started with extendr

YouTube video by Josiah Parry

m.youtube.com

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Reposted by Joseph Guhlin

Laura Bertola @lauradbertola.bsky.social · 22d

Accelerated Bayesian inference of population size history from recombining sequence data
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Accelerated Bayesian inference of population size history from recombining sequence data - Nature Genetics

Population history learning by averaging sampled histories is a new Bayesian method for estimating historical effective population size from recombining sequence data that offers improved speed and ac...

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Joseph Guhlin

Hui Zhen Tan @huizhentan.bsky.social · Sep 3

Genomic imputation can boost dataset quality and benefit research on wild populations. In hihi, we found high #imputation accuracies despite a small reference panel of high-fecundity individuals. Imputation improves downstream #ConservationGenomics analyses. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

High Imputation Accuracy Can Be Achieved Using a Small Reference Panel in a Natural Population With Low Genetic Diversity

Genotype imputation, the inference of missing genotypes using a reference set of population haplotypes, is a cost-effective tool for improving the quality and quantity of genetic datasets. Imputation...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Anna Santure @annasanture.bsky.social · 24d

Fabulous presentation to Forest & Bird Youth Auckland by @huizhentan.bsky.social on conservation management and genetic research for hihi, a taonga (precious) threatened bird species in Aotearoa New Zealand. VIP treatment for a very special bird!

PhD student Hui Zhen presents a slide titled 'A day in the life of a VIP hihi', with images highlighting the conservation management of this precious endangered bird species

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Piotr Ziolkowski @piotraz.bsky.social · Sep 2

Breaking genetics news‼️🌱🌽 A natural DNA trick triples recombination in maize. What we first saw in Arabidopsis (@hendersi lab) a decade ago is now confirmed in crops—opening new doors for plant breeding. Published today in Nature Plants! More details 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Enhancing local meiotic crossovers in Arabidopsis and maize through juxtaposition of heterozygous and homozygous regions - Nature Plants

This study discovered that locally confined DNA differences boost crossover rates in both Arabidopsis and maize, revealing a conserved mechanism that can accelerate plant breeding and trait introgress...

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Joseph Guhlin

Dr Lucy Stewart @lcsnz.bsky.social · Sep 6

Context: this knocks back Marsden funding levels next year a whole two decades to (inflation adjusted) the same level funding as the 2005 Budget.

Te Ara Paerangi Com - Research Advocacy Capability @te-ara-paerangi.community · Sep 6

More cuts to the Marsden Fund. This time $20 million from the annual budget cut starting next year. This is on top of previous cuts by this government. They are trying to skip the 'priming the pump' step of public research as a driver of the economy. How well that is going to work?
#NZPOL

Fewer Marsden Fund grants after government cuts

A major research fund has been forced to slash its grant allocation by more than $20 million next year.

www.rnz.co.nz

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Reposted by Joseph Guhlin

Albert Vilella, PhD. @albertvilella.bsky.social · Aug 31

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky url: academic.oup.com/icb/article-...

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky

Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

academic.oup.com

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Reposted by Joseph Guhlin

Anna Brüniche-Olsen @annabruniche.bsky.social · Aug 4

Long runs of homozygosity are reliable genomic markers of inbreeding depression 🧬 www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Long runs of homozygosity are reliable genomic markers of inbreeding depression

A long-standing goal in ecological, evolutionary, and conservation genetics is to identify genomic correlates of fitness and inbreeding depression. Over the past several years, a growing body of theor...

www.cell.com

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Joseph Guhlin @josephguhlin.bsky.social · Aug 26

Is it possible journals were 'vibe coding' before the rest of us? Because that's such a design flaw it could only come from an LLM

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dan mentos @danmentos.com · Aug 15

starting to suspect my neighbor is a large language model

Cardboard box of apples that says “Free Lemons”

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Reposted by Joseph Guhlin

Pacific Conservation Biology @pacificconsbio.bsky.social · Aug 18

📢 Don't just publish, contribute to our special collection- Matriarchs of the Wheatbelt🌾

🕷️ Celebrating 50 yrs since Prof. Barbara York Main’s invertebrate monitoring began, we are seeking works on kinship, place & conservation

www.publish.csiro.au/pc/content/C...

🗓️ Submission Deadline 30 Nov 2025

CSIRO PUBLISHING

Call for Papers

www.publish.csiro.au

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Brittany Sutherland @sutherlandbl.bsky.social · Aug 13

I love this trend in polyploid research:

“With new data and techniques, we can finally tackle this horribly complicated group!”

“And guess what? It’s even worse than we imagined!”

But seriously, excellent work!

Justin Conover @conjustover.bsky.social · Aug 13

New Paper! In 2019, my first dissertation chapter revealed complicated polyploidies in the cotton family (Malvaceae) but we lacked the tools and genomes to truly understand it. Now with better genomes and improved methods, it's much more complicated than we thought. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Joseph Guhlin @josephguhlin.bsky.social · Aug 12

Who chose this color scheme?

Terminal listing output of 'ls' with terrible, unreadable color scheme

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Reposted by Joseph Guhlin

Nick Young @nickofnz.bsky.social · Aug 10

Pulled lifeless from a commercial fishing net off the Otago coast, the adult female yellow-eyed penguin had drowned in a silent, unseen death.

She was the last known breeding-age female Hoiho from the Sandfly Bay colony.

#NZOverFishing

She was the last: Penguin starvation crisis sparks call for emergency fishing ban

The fate of the hoiho - among the world’s rarest penguin species - rests with two ministers.

www.thepost.co.nz

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Reposted by Joseph Guhlin

Nic Rawlence @nicrawlencenz.bsky.social · Aug 10

A PR company working for Colossal Biosciences is sending AI generated pieces to respected science journalists & asking them to publish the articles under their own names. This is so dodgy & just goes to show our critical expert scientific commentary is working. Sci comm failure 101 for Colossal.

Laurie Winkless @lauriewinkless.bsky.social · Aug 10

Just got a 🧪pitch from a PR claiming to work with Colossal (de-extinction chancers). It was a pre-written article claiming the science sector is carrying out "coordinated attacks" on the co. Spy the headline. They asked if I'd publish it on my Forbes column.

Not enough eye rolls on Earth for this 🙄

Is Colossal a threat to Science or Is it Science's Last Hope for the Next Generation?

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Moi Expósito-Alonso (MOILAB) @mexpositoalonso.bsky.social · Aug 4

*ALERT! GLOBAL GENETIC DIVERSITY TREND RE-ANALYSIS*

"Signals of consistent genetic diversity decline are not yet measurable in global meta-analysis" doi.org/10.1101/2025...

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Reposted by Joseph Guhlin

bioRxiv Genomics @biorxiv-genomic.bsky.social · Aug 4

A novel mobile genetic element with virus-like characteristics is widespread in the world's oceans https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.03.668216v1

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