@evolutionvu.bsky.social we made the cut!

“The black Lava rocks on the beach are frequented by large (2-3 ft), disgusting clumsy Lizards. They are as black as the porous rocks over which they crawl & seek their prey from the Sea. I call them ‘imps of darkness’. They assuredly well become the land they inhabit.”

don't make me choose, love is not a finite resource

What did they think a bird was

Well at least steel production changed from red (the bad color) to green (the good color)

Evo psych publish a figure that isn’t a flowchart challenge

There's a lot more juicy stuff inside so I hope you'll give it a read over at @currentbiology.bsky.social ! Thanks to my (Bluesky) coauthors @linder-surprise.bsky.social, @jlsteenwyk.bsky.social, @ana-pontes.bsky.social, @hittingerlab.bsky.social, & @rokaslab.bsky.social!

One of our new WGDs was also enriched for propanoate metabolism, a family of compounds with a characteristic fruity aroma. Species with this WGD are popular in cheesemaking and naturally occur on cocoa, so you might have to thank a WGD for some of these tasty treats as well!

We found genes involved with carbohydrate metabolism were consistently retained from ancient WGDs, a pattern consistent with the S. cerevisiae WGD for which to have to thank for brewing and baking!

We followed this up with additional long read sequencing of several key species and found duplicated regions across the genome, a pattern consistent with WGD.

Leveraging hundreds of new genomes recently published by my collaborators on the Y1000+ team, I thought I might be on the right track when I found high levels of gene duplication in several branches within Dipodascomycetes yeasts, a group ~300 million years removed from S. cerevisiae.

I always found it suspicious one of the only known WGD in fungi was specific to Saccharomyces cerevisiae (by far the most studied fungus) and a handful of other species, leading me to hypothesize there could be other undiscovered events in the same subphylum.

Make America Diseased Again