The Royal Entomological Society has just published a new popular science book on insects – including a small contribution by Darren! The book is full of wonderful illustrations and should interest anyone with an interest in insects.
Last week we put out two new preprints!
Firstly, work led by William Toubiana, shows that our stick insects have very weird chromosome segregation. The major centromere protein, CenH3, binds to the autosomes in a monocentric pattern, but in a holocentric pattern on the X. Despite this, all chromosomes, attach to spindle microtubules at a single location, making this the first instance of a functionally monocentric species with holocentric-like attributes!
Secondly, in work led by Jelisaveta Djordjevic, we show that dosage compensation in male reproductive tissues is present only in the early nymphal stages. This is likely due to the establishment of meiotic sex chromosome inactivation during development.
Congrats to all authors for getting out these super cool papers!
Our huge genome assembly of the dyeing poison frog (Dendrobates tinctorius) is now out in GBE.
Congrats to all involved!
Congrats to Charlie, Mekhi, and Thomas on getting their dissertations handed in!
Good luck with your next steps.
Last week was Jeli’s public PhD defence! The defence went really well and we wish Jeli all the best of luck in the future as she starts her postdoc with Tanja Schwander.
Congrats!
Last week was Popgroup 57 up in St Andrews. It was really good to attend one of these in person again to chat science and catch up. The quality of the talks was also really high, leaving us full of ideas for the future!
Looking forward to next year!
The genome of the dyeing poison frog (Dendrobates tinctorius) is riddled with TEs!
After *quite* a long wait our fly lab is now ready for use!
Excited to get some projects going at last!
Our new preprint looks at how differences in decision-making by researchers influence the results they report. This paper had 100s of researchers independently analyse two datasets and report their findings. Surprisingly, this resulted in a nearly continuous set of reported effect sizes across a wide range!
What to do about this problem is less clear – maybe multiple analyses per dataset? Model averaging? Have multiple researchers analyse each dataset?
Each of these solutions is far from perfect and it will be interesting to see how the field reacts to this paper.
Two new MRes students start in the lab this week!
Ian Green – who will be identifying genes that change in expression in response to cold in Drosophila.
Willow Legg – Willow will be looking at phenotypic plasticity in sun beetles (Pachnoda marginata).
A big welcome to both!