#molbio — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #molbio, aggregated by home.social.
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IAP proteins play central roles in regulating apoptosis - Lopes et al. show that IAP expansion in animals has repeatedly emerged through lineage-specific duplication events
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Goff et al. measure collateral fitness landscapes of TEM-1 β-lactamase in conditions expected to alter protein aggregation or stability, proposing that mutational destabilization is associated with deleterious collateral fitness effects.
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Li et al. present a genomic reassessment of the endangered black-and-white snub-nosed monkey, suggesting the species is divided into five genetically distinct clusters.
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag104
📷 Xinming He
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The May issue of MBE is here, featuring the work of Topaloudis et al., who evaluated genotype imputation accuracy in a large barn owl low-coverage WGS dataset.
🔗 https://academic.oup.com/mbe/issue/43/5
📷 Alex Labhardt
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Berruga-Fernández et al. show that bacterial hybrid chromosome formation driven by conjugative mobile genetic elements may be an important and widespread mechanism in the emergence and evolution of high-risk bacterial pathogens.
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Ceriotti et al. investigate the rewiring of organellar translation in the holoparasitic Balanophoraceae, revealing extreme changes in the anciently conserved machinery of plant organellar translation.
🔗 https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag077
📷 Tuber and two inflorescences of the holoparasitic plant Lophophytum pyramidale collected from Parque Nacional Calilegua, Argentina
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Pinto et al. present SCINKD as a framework to identify unannotated sex chromosomes and curate diploid genome assemblies from a single individual.
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Cui et al. investigate the evolutionary trajectory leading to dim-light vision in vertebrates, concluding that it evolved via three main stages of molecular adaptation, at the origins of ancestral rhodopsin pigments.
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Cochetel & Cantu publish a new MBE Review on plant pangenomes, outlining major paradigms from gene-based catalogs to haplotype-resolved graphs, core and variable compartments, and how graph-based frameworks enable analyses that are difficult with single linear references.
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MBE's April issue Highlight features the article by Ewan Harney and Josefa González on transgenerational inheritance of heat shock responses in fruit flies, written by SMBE Fellow Shady Kuster.
"A gift from a great-grand-fly—transgenerational epigenetic inheritance of heat shock response"
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Didelot et al. present the R package DiagnoDating for diagnosing issues in a reconstructed dated phylogeny, including outlier detection, posterior predictive checking and residual analysis.
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Bazzicalupo et al analyzed introgression in Iberian and Eurasian lynx with the application of a deep convolutional neural network, detecting specific regions of the genome with signals of gene flow in three populations of these species.
🖌️Paula Martin Art
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Böhm et al. resolve the structural basis of the NADP-malic enzyme divergence in C4 isoforms and propose that tetramerization mitigates aggregation at the high expression levels demanded by the C4 cycle.
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Listening to The Quanta Podcast (One of Nature’s Most Complex Molecular Machines):
https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/quanta-podcast/At the center of little holes in cell nuclei is a mystery. Here, clumps of proteins wiggle disordered tails around like seaweed. They drive a molecular machine that moves countless molecules in and out of the nucleus efficiently, with little room for error.
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Listening to The Quanta Podcast (One of Nature’s Most Complex Molecular Machines):
https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/quanta-podcast/At the center of little holes in cell nuclei is a mystery. Here, clumps of proteins wiggle disordered tails around like seaweed. They drive a molecular machine that moves countless molecules in and out of the nucleus efficiently, with little room for error.
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Ewan Harney & Josefa González show evidence of transgenerational developmental plasticity as a result of heat shock in fruit flies, documenting gene expression and phenotype changes 3+ generations following heat shock.
🔗 https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag069
This study is featured in our newest Highlight article, by SMBE Fellow Shady Kuster:
Highlight: A gift from a great-grand-fly—transgenerational epigenetic inheritance of heat shock response
🔗 https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag083 -
Wang et al. analyzed the genomes of three Mauritius bird species that experienced extreme population bottlenecks, showing that evolutionary context is essential for interpreting genomic risk.
📷 Gregory Guida
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Tan et al. present panCG, an integrative pipeline for family-level super-pangenome analysis across coding and noncoding sequences, enabling the reference-free construction of pangene and pan-conserved noncoding sequences.
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MBE is excited to launch our newest Call for Papers on the Major Transitions of Life, covering all aspects of phylogenomic research.
🔗 academic.oup.com/mbe/pages/call-for-papers-on-the-major-transitions-of-life
Guest Editors:
Davide Pisani
Anja SpangAccepted manuscripts will receive a 20% discount on the APCs, on top of the SMBE membership discount.
Toward a genomic understanding of the tree of life
🔗 https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag043 -
Glass et al. review recent progress in understanding NF-κB transcription factors in unicellular holozoans, Porifera, Placozoa, and Cnidaria, which are involved in multiple biological functions.
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🦠 High-performance cell atlas workflow driven by manifold fitting
https://phys.org/news/2026-02-high-cell-atlas-workflow-driven.html
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The April issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution features the work of Gu et al., who performed large-scale phylogenomic analyses of the white-bellied pangolin.
🔗 https://academic.oup.com/mbe/issue/43/4
🖌️ Ting Bai
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Yang et al. sequenced ancient individuals from the Bronze Age to historical periods in Xinjiang, revealing divergent genetic profiles of the western and eastern Tianshan, underscoring a complex population-culture interplay.
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Li et al. studied the genomic basis of mimicry in Epicopeiidae moths, finding that TE-driven regulatory innovation rewired developmental gene networks, facilitating the emergence of multiple mimetic forms.
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🔥 Triggering self-combustion in fat cells for weight loss
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-02-triggering-combustion-fat-cells-weight.html
#medicine #biology #healthcare #molbio #fat #thermogenesis #metabolism #pharmacology #drugs
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Daniel Huson introduces displacement-optimized tanglegrams (DO-tanglegrams), a new approach that applies equally to trees and rooted phylogenetic networks, performing better than cophylo on trees and then NN-tanglegram on networks.
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McArthur et al. present piqtree, an easy to use, open-source Python package that provides Python script-based control of IQ-TREE’s phylogenetic inference engine.
