Diego Ortega-Del Vecchyo
delvecchyo.bsky.social
Diego Ortega-Del Vecchyo
@delvecchyo.bsky.social
Associate professor @liigh-unam.bsky.social. Interested on theoretical population genetics and developing new computational methods to understand our past. He/him/his.
Alessandro and I discussed a paper analyzing a deleterious genetic interaction that causes melanoma in swordtail fishes.
October 9, 2025 at 4:06 AM
Reposted by Diego Ortega-Del Vecchyo
In this #Journal Club, @delvecchyo.bsky.social &Co discuss a study that mapped the genetic basis of hybrid incompatibility in swordtail fish, revealing #melanoma-causing gene interactions that reduce survival in natural hybrid populations.

📖 ⬇️
Discovering genetic interactions that cause melanoma in a non-model species - Nature Reviews Cancer
In this Journal Club, Lopez-Hernandez and Ortega-Del Vecchyo discuss a study that mapped the genetic basis of hybrid incompatibility in swordtail fish, revealing melanoma-causing gene interactions that reduce survival in natural hybrid populations.
www.nature.com
October 7, 2025 at 4:54 PM
Alessandro and I discussed this great paper www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... that investigates a deleterious genetic interaction that causes melanoma.
September 24, 2025 at 4:57 PM
Reposted by Diego Ortega-Del Vecchyo
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
August 21, 2025 at 7:36 PM
Gaceta UNAM cubrió nuestra investigación sobre el impacto de la selección natural en la predicción genética de rasgos complejos en individuos del pasado:

www.gaceta.unam.mx/la-seleccion...
La selección natural complica las predicciones genéticas - Gaceta UNAM
Hacen menos confiables los análisis de características físicas en humanos antiguos, afirma artículo publicado en la revista científica The American Journal of Human Genetics, en el cual participa un g...
www.gaceta.unam.mx
August 22, 2025 at 2:43 PM
Reposted by Diego Ortega-Del Vecchyo
Hey, Miles' @milesroberts.bsky.social beautiful paper showing that sequence diversity missed by standard methods contributes to Lewontin's paradox is officially published in @evolletters.bsky.social. academic.oup.com/evlett/advan...
k-mer-based diversity scales with population size proxies more than nucleotide diversity in a meta-analysis of 98 plant species
Abstract. A key prediction of neutral theory is that the level of genetic diversity in a population should scale with population size. However, as was note
academic.oup.com
June 12, 2025 at 7:57 PM
Reposted by Diego Ortega-Del Vecchyo
Our review of recent Sequentially Markovian Coalescent methods is up on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2506.00692 (based on last year's @official-smbe.bsky.social symposium)
Not Just $N_e$ $N_e$-more: New Applications for SMC from Ecology to Phylogenies
Genomes contain the mutational footprint of an organism's evolutionary history, shaped by diverse forces including ecological factors, selective pressures, and life history traits. The sequentially Ma...
arxiv.org
June 11, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Happy to have worked on this project with @mashaals.bsky.social , Emilia Huerta-Sanchez and Valeria Añorve-Garibay. We analyzed how stabilizing and directional selection cause problems to predict traits in ancient samples.
Our new work is now out in AJHG "Natural selection acting on complex traits hampers the predictive accuracy of polygenic scores in ancient samples." Great collaboration with @delvecchyo.bsky.social and Emilia Huerta-Sanchez, led by Valeria Añorve-Garibay.
📣Online now!
📄Natural selection acting on complex traits hampers the predictive accuracy of polygenic scores in ancient samples
🧑‍🤝‍🧑 @delvecchyo.bsky.social @mashaals.bsky.social & co
June 10, 2025 at 5:58 PM
Reposted by Diego Ortega-Del Vecchyo
📣Online now!
📄Natural selection acting on complex traits hampers the predictive accuracy of polygenic scores in ancient samples
🧑‍🤝‍🧑 @delvecchyo.bsky.social @mashaals.bsky.social & co
Natural selection acting on complex traits hampers the predictive accuracy of polygenic scores in ancient samples
Using polygenic scores, we find that two types of natural selection, stabilizing selection and directional selection, can decrease the prediction accuracy of complex traits in ancient individuals. We ...
www.cell.com
June 10, 2025 at 3:07 PM
Reposted by Diego Ortega-Del Vecchyo
We continue with the #human genetic variation and ancient #genomics session! Our next speaker is @delvecchyo.bsky.social, who is telling us about how to use geographical and temporal information to infer the action of natural #selection @liigh-unam.bsky.social #LIIGH10anniversary
January 12, 2025 at 5:36 PM
Reposted by Diego Ortega-Del Vecchyo
The next talk is by PhD student Alan Izarraras from @delvecchyo.bsky.social's group, and he is telling us about how to infer the distribution of fitness effects using local genealogies @liigh-unam.bsky.social #LIIGH10anniversary
January 11, 2025 at 11:34 PM
Reposted by Diego Ortega-Del Vecchyo
🚨🪅 Registration is NOW OPEN for our Symposium on Ancient Pathogen Genomics! 🦠🧬 Join us on April 12-13 2025 in Juriquilla, Mexico. Featuring top speakers & great science in a beautiful venue! Plz RT !
liigh.unam.mx/apg/ 🪅🚨
Ancient Pathogens Genomics International Symposium
liigh.unam.mx
November 18, 2024 at 12:39 AM
Reposted by Diego Ortega-Del Vecchyo
New preprint (with @linoafferreira.bsky.social) where we explore the idea of using genealogies (in the form of ancestral recombination graphs, ARGs) to tell apart real GxG interaction signals between nearby variants from false positives www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Phantom epistasis through the lens of genealogies
Phantom epistasis arises when, in the course of testing for gene-by-gene interactions, the omission of a causal variant (with a purely additive effect on the phenotype) causes the spurious inference o...
www.biorxiv.org
December 9, 2024 at 6:59 PM
Don't forget to submit your abstract for "Probabilistic Modeling in Genomics 2025". Deadline: January 10th, 2025. meetings.cshl.edu/meetings.asp...
Probabilistic Modeling in Genomics
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Meetings & Courses -- a private, non-profit institution with research programs in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology, genomics, bioinformatics.
meetings.cshl.edu
December 2, 2024 at 5:27 PM
I have received tenure! I got here thanks to the support from my students, colleagues, mentors and home institution ( @liigh-unam.bsky.social ). I plan to continue doing research on Theoretical Population Genetics and developing methods to understand how Evolution has shaped our past.
September 30, 2024 at 6:51 PM
Our preprint analyzing the impact of stabilizing and directional selection on the prediction of complex traits in ancient samples is out. Work spearheaded by
Valeria Añorve-Garibay in collaboration with Mashaal Sohail and Emilia Huerta-Sánchez. Thread below:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Natural selection acting on complex traits hampers the predictive accuracy of polygenic scores in ancient samples
bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution
www.biorxiv.org
September 12, 2024 at 4:48 PM
Happy to see @Alanizarr, Sebastián Iturbe and Abad Guzmán from our group presenting their work during the poster session. #SMBE2024
November 16, 2024 at 8:54 AM
During dinner a lot of people were asking: "Where is the after party?". It is tomorrow at 9am. We have a great set of talks on new approaches to estimate demography and natural selection. Symposium organized with @valenomics #smbe2024
November 16, 2024 at 9:02 AM
"Community Engagement Experiences of the Afromexico Genomics Project" by @paleogenomics .
November 16, 2024 at 9:09 AM
Our group will have a strong presence at #SMBE2024 . Two students will be giving talks and another three students will be presenting posters.
July 7, 2024 at 5:55 PM
The abstract book is available online along with the scientific program and the travel guide to #smbe2024 #smbe24 https://smbe2024.org/ . Happy to see the community in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico soon.
November 16, 2024 at 9:17 AM
Don't forget to register for #SMBE2024 https://smbe2024.org/ today in order to be part of the scientific program if you were accepted to give a poster or oral presentation.
November 16, 2024 at 9:25 AM
We had a strong presence in the "Días Académicos" event held the last couple of days @LIIGH_UNAM . We had poster presentations by Sebastián Iturbe and Abad Guzmán. @AlanIzarr and @PsyduckResearch gave talks.
November 16, 2024 at 9:33 AM
Our perspective piece "The Promise of Inferring the Past Using the Ancestral Recombination Graph (ARG)" is out. Work with Débora YC Brandt, Christian D Huber , Charleston WK Chiang: academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...
The Promise of Inferring the Past Using the Ancestral Recombination Graph
Abstract. The ancestral recombination graph (ARG) is a structure that represents the history of coalescent and recombination events connecting a set of sequence
academic.oup.com
February 2, 2024 at 6:13 PM