Dan Sloan
@sloanevolab.bsky.social
760 followers 440 following 65 posts
Molecular Evolutionary Biologist. Professor at Colorado State University Department of Biology. Personal account. Opinions my own (as if anyone else would want them). https://sites.google.com/site/danielbsloan
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Reposted by Dan Sloan
danielbolnick.bsky.social
The GRFP announcement from NSF cuts out an entire cohort of 2nd year students from consideration, without warning. This is so deeply unfair that it warrants a formal protest from the scientific community. If someone wants to work with me to craft an open letter and solicit signatures, LMK.
dangaristo.bsky.social
New: After a long wait, the GRFP solicitation is live! Deadlines have been extended to early November, so applicants have a bit over a month to submit. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)
www.nsf.gov
Reposted by Dan Sloan
jbonfield.bsky.social
Heads up: ignore samtools dot org, similarly minimap2 dot com and likely others. It's owned by a known phishing site and while the binaries they offer look valid currently (but note they may be serving us different binaries to others), that could change.

Ie: it's not us (Samtools team)! Be warned
Reposted by Dan Sloan
official-smbe.bsky.social
📢 The Call for Symposia for SMBE2026 is now open. We warmly invite you to submit a symposium proposal and help shape the scientific content of our annual meeting.

🗓️ Key dates
Call for symposia: Sep. 1 - Oct. 15
Announcement of accepted symposia: Nov. 3

More information: smbe2026.org/symposia
SMBE2026 - Call for Symposia Proposals
Reposted by Dan Sloan
jomcinerney.bsky.social
I’ll be advertising a post-doc position (up to 3 year) soon. It will be for somebody that is a good programmer, interested in evolution & is keen to learn new machine learning & AI approaches. I don’t have a link to a job advertisement yet. The post will be hybrid working and based at U of Liverpool
Reposted by Dan Sloan
nucleosomepolice.bsky.social
❤️❤️❤️ CSU. Fort Collins is a lovely place to live, and students / faculty are awesome. I should know, I taught there for 15 years! Apply!
sloanevolab.bsky.social
New preprint on the role of MutS2 genes in rescuing stalled/collided ribosomes in chloroplasts, led by Amanda Broz and many other contributors from the lab. Never expected to go down this road when we started working on plant MutS2 years ago. Feedback appreciated!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Graphs showing plant responses to ribosome-stalling drugs as measured by photosynthetic efficient (Fv/Fm) and root length, with representative images of phenotypic mueasurements.
sloanevolab.bsky.social
On the same page there!
Slide showing definition of epistasis: Interactions between alleles at different loci. The phenotypic effect of an allele at one locus depends on which alleles are present at another locus in the genome.
sloanevolab.bsky.social
Cuz I thought epistasis only exists when there is variation at both loci, which is why the QG folks talk about "converting" epistatic to additive variance when an allele is fixed at one locus. Dude, all I know is that my confidence is shot next time I teach the Genetics kiddos about epistasis. Ha.
sloanevolab.bsky.social
Don't you also need Ab and ab to show that it's an interaction?
sloanevolab.bsky.social
By that, you mean an alelle at each of two different loci? I don't think you can have epistasis until you consider that there is an alt allele (WT?) at each of those loci. I think of epistasis as being defined between loci, not between alleles, and it could not be done with only two haplotypes.
sloanevolab.bsky.social
I guess one difference is that you can have a dominance relationship with just two alleles (e.g., one of your mutants and WT). But you couldn't have epistasis if there were just those two alleles.
sloanevolab.bsky.social
But if you consider the sites of the mutations to be diff loci, you have one epistatic relationship between 2 bi-allelic loci to define. Both seem like reasonable framings, but I don't see how that makes dominance = epistasis? I might be misunderstanding tho.
sloanevolab.bsky.social
I think dominance is defined for pairs of alleles. In your two-mutant (A and a) example, you would also have a WT allele, so there are 3 dominance relationships (A vs a; A vs WT; a vs WT) to define.
Reposted by Dan Sloan
mitomaths.bsky.social
There'll be 2 PhD positions (math / microscopy) on MitoPhyto. But the Norwegian research council is also offering opportunities for non-European postdocs to come to Norway for 3 years associated with FRIPRO projects. Please DM me if interested!
www.forskningsradet.no/en/call-for-...
Recruitment of Talented Researchers to Norway
The Research Council supports the recruitment of talented international researchers to the Research Council's centre calls and for projects funded ...
www.forskningsradet.no
Reposted by Dan Sloan
maddyseale.bsky.social
My pick for In Other Journals this week:
MSH1 suppresses organelle mutation - an investigation of how many plants maintain very low mitochondrial mutation rates

My summary here:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Paper here: doi.org/10.1371/jour...
@sloanevolab.bsky.social
#PlantScience
In Other Journals
Editors’ selections from the current scientific literature
www.science.org
Reposted by Dan Sloan
iochromaland.bsky.social
Big news! We are recruiting a postdoc to work on tomatillo evolution: jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta.... The clade containing tomatillos and its allies (ca 300 spp) has evolved lantern fruits at least 25 times - we want to know why! Join us @rociodeanna.bsky.social & @caschenck-bio.bsky.social
Postdoctoral Fellow in Tomatillo Evolution
jobs.colorado.edu
Reposted by Dan Sloan
annttate.bsky.social
Pls RT: We are recruiting a postdoc (and potentially an RA or staff scientist) to work on the evolution of stage-structured immune systems! Experimental evolution, natural variation in immunity, and/or evo genomics in flour beetles (Tribolium). See ad here: my.vanderbilt.edu/tatelab/join...
Scale highlighting trade-offs between larval and adult beetles in response to infection A teaser of panels illustrating potential approaches to studying stage-structured immune systems, including transcriptomics, experimental evolution, and experiments in wild-derived populations
Reposted by Dan Sloan
psudmant.bsky.social
The Sudmant lab at UC Berkeley is seeking a postdoc to work on a fully funded NIH project to understand differences in DNA repair and somatic mutation across the primate tree of life. Please spread widely to those who may be interested aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05052
Postdoctoral Scholar – Genomics, Aging, Somatic Mutation, Structural Variation, Evolution , Cancer – Integrative Biology
University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!
aprecruit.berkeley.edu
Reposted by Dan Sloan
mollyschumer.bsky.social
Our review on the last decade+ of hybrid incompatibility research is now out! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Original thread here: bsky.app/profile/moll...
Reposted by Dan Sloan
teralevin.bsky.social
I'm excited to announce our new biorxiv preprint, wherein we investigate the evolution of the weirdest genetic locus I've ever seen! Behold the tgr genes of the social amoeba, which mediate self/non-self discrimination during facultative multicellularity 🐅 🧵 1/
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Hypermutable hotspot enables the rapid evolution of self/non-self recognition genes in Dictyostelium
Cells require highly polymorphic receptors to perform accurate self/non-self recognition. In the amoeba Dicytostelium discoideum, polymorphic TgrB1 & TgrC1 proteins are used to bind sister cells and e...
www.biorxiv.org