Then came his scientific talk on evidence for different models of structural and functional divergence of paralogs following duplication, using salmon, whose extra whole genome duplication makes them a great choice of model system.

Overview and program can be found here: www.mncn.csic.es/en/investiga... #JME2025

@criscanestro.bsky.social gives a lovely, thoughtful talk on this theme, on a tunicate species with very a scrambled genome; then reflects on what the patterns of scrambling can tell us about the underlying regulatory architecture. #eseb2025

They also made new centromeres out of their local TEs. Genomes totally blown apart and stitched back together. Amazing.

The wild part: they find a facultative endosymbiont in aphids that protects against parasitoid wasps - but only because the bug itself has a phage that contributes the eukaryotic toxin. There's a bump in the log, and on the bump there's a frog, and....

Must either be specifically transferred or specifically preserved while the rest of the genome is eliminated. Several histones/histone modifiers on the chromosome; hypothesizes that these are to mark it for special treatment. Cool!

It seems to be targeting a neural "scramblase," which regulates lipid movement in cell membranes. Can't wait for the neural mechanism here.

A secreted peptide makes sense here, and they use omics to find a candidate, express it, and give it to the ants; it causes one component of the infected behavior, social self-isolation.

You may have heard of these fungi, but I didn't know that they're just a drop in the bucket. The phenomenon of small things controlling the brains of big things to their own benefit is literally a whole ecological niche.

and b) in the back of my mind was sort of your paper with Nikos where you land on polyA/T tracts as the main source of bias toward yeast intergenic TMs - seems like a similar type of sequence idiosyncrasy could drive this? You're the expert.

I don't think I have much to suggest other than to ask a) if you look at a bunch of each set of sequences by eye, does anything jump out?

And fun facts kept coming in Q&A: elephants apparently have internal testes, and so did these mammoths, based on a female morphological ID for a sample but a clearly male genotype!
So cool.