Marco Pessoa
@marcopessoa.bsky.social
Parent, husband, vinyl collector.
Research Scientist at Embrapa, Brazil.
Plant genomics, plant genetic resources, and breeding of tropical forages.
1st-gen DSc.
Research Scientist at Embrapa, Brazil.
Plant genomics, plant genetic resources, and breeding of tropical forages.
1st-gen DSc.
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
¿Hiciste tu doctorado en México? ¿Quieres hacer un postdoc en California? ¿Te interesa la genética evolutiva? ¡Checa esta beca y mándame un mensaje! alianzamx.universityofcalifornia.edu/research-and...
Postdoctoral Research Fellowships - University of California Alianza MX
Submitting an Application Current Fellows 2025 Cohort Additional Information Humberger Toggle Menu Interested in applying for a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship? Eligibility The program seeks applican...
alianzamx.universityofcalifornia.edu
November 7, 2025 at 10:47 PM
¿Hiciste tu doctorado en México? ¿Quieres hacer un postdoc en California? ¿Te interesa la genética evolutiva? ¡Checa esta beca y mándame un mensaje! alianzamx.universityofcalifornia.edu/research-and...
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
Confused writing is usually a symptom of confused thinking. As we struggle to clarify writing, we clarify our thoughts. AI writing aids rob us of that struggle, leaving clean-looking text and thoughts still confused for lack of inspection. Writing is not just a product; it is a diagnostic tool.
September 5, 2025 at 3:20 PM
Confused writing is usually a symptom of confused thinking. As we struggle to clarify writing, we clarify our thoughts. AI writing aids rob us of that struggle, leaving clean-looking text and thoughts still confused for lack of inspection. Writing is not just a product; it is a diagnostic tool.
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
It is depressing, but all too predictable, how swiftly we’ve gone from the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium offering reassurances about the uses of behavioural polygenic scores to one of their lead authors marketing embryo selection for IQ
August 2, 2025 at 2:15 AM
It is depressing, but all too predictable, how swiftly we’ve gone from the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium offering reassurances about the uses of behavioural polygenic scores to one of their lead authors marketing embryo selection for IQ
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
Asking for a friend: Colleague was shipping purified RNA samples from Brazil to Macrogen Korea. She had a FedEx prepaid shipping label provided by Macrogen. FeDex returned shipment because this was a biological sample. Anyone else had an issue like this?
June 26, 2025 at 4:32 PM
Asking for a friend: Colleague was shipping purified RNA samples from Brazil to Macrogen Korea. She had a FedEx prepaid shipping label provided by Macrogen. FeDex returned shipment because this was a biological sample. Anyone else had an issue like this?
Asking for a friend: Colleague was shipping purified RNA samples from Brazil to Macrogen Korea. She had a FedEx prepaid shipping label provided by Macrogen. FeDex returned shipment because this was a biological sample. Anyone else had an issue like this?
June 26, 2025 at 4:32 PM
Asking for a friend: Colleague was shipping purified RNA samples from Brazil to Macrogen Korea. She had a FedEx prepaid shipping label provided by Macrogen. FeDex returned shipment because this was a biological sample. Anyone else had an issue like this?
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
FastGA: Fast Genome Alignment www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧬🖥️🧪 www.github.com/thegenemyers...
June 20, 2025 at 9:39 AM
FastGA: Fast Genome Alignment www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧬🖥️🧪 www.github.com/thegenemyers...
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
It may be true (I don't know enough neuroscience to say) that LLMs & human brains use similar techniques to make connections between concepts & learn. But most humans don't speak confidently & coherently about something unless they actually know it. The ones who do... well, we have words for them.
June 19, 2025 at 3:42 PM
It may be true (I don't know enough neuroscience to say) that LLMs & human brains use similar techniques to make connections between concepts & learn. But most humans don't speak confidently & coherently about something unless they actually know it. The ones who do... well, we have words for them.
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
I expect that consumer-facing AI programs will continue to improve and they may become much more useful tools for everyday life in the future.
But I think it was a disastrous mistake that today’s models were taught to be convincing before they were taught to be right.
But I think it was a disastrous mistake that today’s models were taught to be convincing before they were taught to be right.
June 19, 2025 at 1:26 PM
I expect that consumer-facing AI programs will continue to improve and they may become much more useful tools for everyday life in the future.
But I think it was a disastrous mistake that today’s models were taught to be convincing before they were taught to be right.
But I think it was a disastrous mistake that today’s models were taught to be convincing before they were taught to be right.
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
I suspect that fact that the vast majority of LLM users don’t seem to have received this (really very simple!) message is because the AI companies have a vested interest in us not understanding it. “ChatGPT is smart, it just makes mistakes sometimes” is much more marketable than the truth.
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
June 19, 2025 at 11:36 AM
I suspect that fact that the vast majority of LLM users don’t seem to have received this (really very simple!) message is because the AI companies have a vested interest in us not understanding it. “ChatGPT is smart, it just makes mistakes sometimes” is much more marketable than the truth.
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
When a chatbot gets something wrong, it’s not because it made an error. It’s because on that roll of the dice, it happened to string together a group of words that, when read by a human, represents something false. But it was working entirely as designed. It was supposed to make a sentence & it did.
June 19, 2025 at 11:28 AM
When a chatbot gets something wrong, it’s not because it made an error. It’s because on that roll of the dice, it happened to string together a group of words that, when read by a human, represents something false. But it was working entirely as designed. It was supposed to make a sentence & it did.
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
June 19, 2025 at 11:21 AM
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
Congrats to @dantipov.bsky.social et al. on the publication of Verkko2! The team put a ton of work into this making it the first assembler that deals with the complexity of human acrocentric chromosomes. Lots of interesting discoveries to come! genome.cshlp.org/content/earl...
June 17, 2025 at 1:39 PM
Congrats to @dantipov.bsky.social et al. on the publication of Verkko2! The team put a ton of work into this making it the first assembler that deals with the complexity of human acrocentric chromosomes. Lots of interesting discoveries to come! genome.cshlp.org/content/earl...
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
A great collection of papers here ... onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17550998... Special Issue: Advancing species conservation and management through omics tools
Special Issue: Advancing species conservation and management through omics tools: Molecular Ecology Resources: Vol 25, No 5
Molecular Ecology Resources is a broad journal publishing computer programs, statistical & molecular advances & more for studies in evolution, ecology & conservation.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
June 15, 2025 at 11:11 AM
A great collection of papers here ... onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17550998... Special Issue: Advancing species conservation and management through omics tools
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
Your genome is not a blueprint. A thread about misleading metaphors in science communication. 🧬🧪 1/n
June 14, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Your genome is not a blueprint. A thread about misleading metaphors in science communication. 🧬🧪 1/n
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
Fast3VmrMLM: A fast algorithm that integrates genome-wide scanning with machine learning to accelerate gene mining and breeding by design for polygenic traits in large-scale GWAS datasets #resource #PlantCommunications cell.com/plant-commun...
May 27, 2025 at 11:30 AM
Fast3VmrMLM: A fast algorithm that integrates genome-wide scanning with machine learning to accelerate gene mining and breeding by design for polygenic traits in large-scale GWAS datasets #resource #PlantCommunications cell.com/plant-commun...
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
We're excited to share PlantCAD browser tracks: a new, unpublished dataset integrating AI techniques for plant genome analysis. Explore it here: github.com/andorfc/Plan...
We welcome the community's feedback and innovative use cases for this data!
We welcome the community's feedback and innovative use cases for this data!
June 6, 2025 at 2:48 PM
We're excited to share PlantCAD browser tracks: a new, unpublished dataset integrating AI techniques for plant genome analysis. Explore it here: github.com/andorfc/Plan...
We welcome the community's feedback and innovative use cases for this data!
We welcome the community's feedback and innovative use cases for this data!
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
"EviAnn consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art packages including BRAKER3, MAKER2, and FINDER... Annotation of a mammalian genome can be completed in less than an hour on a single multi-core server." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧬🖥️🧪 github.com/alekseyzimin...
May 13, 2025 at 6:30 PM
"EviAnn consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art packages including BRAKER3, MAKER2, and FINDER... Annotation of a mammalian genome can be completed in less than an hour on a single multi-core server." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧬🖥️🧪 github.com/alekseyzimin...
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
Inspired by Helixer (by @AlisandraDenton ), we explore the potential of deep learning for genome annotation. We introduce Tiberius for highly accurate ab initio prediction of protein coding genes in mammals. Tiberius beats Augustus, BRAKER3, and Galba. doi.org/10.1101/2024...
Tiberius: End-to-End Deep Learning with an HMM for Gene Prediction
bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution
doi.org
July 24, 2024 at 5:28 AM
Inspired by Helixer (by @AlisandraDenton ), we explore the potential of deep learning for genome annotation. We introduce Tiberius for highly accurate ab initio prediction of protein coding genes in mammals. Tiberius beats Augustus, BRAKER3, and Galba. doi.org/10.1101/2024...
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
NIH funding supporting the HMMER and Infernal software projects has been terminated. NIH states that our work, as well as all other federally funded research at Harvard, is of no benefit to the US.
May 22, 2025 at 12:42 PM
NIH funding supporting the HMMER and Infernal software projects has been terminated. NIH states that our work, as well as all other federally funded research at Harvard, is of no benefit to the US.
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
The 'Oscar' of food prizes goes to a Brazilian who harnessed the power of bacteria
Mariangela Hungria found microbes that were good at capturing nitrogen from the air and turning it into fertilizer for crops.
www.npr.org/2025/05/14/n...
Mariangela Hungria found microbes that were good at capturing nitrogen from the air and turning it into fertilizer for crops.
www.npr.org/2025/05/14/n...
The 'Oscar' of food prizes goes to a Brazilian who harnessed the power of bacteria
This year's $500,000 World Food Prize, for advances in agriculture and nutrition, goes to a Brazilian who boosted the country's farming revolution, turning it into a soybean superpower.
www.npr.org
May 15, 2025 at 2:14 PM
The 'Oscar' of food prizes goes to a Brazilian who harnessed the power of bacteria
Mariangela Hungria found microbes that were good at capturing nitrogen from the air and turning it into fertilizer for crops.
www.npr.org/2025/05/14/n...
Mariangela Hungria found microbes that were good at capturing nitrogen from the air and turning it into fertilizer for crops.
www.npr.org/2025/05/14/n...
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
Genome-wide family prediction unveils molecular mechanisms underlying the regulation of agronomic traits in Urochloa ruziziensis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.25.559305v1
Genome-wide family prediction unveils molecular mechanisms underlying the regulation of agronomic traits in Urochloa ruziziensis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.25.559305v1
Tropical forage grasses, especially species of the genus Urochloa, play an important role in cattle
www.biorxiv.org
September 26, 2023 at 4:37 PM
Genome-wide family prediction unveils molecular mechanisms underlying the regulation of agronomic traits in Urochloa ruziziensis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.25.559305v1
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
Advances in genomic characterization of Urochloa humidicola: exploring polyploid inheritance and apomixis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.31.555743v1
Advances in genomic characterization of Urochloa humidicola: exploring polyploid inheritance and apomixis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.31.555743v1
Tropical forage grasses are an important food source for animal feeding, with Urochloa humidicola, a
www.biorxiv.org
September 4, 2023 at 3:34 AM
Advances in genomic characterization of Urochloa humidicola: exploring polyploid inheritance and apomixis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.31.555743v1
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
The rest of Mendel's alleles characterized! So, out of 7 traits, 3 caused by TE insertions!!! (though apparently there are two different green alleles, one cause by a TE insertion, but another a promoter deletion allele)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Genomic and genetic insights into Mendel’s pea genes - Nature
Characterization of the genetic architecture underlying the 7 pairs of contrasting traits studied by Mendel and the over 70 additional agronomic traits in pea (Pisum sativum) reveals their m...
www.nature.com
April 26, 2025 at 2:15 AM
The rest of Mendel's alleles characterized! So, out of 7 traits, 3 caused by TE insertions!!! (though apparently there are two different green alleles, one cause by a TE insertion, but another a promoter deletion allele)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
Robin Waples' reference manual for the elegant, yet hideously complex concept of effective population size (Ne) #biodiversity #genomics #conservation #evolution onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
The Idiot's Guide to Effective Population Size
This is a reference manual for the elegant, yet hideously complex concept of effective population size (Ne), inspired by a classic, self-published manual of automotive repair ‘for the compleat idiot’...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
February 17, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Robin Waples' reference manual for the elegant, yet hideously complex concept of effective population size (Ne) #biodiversity #genomics #conservation #evolution onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Reposted by Marco Pessoa
Thrilled to see this paper out! 🎉
We analyzed 470 (!) angiosperm genomes and identified and dated 132 whole-genome duplication events. Importantly, we observed that WGD occurrence dates are not randomly distributed, but clustered at times of major environmental upheaval.
We analyzed 470 (!) angiosperm genomes and identified and dated 132 whole-genome duplication events. Importantly, we observed that WGD occurrence dates are not randomly distributed, but clustered at times of major environmental upheaval.
November 24, 2024 at 10:30 AM
Thrilled to see this paper out! 🎉
We analyzed 470 (!) angiosperm genomes and identified and dated 132 whole-genome duplication events. Importantly, we observed that WGD occurrence dates are not randomly distributed, but clustered at times of major environmental upheaval.
We analyzed 470 (!) angiosperm genomes and identified and dated 132 whole-genome duplication events. Importantly, we observed that WGD occurrence dates are not randomly distributed, but clustered at times of major environmental upheaval.