🌯 BIOLOGY IS A BURRITO 🌯 Cells are crowded and very fast places. It's a miracle that anything works at all. The central dogma is often depicted as DNA -> RNA -> proteins, but it's so much more: A biophysical marvel inside the smallest of vessels. 💓 open.substack.com/pub/cell/p/bur…

Are you an evolutionary geneticist in SoCal? Looking for an opportunity to present your work (especially if you’re a grad student or postdoc)? Consider coming to SCalE!!! We’re accepting abstracts for short talks and posters by next Fri March 10 Link: ecoevo.social/@SCalEMeeting

This just in: new work from the lab (led by star postbac Mehrose) in Nature Communications. We found an evolutionary tradeoff in acquiring a new plasmid! Clones that take longer to adapt can achieve faster recovery growth. Read on for why you should care!! 1/N nature.com/articles/s4146…

This is finally happening!!! Sergey Kryazhimskiy 🇺🇦 and I are co-organizing the West Coast hub, join us for amazing science across multiple time zones!

the Neutral Theory is in trouble. Darwin's free competitor Evolution by Natural Selection will never need a MASSIVE update 🔥 Here's 5 incredible things Natural Selection can do that Neutrality can't 🧵

Elsevier is losing editors

My postdoc Joseph Matheson and I were sending off my former undergraduate student Minkyu Kim to graduate school at USC and giving him some advice over a beer. I thought it might be useful to share.

I have some preliminary good news, the short of it is that I will be hiring a postdoc soon to work on a collaborative project with Dr. Seunghyun Sim (an amazing chemist) to evaluate the role of spatial structure in community function using bio-printing and directed evolution.

Referring to careers in ecology/conservation like quirky passion projects bugs me. “Oh, she/he/they just loves birds, hehe, what a nature buff” No, we’re trying to help humanity survive the Anthropocene, what has your real estate license done for the world lately, Brayden?

Many ppl can't imagine what it's like to be the opposing side; you subconsciously imagine the other people must 'feel' evil or not 'really' believe what they claim, and since you yourself *don't* feel evil and *do* feel genuine belief, this is quiet proof that you must be right

Me trying to piece together my data and understand what the heck is going on

This needs to be shared FAR AND WIDE.

Y'all, I found it: The single greatest post EVER

Affirmative action was never about admitting unqualified Black kids. It was always about ensuring qualified Black kids could also get accepted despite a world of systemic racism. The “unqualified admission” you’re thinking of are legacy students—like how Kavanaugh got into Yale.

I am delighted to be hosting a hub with Sergey Kryazhimskiy 🇺🇦 in San Diego. Please submit your abstract by Sept 29th!

Very excited to share this preprint that shows that yeast - and we speculate other single cell organisms but maybe even beyond - have memory of the past growth cycles that affect their fitness in the current growth condition 1/4

I am cautiously optimistic that my lab will have an open postdoc position in 2024. If you are potentially interested, please reach out. Or if you know somebody who might be interested, please connect us. My email is on our lab website sklab.science

Our newest paper was published today, a capstone to our work on gain-of-function evolution, phage-bacterial interaction network formation, and microbial diversification.

Our new yeast toolkit is now available on @addgene! Huge thanks to the whole team at Addgene for the heroic effort getting this kit ready for distribution. addgene.org/kits/ellis-myt/ Below is a summary of the toolkit... [1/17] Tom Ellis Mo Khalil