Rajiv McCoy
@rajivmccoy.bsky.social
630 followers 1.1K following 32 posts
Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins studying human evolutionary and reproductive genetics https://mccoy-lab.org
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rajivmccoy.bsky.social
Aneuploidy is the leading cause of pregnancy loss. In work led by @saracarioscia.bsky.social and @aabiddanda.bsky.social, we reanalyzed genetic testing data from 139,416 IVF embryos to discover variants associated with recombination phenotypes and aneuploidy risk. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
vseplyarskiy.bsky.social
Our paper on clonal expansions in Sperm is out in Nature www.nature.com/articles/s41...
If you are interested in working at an intersection of Mendelian genomics/Population genetics/Clonal expansions +Cancer genetics/ and of course mutagenesis, please rich out about postdoc in my lab
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
schuhlab.bsky.social
How do oocytes prepare for life before life begins? 🧬
Our new review in Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology @annualreview explores how oocytes store proteins to support development and fertility. (1/5)
🔗 go.shr.lc/4o9hsk8
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
piotraz.bsky.social
🚀 We’re hiring a Postdoc!

Join our group in Poznan, Poland to study meiotic crossover recombination in plants 🌱 Highly motivated & enthusiastic candidates are welcome!
📅 Deadline: Nov 1, 2025

🔗 ibmib.web.amu.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Postdoc_position-2025-Ziolkowskis-Lab.pdf
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
yun-s-song.bsky.social
We are excited to share GPN-Star, a cost-effective, biologically grounded genomic language modeling framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of variant effect prediction tasks relevant to human genetics.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
(1/n)
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
lauritsskov.bsky.social
Are you interested in doing a PhD in Copenhagen? Interested in studying Neanderthals and Denisovans which live on in our genomes?
Than you are more than welcome to apply to join my group starting Jan 2026 :)

candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

Please reach out if you have any questions!
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
joaoascensao.bsky.social
How common are frequency dependent fitness effects?

New preprint out today 👇
doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Frequency-dependent fitness effects are ubiquitous
In simple microbial populations, the fitness effects of most selected mutations are generally taken to be constant, independent of genotype frequency. This assumption underpins predictions about evolutionary dynamics, epistatic interactions, and the maintenance of genetic diversity in populations. Here, we systematically test this assumption using beneficial mutations from early generations of the Escherichia coli Long-Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE). Using flow cytometry-based competition assays, we find that frequency-dependent fitness effects are the norm rather than the exception, occurring in approximately 80\% of strain pairs tested. Most competitions exhibit negative frequency-dependence, where fitness advantages decline as mutant frequency increases. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the strength of frequency-dependence is predictable from invasion fitness measurements, with invasion fitness explaining approximately half of the biological variation in frequency-dependent slopes. Additionally, we observe violations of fitness transitivity in several strain combinations, indicating that competitive relationships cannot always be predicted from fitness relative to a single reference strain alone. Through high-resolution measurements of within-growth cycle dynamics, we show that simple resource competition explains a substantial portion of the frequency-dependence: when faster-growing genotypes dominate populations, they deplete shared resources more rapidly, reducing the time available for fitness differences to accumulate. Our results demonstrate that even in a simple model system designed to minimize ecological complexity, subtle ecological interactions between closely related genotypes create frequency-dependent selection that can fundamentally alter evolutionary dynamics. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.
doi.org
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
fervillanea.bsky.social
Our paper on the evolution of MUC19 in humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans is finally out today in Science!

This has been a six-year effort by 13 authors to weave together 3 separate but related evolutionary stories around this one gene (more on thread 🧵).

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
The MUC19 gene: An evolutionary history of recurrent introgression and natural selection
We study the gene MUC19, for which some modern humans carry a Denisovan-like haplotype. MUC19 is a mucin, a glycoprotein that forms gels with various biological functions. We find diagnostic variants ...
www.science.org
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
ryangutenkunst.bsky.social
I built a Gradio app to illustrate how selective sweeps can be detected from population genetic data: ryangutenkunst-sweep-detection-dpi.hf.space . It can help with your first submissions to the GHIST sweep detection challenges! ghi.st #GHIST
GHIST logo
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
kuhlwilm.bsky.social
How to get introgressed fragments in genomic data? Everything you always wanted to know you find in our review in @cp-trendsgenetics.bsky.social, led by Xin Huang:
doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...
rajivmccoy.bsky.social
Lab retreat at the JHU Bloomberg Center in DC
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
jlsteenwyk.bsky.social
NEW pub: The role of metabolism in shaping #enzyme structures over 400 million years. Now out in @nature.com

Super grateful to have played a small role in this project - congrats to lead/corr authors Oliver, Benjamin, and Markus!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#alphafold #evolution #genomics
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
jamie-blundell.bsky.social
Delighted to share our latest on longitudinal methylation dynamics preceding cancer. Epigenetic signs of AML appear in blood DECADES before Dx.
👉 Early cancer detection
👉 Methylation drivers
👉 Epimutation rates
👉 CpG lineage tracing

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
lablabella.bsky.social
Caiti Smukowski Heil @caitismuheil.bsky.social tells us about th domestication of yeast in bread 🍞

Humans have made a profound impact on the genome of S. cerevisiae

And commercial baking strains are super weird!

#Evol2025 #Evol25
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
fervillanea.bsky.social
Finally! Denisovans are officially Homo longi, the Harbin skull is the holotype.
carlzimmer.com
Dragon Man was a Denisovan! DNA and proteins both confirm it, giving this mysterious human lineage a face at long last. Here’s my story. [Gift link] nyti.ms/44nQq1i
Artist's reconstruction of the Harbin skull Denisovan. Image by Chuang Zhao
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
mollygale.bsky.social
🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬

Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025
Barbara McClintock portrait
rajivmccoy.bsky.social
It's good that my keyboard does not have an em dash button—otherwise, nothing could hold me back. #grants
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
mikeinouye.bsky.social
📣 Latest from the lab: Performance of deep-learning-based approaches to improve polygenic scores www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Its thought deep learning will substantially improve PGS but the reality is MANY have tried but no/little gain has been seen so far. Here we report our negative results.
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
itaiyanai.bsky.social
90% of doing science is being open to new ideas.
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
benlangmead.bsky.social
Industry friends, now is the time for MUCH more speaking out on behalf of academic colleagues under duress. Here are core open source methods that many of your products doubtlessly depend on either directly or indirectly (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMMER) being abruptly defunded. Make noise.
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
jgschraiber.bsky.social
HMMER is crucial to our modern understanding of protein biochemistry and has almost certainly generated at least a 10-fold return on investment for every dollar the US government has spent on funding it.
cryptogenomicon.bsky.social
NIH funding supporting the HMMER and Infernal software projects has been terminated. NIH states that our work, as well as all other federally funded research at Harvard, is of no benefit to the US.
Reposted by Rajiv McCoy
aazaidi.bsky.social
Our paper on the theoretical properties of SNP heritability in admixed populations is out in Genetics:
academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

with @jinguohuang.bsky.social, @nicole-kleman.bsky.social , Saonli Basu, and Mark Shriver