#smbe2026 — Public Fediverse posts

Thoughts on traveling by train to 2 international conferences a bit far:
Lausanne - Glasgow for #EED2026, 13h of train to, a bit more with a night train fro.
Lausanne - Copenhagen for #SMBE2026, 22h each way including a night train.
#NoFlyEED #NoFlySMBE #NoFlyAcademics

After @GaltierNicolas 's #SMBE2026 talk I of course calculated my @DAFNEE score. It is notably brought down by NAR Database 🤷

@moi #SMBE2026 "A scientists warning to humanity on the loss of genetic diversity" #ClimateChange #Biodiversity
https://genetic-diversity-scientists-warning.github.io/

@moi #SMBE2026 Arabidopsis local adaptation is lagging behind on climate change 😢 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.02.729671v1

@moi et al do see evolution happening in plants: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adz0777 #SMBE2026

Moises Exposito-Alonso @moi last but not least keynote of #SMBE2026, presenting large scale experimental evolution of Arabidopsis: https://grene-net.org/

My take-away from #SMBE2026 after 3 days: biodiversity genome projects such as Darwin Tree of Life @[email protected] @[email protected] et al are no longer promises, but are changing how we do molecular evolution.
I hope biodiversity gene expression will be next 😎 .

Beautiful talk by Jule Drewalowski on the magic of the syngnathiformes and the amazing genomic dataset Josefin Stiller’s group have produced. #SMBE2026

Thank you #SMBE2026 for this fun and useful plogging (it's a word apparently) tour, running around Copenhagen while picking up litter.

Noticing that the public data reused in #SMBE2026 symposium Evolutionary Genomics from Public Repositories is always genomes / DNA rather than expression / transcriptomes. Hopefully in future years this will change thanks to work at @bgeedb and elsewhere!

If you're at #SMBE2026 and you think your species should be in a next release of @bgeedb, ping me on social media or come to chat with me or @fbastian. We're very nice, we don't bite, are mostly polite and always happy to speak about our database 🤓.

#SMBE2026 Nice resource of whole genome duplicates, i.e. ohnologs, by Lukasz Niezabitowski of @aoifemcl lab: https://ohnologs.com/

Not going to be too ambitious on live-posting given the wifi, but noting that 2 of the 1st talks in #SMBE2026 symposium Evolutionary Genomics from Public Repositories are from @SIB: @rmwaterhouse and @fbastian 😎

The poor wifi also limits the usefulness of the #SMBE2026 app, which always wants to reload and often doesn't manage. 😕

Frustrated by #SMBE2026 wifi. I'm not going to live post anymore until further notice.

Loosing wifi again, sorry if my live-posting is interrupted. #SMBE2026

Haghani #SMBE2026: but why do these fish have sparkling scales? It seems to be a tunable signaling system to help evade predator attacks, verified by flying model birds above the fish tank.

Haghani #SMBE2026: genomic alignments indicate a consistent insertion of an endogenous retrovirus hear alkal2 in sparkling swordfish. Changes chromatin accessibility, enhances expression.

Haghani #SMBE2026: "sparkle" scales have an enrichment in iridophore cells. GWAS for sparkle: 1 peak. Differential gene expression: 1 gene near the peak: alkal2.
https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.07.687308

Containing the #SMBE2026 Grad student award symposium, always my favorite part of SMBE, with Nadia Haghani on swordtail fish coloration. Instead of pigments, structural coloration trait.

Lin #SMBE2026: a high noise mutant enhances cell competitiveness under a fluctuating environment.
Depending on backgrounds, noise is advantageous or deleterious.

Lin #SMBE2026: focus on protein level, with a reporter gene. Experimental evolution reveals the regulators of expression noise. Expression noise can be detrimental, but also adaptive as bet-hedging of cell populations.
https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkae432

Starting the Grad student award symposium #SMBE2026 with Wei-Han Lin, with a very interesting topic: gene expression noise.

Do you want easy access to annotated transcriptome data in animals? Where and when genes are expressed? Are you trying to analyse together single-cell datasets of different protocols and species? Come to @fbastian #SMBE2026 talk presenting @bgeedb in S04 Mining the Archive at 16:35!

Bitbol: ProteomeLM: predicting protein-protein interactions at scale using coevolution. #SMBE2026 (would share the paper but wifi very bad, abandoning live posting for now)

Bitbol: MSA transformer attention model capture structural contacts and phylogenetic relationships despite not being explicitly modeled. #smbe2026

Standing room only for Bitbol. #smbe2026 underestimated strongly the interest in AI in molecular evolution. (Also the wifi sucks, sorry if I don't manage to post much.)

Teeling #SMBE2026: hypothesis: flight imposes adaptation to very high metabolism, immune system and aging follow. 🤔

Teeling #SMBE2026: bats antiviral genes have evolved under strong positive selection
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08471-0

Teeling #SMBE2026: Key protein complex DREAM appears repressed in bats, which enables the higher expression of DNA repair/cell regulation genes.