Adria LeBoeuf

Grammarly is using our identities without permission Grammarly’s AI stole my boss’s identity.

Lawsuits when.

A phylogenetic tree of insects is shown annotating the presence or absence of a an antimicrobial peptide gene across winged insects

Various phylogenetic secondary loss events are mapped to a tree of insects to explain the parsimony calculations necessary to explain the diversity of insect Drosomycin antimicrobial peptide genes

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are key defence molecules of the innate immune system of plants and animals. Understanding the evolutionary origins of AMPs can help to explain how immune systems acquire novelty and vary in their defensive capabilities. However, AMPs evolve rapidly, and so the origins of similar AMPs across organisms is often unclear. Furthermore, false negatives due to low search sensitivity are common and can hinder confident annotations about true absences. Due to these difficulties, understanding whether similar AMP genes found in diverse organisms represent ancestral molecules or evolutionary novelties has been challenging. In this report, we present evidence of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) of the antifungal peptide gene Drosomycin across insects. We show that in Diptera, the presence of Drosomycin is restricted to the Melanogaster group and additionally the distant relative Drosophila busckii. We go on to recover Drosomycin genes in cockroaches (Blattodea), mantises (Mantodea), one katydid (Orthoptera), various beetles (Coleoptera), and a recently acquired pseudogenized Drosomycin locus in Liposcelis booklice (Psocodea), but no other insects. Explaining this diversity through shared ancestry requires at least 50 independent loss events, or just seven HGT events. Previous studies have suggested that similar AMPs found across divergent species reflect conservation from a common ancestor, or due to their small size, that they arose via convergent evolution resulting from pathogen-imposed selection. Our findings suggest horizontal gene transfer can be responsible for the presence of some AMP genes found scattered across the tree of life. By presenting a mechanism through which immune systems can acquire novelty, our study also suggests a possible explanation for certain lineage-specific competencies for defence against infectious disease. While loss of AMP genes is common in certain lineages, here we suggest gain of AMPs can occur just as suddenly.

Pleased to finally share this fun collab that began at #Ento23

@cedricaumont.bsky.social presented & I had seen NCBI annotated some cockroach genomes as "contaminated." Turns out NCBI & I were wrong (much more fun).

Horizontal transfer of an #AntimicrobialPeptide across insects
bit.ly/DrsHGT

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Pls re-post: My department @oxfordbiochemistry.bsky.social are recruiting for several new faculty positions (links below). Broad search in molecular biology/biochemistry, across prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Interested in understanding life at the molecular level, this job might be for you!
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Leipzig U and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) have an open faculty position (W2) in evolutionary population genetics! This position is tenured and comes with generous core funding. We are eager to welcome a new colleague! Deadline March 11.
www.uni-leipzig.de/en/newsdetai...

🚨 It looks like the UK government is gearing up to upend copyright law in favour of AI companies, legalising the theft of their work.

This is despite creatives' huge protests, and despite previous proposals being roundly rejected by the public.

Please spread the word.

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Defining the reference proteomes for small extracellular vesicles and non-vesicular components - Nature Cell Biology Morales-Sanfrutos, Etxeberria-Ugartemendia, Barroso-Gomila and colleagues map the elution profiles of small extracellular vesicles along density gradients from human biofluids and cell lines, distingu...

☕Morales-Sanfrutos, Etxeberria-Ugartemendia, Barroso-Gomila et al map the elution profiles of small #ExtracellularVesicles along density gradients from human biofluids and cell lines, distinguishing extracellular vesicle content from co-isolation components.
bit.ly/3ZWmeHJ

I love the ecological context! Makes the biology so much richer. Excited to dive in!

Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating).

A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)

Fun times. And not a surprise.

I'm hiring a technician! www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

An 80% role in a 4-yr BBSRC project and hopefully beyond. Looking for someone to support the @socialfluids.bsky.social 🧪our ants 🐜 and our projects.

Looking for someone kind + conscientious + reliable who takes pride in a job well done.

🚨JOB alert🚨

We have three (yes, THREE) 🌟lectureships🌟 advertised in the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol.

Broad remit, including #AnimalBehaviour & #GlobalChangeBiology

⏱️Deadline: 8th March 2026
🙏Please circulate widely

😊Come join us!

Full #job details: tinyurl.com/y3us95rc

Hiring for 3 positions: Research Assistant, Field Research Coordinator, and Postdoc I am looking to hire 3 people into my lab this year. I am still doing the paperwork to get the jobs officially posted but I want to send the word out and screen potential applications right away. R…

I am hiring a research assistant (vampire bats), a Panama fieldwork coordinator (vampire bats), and also considering postdoc apps (social behavior, any species): socialbat.org/2026/02/19/h...

How specific are heritable symbioses?

And what can we learn from swapping obligate symbionts across host species?

We address this in our latest, led by @inespons.bsky.social & in our collaboration w/ @microbiome.bsky.social 🦠🪲 Out today in @natcomms.nature.com!

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

You Have Billions Invested In Generative AI by Woe Industries Let's make this sh*t too big to fail.

Very nice little game. 5 min or so. Sound on.
woe-industries.itch.io/you-have-bil...

I'm hiring a technician! www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

An 80% role in a 4-yr BBSRC project and hopefully beyond. Looking for someone to support the @socialfluids.bsky.social 🧪our ants 🐜 and our projects.

Looking for someone kind + conscientious + reliable who takes pride in a job well done.

After a few years of benign neglect I am rebuilding bionames.org, which is a database of 5.4 million taxonomomic names for animals, linked to half a million DOIs and 278K PDFs. Dream is for every species name to be linked to its original publication using a persistent identifier #PID

a group of people are crawling through the mud . Alt: a group of people are crawling through the mud .

Marie Curie fellowships are madness this year. A score of 97% required for funding. To all those who didn't succeed - you and your project are probably brilliant, hang in there and keep trying

🎉 After a very long one (appropriately…), I’m excited to share work revealing an unexpected role for the epigenetic regulator ZFP57 - linking development, lactation, milk composition and lifelong health.

Check it out: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#MammaryGlandBiology #DOHaD

Applications close for this 4-year postdoc on Feb 9th (2 days!). The associated post for a technician should be online next week 👀

This clear and thorough piece on higher education funding in the UK really helps clarify the current shifts and the mess we are in.

RETRACTED: Integrative phylogenomics positions sponges at the root of the animal tree Determining whether sponges or ctenophores root the animal tree has important implications for understanding early animal evolution. Here, we examined support for these competing hypotheses by constru...

This is a beautiful case of how real science happens & serious scientists work. Kudos to both set of authors: “This has been a humbling experience, but one that speaks to the self-correcting nature of the scientific endeavor.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again.
#Pinks #ProudBlue

From Permits 📜 to Samples🧪🧬

Addressing Key Challenges for High-Quality Reference Genome Generation in Europe🧬🇪🇺

Now published in Mol Ecol Res!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Thanks to the @ergabiodiv.bsky.social team!!!🙂

Three ants with giant gasters are next to each other. The one on the left has a creamy and opaque gaster, the middle one has a dark amber and transluscent gaster, and the third is a lighter honey-colored transluscent gaster. All three ants are Mymecocystus mexicanus repletes from the same colony. The colors are due to the different fluids that they are storing in their crops. Because their crops and gasters are so distended, it's possible to see the crop contents.

A new paper, "Honeypots: a review of repletism across the ants" from our lab was published today, with grad student Bianca Nogueira as first author, and co-authors DiemQuynh Nguyen, @adriatica.bsky.social, and @haidomyrmex.bsky.social.

It was a labor of love!
doi.org/10.25849/myr...
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How unsettling (!)

Congratulations to my amazing brother @remyleboeuf.bsky.social for winning a best instrumental composition at the #grammys !!! You are incredible.

Now both my brothers have won Grammys. I need to step it up somehow…

A bacterial gene acquired by parasitoid wasps contributes to venom secretion against host defence - The EMBO Journal Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is an important source of gene innovation in prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms. Several genes acquired by hosts of parasitoid wasps via HGT have been reported to prot...

Excited to share a new piece of work in @embojournal.org

Parasitoid wasps hijack a bacterial gene that governs venoms against host. Coauthors include @rokaslab.bsky.social and others.

Read more from: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

We need to be shouting about the effects of this on junior researchers from the roofs, writing to our MPs. We are risking a "missing generation" of researchers.

XX. International Congress of the International Union for the Study of Social Insects Visit the post for more.

Hey Everyone, the abstract submission deadline for the International Congress of the International Union for the Study of Social Insects #IUSSI26 is only four days away. Send in your contribution now!
iussi2026.org

1. From lung cancer to climate change, capitalist governments are notoriously slow to recognize and remedy the negative externalities generated by corporate activity.

Generative AI is no exception. Large language models are proving a disaster in numerous spheres of public life.