Hilde Schneemann

Happening today!

We are offering a fully funded two-year postdoctoral position focused on sex chromosome evolution and speciation in the *Jaera albifrons* species complex. Please find the advertisement attached. We welcome applications from interested candidates. Join us :-)

seminar announcement with photos of speakers and talk titles

The integration of speciation seminar series is restarting, with the first session coming up on *Tuesday March 3rd @ 5pm CET*, featuring two talks by @naturalselection.bsky.social and @andreaestandia.bsky.social + career Q&A with @markravinet.bsky.social as part of the ECR in Speciation theme.

On March 3rd @ 5pm CET, we are re-starting the Integration of speciation seminar series! The first 3 sessions feature talks by *Early-Career Researchers*, and include a Q&A with an established PI about their career path.

Sign up to get the link: speciation-network.pages.ist.ac.at/seminar-seri...

In #GENETICS, @hildeschneemann.bsky.social and John Welch introduce a simple fitness landscape model to predict hybrid fitness with arbitrary ploidy and an arbitrary number of hybridizing lineages using data from #maize and rye. buff.ly/E24fZsM

I got to think about lots of cool/scary things working on this: (very) rapid adaptation, introgression of structural variants, invasive species, reproductive isolation, pesticide resistance, the precarity of food production. Grateful to have worked on such a big dataset with amazing collaborators

Predicting Hybrid Fitness: The Effects of Ploidy and Complex Ancestry Abstract. Hybridization between divergent populations places alleles in novel genomic contexts. This can inject adaptive variation – which is useful for br

New paper published together with John Welch on hybrid fitness and how it depends on ploidy and # of distinct ancestries, incl some remarkable fits of data & theory 😶. Keen to hear any thoughts/comments/questions! doi.org/10.1093/gene... Thanks to the team @ Genetics for the smooth experience :)

Picture of MEME students on the beach

Do you want to do a Masters in Evolutionary Biology? The call for applying to the MEME program is now open! MEME is a fantastic 2-year MSc between four European Universities on all areas of Evolutionary Biology. Apply and study in Sweden/France/the Netherlands/Germany/USA/Switzerland! www.evobio.eu

Green butterfly sat on a flower.

I'm looking for PhD students to join the lab starting August 2026. We study the evolution of insect chemical signals so if you're interested in evolutionary biology, chemical ecology, molecular biology, behavior, or genetics, this could be a good fit for you! More info here: tinyurl.com/mrxchwfm

🚂 Sauvons les trains de nuit Paris-Berlin et Paris-Vienne Signez la pétition maintenant !

🚂 This petition needs your signatures! Save the wonderful nighttrain that gets you into the center of Paris/Vienna/Berlin in time for breakfast whilst you doze off or have memorable encounters and conversations with fellow travellers agir.greenvoice.fr/petitions/sa...

Why do males and females often differ in traits?
The expected answer: selection.
But our new paper in GENETICS shows that genetic drift alone can generate sexual dimorphism — even when male & female optima are the same

The genomic basis of local adaptation in the white x Engelmann spruce hybrid zone Hybridization between species can occur along repeated zones of contact, providing a powerful natural laboratory for studying the interplay between migration and selection, and for identifying loci in...

I am happy to share my second paper with @samyeaman.bsky.social and collaborators! If you are into hybrid zones and tree genomics, this is for you!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

📣⚠️

I'm reviewing applicants later this week and will continue to accept new applications until the position is filled

Now out in print! Elli Cryan (coadvised by @spicybotrytis.bsky.social) digs deep into the sgtructure and function of hybrid incompatibility loci in maize. Among other things she discovers a conserved, ancient pseudogene haplotype that silences the locus in trans! academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

Really excited that our DFG grant on the Speciation Genomics of Eye Size variation in *Heliconius* has been funded :) In the next weeks, I will post an advert for a PhD, but if you know of good students, please suggest they get in touch. Please repost.

Why is sex so common if it's so costly?
Super excited to share our new preprint “Sex decreases the pleiotropic costs of local adaptation”, where we bring a new angle to this age-old evolutionary question. Co-led by Parris Humphrey, in Michael Desai's lab. Short thread here: (1/n)

Exciting news! @wcratcliff.bsky.social and I published an essay last week in @nature.com reviewing the substantial contributions of 'long-term' studies to evolutionary biology
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/n

Just extended the deadline to March 21 for this position in the Plant Phylogenomics group at the University of Vienna. It is sort of a "post doc plus" position funded for up to six years.

Please reach out if you want to chat - I'd love to talk to you about it!

jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Universi...

A plot showing allele frequencies along a chromosome for two groups: those that survived the selective event (Alive) and those that perished (Dead).

Do you want to map the loci underlying selection but you're on a budget? Let me introduce you to the concept of sequencing the living and the dead. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Please circulate widely:

We are hiring two Ass Prof tt at the Institute of #ecology and #evolution at @unibern.bsky.social in conservation biology; mathematical & computational ecology

We are committed to diverse, inclusive and equitable leadership in research and education

tinyurl.com/IEEjobs

PopGen Seminar Series Summer Term 2025 04.03.25 – Lutz Becks (Univ. of Konstanz, DE)
The evolutionary dynamics of novel endosymbiosis. 11.03.25 – Ilkka Kronholm (Univ. of Jyväskylä, FI)
How chromatin structure influences genetic and epigenetic variation. 18.03.25 – Katja Hoedjes (Vrije Univ. Amsterdam, NL)
Understanding functional impact of genetic variation on complex traits at a single nucleotide resolution. 25.03.25 – Sophie Armitage (Freie Univ. of Berlin, DE)
Evolutionary ecology of host-pathogen interactions. 01.04.25 – Matthew Rockman (New York Univ., US)
Developmental evolution is a population-genetics problem. 08.04.25 – Wen-Juan Ma (Vrije Univ. Brussels, BE)
The evolution of sex chromosomes and sex determination in frogs. 15.04.25 – Almorò Scarpa (Vetmeduni, AT)
Two centuries of transposable element invasions in Drosophila melanogaster 22.04.25 – Julia Kreiner (Univ. of Chicago, US)
The mode and tempo of genomic adaptation to contemporary agriculture. 29.04.25 – Martin Kaltenpoth (Max Planck Inst. for Chemical Ecology, DE)
Microbial symbionts as sources of evolutionary innovations in beetles. 06.05.25 – Luisa Pallares (Friedrich Miescher Laboratory, DE)
Phenotypic robustness across the genotype-phenotype map, from genes to environment and back. 13.05.25 – Diana Rennison (Univ. of Calif., San Diego, US)
Understanding the predictability of evolutionary trajectories using threespine stickleback.

20.05.25 – Filipa Sousa (Univ. of Vienna, AT)
Bioenergetics Evolution: The link between Earth’s and Life’s history. 27.05.25 – Yun Song (Univ. of California, Berkeley, US)
Learning and applying complex probability distributions over biological sequences. 03.06.25 – April Wei (Cornell Univ., US)
Enabling efficient analysis of biobank-scale data with genotype representation graphs. ALT TEXT OUT OF SPACE, GO TO https://www.popgen-vienna.at/news/seminars/

The PopGen Vienna Seminar series schedule is ready for the next term (Mar-Jun). It's jam-packed with fantastic speakers in #evolution, #genetics, #genomics, #popgen, and more! Details and streaming link signup can be found on our website www.popgen-vienna.at/news/seminars/

Modeling and Theory in Population Biology | NITMB

The 2nd conference of the Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Population Biology @smtpb.bsky.social will be in Chicago @nitmb.bsky.social June 2-6. Applications are now open, both to attend (junior applicants can apply for financial support), and to present, at www.nitmb.org/modeling-and...

Job alert! Lectuter in Evolutionary Biology out now

Job alert!

We seek to appoint a new Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology in the School of Biological Sciences, find out more at the link below!

www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

Applications for MEME are open! It's a research- and mobility-oriented Evolutionary Biology Master's Programme, where students have the opportunity to visit 4(+2) different universities in two years. Please spread the word! www.evobio.eu #EvoBio

Check out our exciting programme of early-career speciation research talks for the Gordon Research Symposium on Speciation, this March in Ventura www.grc.org/speciation-g...

Graduate students & postdocs, if you'd still like to join us: make sure to register before the 1st of Feb!

Fungal phylogeny highlighting genome size changes

Summary of genome size variation among groups

@tbadet.bsky.social and I have a preprint out on transposon silencing in fungi!

Genome size evolution is fascinating and showcases the dynamic nature of transposon activation.

What we understand less are the dynamics of transposon defense systems encoded by the genomes.

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Please forward: 2-year post-doc position in the lab Evo-Eco-Paleo (Lille, France) to work on plant self-incompatibility & evolution - email me if interested!

Latitudinal gradients in air density create invisible topography at sea level, affecting animal flight costs Air density affects the costs of animal flight. This is well-established for flight at high altitude. Shepard et al. show that changes in air density cause regional differences in flight costs at sea level due to latitudinal temperature gradients. They discuss the implications for species distributions and for global change.

@currentbiology.bsky.social does it again!

Our environments are considerably more complex than we typically think. Is it really so surprising that there are broad swaths of biology we don't even know about, let alone don't know how to interpret?

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Order of amino acid recruitment into the genetic code resolved by last universal common ancestor’s protein domains | PNAS The current “consensus” order in which amino acids were added to the genetic code is based on potentially biased criteria, such as the absence of s...

We identified protein domains in LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor). Their distinctive amino acid usage reveals the order amino acids were added to the genetic code, based mostly on size. Older proteins hint at earlier alternative codes. 1/15 @seekingluca.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...