I also saw a queen yesterday! What are the chances

I don't like your government any more than you (same goes for my government). But I have to acknowledge that they may have accomplished something if the Iranian nuclear program is really done for.

Looking good!

Great study! Super interesting read. In the first genomic survey of positive selection in ants @julienroux.bsky.social and I showed that nuclear genes related to the mitochondria are especially enriched for positive selection compared to flies and bees:
academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Depends on which field. Some are worse than others. It's all up to the community norms and enforcement by reviewers and editors.

cry

Thanks Brendan! Right! Everybody please check it in your favorite (hymenopteran) social insect!

Really? I was sure it is. Looks exactly like you!

This incredible result is the product of great work led by the super postdoc Aparna Lajmi with lots of contributions from the rest of the lab.

This means it's an ancient chromosome, at least 90 million years old. The discovery of the antiquity of the social chromosome opens the way for future studies in many other species.

We studied the genomic basis of polymorphism in social structure. We identified a "social chromosome" associated with colony structure in the desert ant Cataglyphis niger. This chromosome is homologous to the first social chromosome discovered in the fire ant Solenopsis invicta.

🤫 don't tell! it's a surprise!

:-) It's just my regular bus ride home. I wanted to hold a hard copy in my hand and flip through the pages and the beautiful figures. That's what we did in the olden days...

Our controlled experiments show that the combination of enzyme choice and size selection (using a Bluepippin instrument) allows for optimizing yield and efficiency. Without accounting for this in advance, a suboptimal design can easily result in waste of 30% of sequencing effort.

Upload your genome and ddgRADer will suggest enzyme choices for the double-digest Restriction-site Associated DNA sequencing protocol (ddRAD-seq) to achieve a desired coverage of the genome, both in terms of number of loci and sequencing depth. The plot shows the predicted fragment size distribution