New work from our lab led by Cassidy Catrett. She used total herd reporting data from American Simmental to conduct a huge survey on the phenotypic and genetic variation of cow fertility phenotypes. We learned so much from this powerful dataset!

academic.oup.com/jas/article/...

Almost 100 years of a barley common garden experiment involving reciprocal crossing showed a rapid decrease in genetic diversity with around 60% of progeny deriving from a single parent after 50 generations. @evogen.bsky.social Paper: doi.org/10.1126/science.adl0038 (24/34)

Have spent the week at #COP29 but the most impactful panel I’ve seen was hearing from beef and dairy producers about how they are affected by climate change and how they’re committed to being a part of the solution. Absolutely essential to have farmer and rancher voices at the table.

Two paper acceptance emails in 15 minutes

Two papers accepted within 15 minutes of each other.

Great to see the science community growing back here! Lots of familiar faces from other communities, but any agricultural genetics folks around that I'm missing? Or has someone made a starter pack that I can't track down?

Our paper using biobank scale data in cattle to map polygenic selection and sweeps is out in Evolutionary Applications! We use sequence-imputed genotypes on over 137,000 individuals to identify hundreds of loci actively responding to selection. Long time coming, but we're excited to have it out!

The origins of maize were the subject of controversy for well over a century. Even in the 1950's botanists like Edgar Anderson weren't totally sure what continent it came from!

We published today a new model for maize origins (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...). Let me tell you how we got here. 1/

Spent 18 of my last 36 hours on the road to get these precious embryos from Florida back to Tennessee. These are the “Brahman half” of our project studying the molecular basis of heterosis in beef cattle.

New paper just dropped, apparently you don't get to review the galleys on a "Perspectives" piece.

doi.org/10.3168/jds....

Great to find so many science folks from the other app on here, but I'm not seeing many of my livestock/animal science people. Are y'all out there? Or have we yet to fully migrate over here?

This preprint describes tidyomics, a community-led effort to enable application of grammar from tidyverse to omics data in Bioconductor. I've been greatly impressed with the crowd-sourcing of issues via GitHub Projects.

preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

github: github.com/tidyomics

2nd Bluesky post … faculty search! Genomics and Comp Bio dept @ UMass Chan Med School academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/25641 pop genomics, imaging, stat. genetics, machine learning aka cool science w big data.

Collab & supportive environment where you can innovate & make discoveries. Join us!

Genetic correlations back at it again!

Lots of cases where selection for productivity really kills palatability. Same experience for me when eating a lean grocery store pork chop vs. one from a Duroc/Berkshire

Latest paper from the lab, led by Wei Yuan: Pervasive under-dominance in gene expression underlying emergent growth trajectories in Arabidopsis thaliana hybrids
genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....