The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt University
The Laboratory of Antonis Rokas at Vanderbilt University. Tweets should be interpreted as bookmarks, not as endorsements. All opinions are Antonis'.
http://www.rokaslab.org
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityWith the @rokaslab.bsky.social, three novel whole genome duplication (WGD) events were discovered in the Saccharomycotina yeast species in the Dipodascales clade. Before now, only four WGD events were known in fungi. This work suggests WGD may be underreported. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityExcited to share a new piece of work in @embojournal.org Parasitoid wasps hijack a bacterial gene that governs venoms against host. Coauthors include @rokaslab.bsky.social and others. Read more from: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityExcited to announce our latest publication in reporting evidence for three (3!) new whole genome duplications (WGDs) in yeasts. Scientists have often wondered why WGD is so rare in fungi, it turns out we may just not have been looking hard enough! 🧪 🍄 🧬 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityIf you participated in a yeast meeting in 2025, reach out to me about publishing your work from that meeting!
- The deadline for the submission of papers to the special issue on the International Yeast Meetings of 2025 has been extended to 31 March. Papers should be connected to one of the meetings listed below. Hurry up and don't miss this chance! More information at: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal...
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- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt University🎉 Fall 2025 Evolutionary Studies - the Magazine is live! Horses that ignore genetic stop signs, humans adapting to extreme deserts, the #evolution of birdsong, and our Friend of Darwin award. Read it: loom.ly/cACR5HY #science
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt University📣 #EMBOEvoEco returns in 2026 to uncover the mechanistic foundations of ecological and evolutionary change! Keynote lectures will spotlight the ecology and evolution of symbiosis. Submit your abstract for the EMBO Workshop: s.embl.org/eae26-01-bl!
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- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityWe made a new lager beer! "Indomitus" for wild and untamed. Brewed with a wild yeast strain from Patagonia! This is the result of a super fun collaboration (and lots of hard work) with Francisco Cubillos in Chile (@fcocubillosr.bsky.social) and Andrés Furukawa at the Nils Oscar Brewery in Sweden.
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- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt University2026 is the 50th anniversary of the Cellular and Molecular Fungal Biology GRC. It will be June 21-26, 2026. Consider attending this is a great meeting if you work in the fungal biology field at genetic / genomic / molecular scale. www.grc.org/cellular-and... 🍄🧬🖥️
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt University🚨Call for papers🚨 Microbial Evolution: Impacts on Human Health in the society journal Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health Guest Editors: Bob Woods, Silvie Huijben & Camilo Barbosa EIC: me This will be great, please submit and share! academic.oup.com/emph/pages/m...
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityLast work of the lab showing that Repeated losses of self-fertility shaped heterozygosity and polyploidy in yeast evolution | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversitySponges are notoriously difficult to understand in evolutionary biology terms. I think this paper is a big step forward : www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityLast week, faculty, trainees, alumni and friends gathered for our annual retreat. It was a day of talks, trivia and conversation spanning #evolution, medicine, ecology, and genomics. A great reminder of the interdisciplinary community that makes ESI work. More retreat highlights soon…
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityGrateful to share our paper on gene-specific selective sweeps in human gut microbiomes, now out in Nature! It has been a joy to work with @rwolff.bsky.social, whose insights and hard work made this possible. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityOur raxtax tool for taxonomic classification is published: it is 2.7–100 times faster than competing tools but equally accurate - raxtax has increasing speedups with growing query and reference sequence numbers compared to existing tools: academic.oup.com/bioinformati...
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityWe are excited to present the accepted paper on the Mycetohabitans pangenome now in @genomebiolevol.bsky.social! 🧬🦠 Thanks to @bhuwanabbot.bsky.social for leading and collaborators: @raw937.bsky.social @andrabuchan.bsky.social academic.oup.com/gbe/advance-...
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityJust a few days left to apply to the PhD position in our group. It focuses on selfish genes in #fungi and how they might affect the spread of giant #TEs called Starships.
- We're looking for a PhD student! If you're interested in #fungal #genomics & #TEs, meiotic drive, or pathogens, please consider applying. The project is about toxin/antidote genes in the human fungal pathogen A. fumigatus. uu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...
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- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityNew preprint with @rokaslab.bsky.social! We used genomic, metabolic, environmental, and phenotypic data sets from 1,154 Saccharomycotina strains to asses filamentation variability and predict filamentation types across the subphylum. 🧩 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityEssential reading if you care about the health of scientific inquiry in the US www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityReminder! Our Friend of Darwin and Friend of the Planet webinar is coming up this Thurs., 12/4! Join us virtually as we celebrate 2025's award recipients. This online event is free and will include a Q&A after brief comments from the winners. Register - us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi... #soundscience
- Join us virtually on 12/4 at 6 ET as we celebrate our 2025 Friend of Darwin and Friend of the Planet recipients. Register in advance for a link - us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi... #CelebrateScience #ScienceSky #ClimateSky
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityHow do new centromeres evolve while staying compatible with the division machinery? Discover it in our new Nature paper! We show centromeres transition gradually via a mix of drift, selection, and sex, reaching new states that still work with the kinetochore. 👉 doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09779-1
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- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityCheck out Brynn Wooten's work featured in @livescience.com and covered on our website - loom.ly/rVt1O2o! Proud alum of Fort Hays State University @vuartsci.bsky.social #HellPig
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityDebating submitting an abstract to present at #Fungal26? Share your science with a supportive community, ready to provide important feedback, exchange ideas, and build new collaborations to further the field of fungal genetics. Submit an abstract: buff.ly/SSt7GDF
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityWe are hiring!! Biological Sciences as UNC Charlotte has a broad search for a new assistant professor. Apps reviewed 12/15. Please spread the word! 💚⛏️ #PlantSci 🧪🦠🧬 jobs.charlotte.edu/postings/65141
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityThis is a remarkable study describing a new fungal species in a 407 million year old plant - Rugososporomyces lavoisierae Strullu-Derrien and Schornack sp. nov - using some amazing technology. Worth a read 👇
- Confocal scanning laser microscopy, fluorescence lifetime imaging & Raman analyses allowed @nhm-london.bsky.social, @slcuplants.bsky.social & @cambridge-ee.bsky.social researchers to resolve plant & fungal structures fossil Read in @newphyt.bsky.social doi.org/10.1111/nph.... @dromius.bsky.social
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- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityJoin us virtually on 12/4 at 6 ET as we celebrate our 2025 Friend of Darwin and Friend of the Planet recipients. Register in advance for a link - us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi... #CelebrateScience #ScienceSky #ClimateSky
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityNSF is open again! A few comments: *Please be patient. During a shutdown NSF employees cannot open computers or respond to emails. *Merit review will continue. However panels won’t resume until after Dec 8th. *POs remain excited and committed to advancing science and the scientific workforce.
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityNEW pub in @science.org 🥳 Is it sponges (panels A & B) or comb jellies (C & D) that root the animal tree of life? For over 15 years, #phylogenomic studies have been divided. We provide new evidence suggesting that... 🔗: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
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- Abstract submission open for #Fungal26 through Dec 4! Comparative & functional genomics, gene regulation, cell biology, biochemistry and metabolism, population & evolutionary genetics, host-pathogen interactions, ecology, and more. Can’t wait to see your science! genetics-gsa.org/fungal-2026/...
- Know of someone (or are you someone) that recently authored a high-impact paper that was recently published or in press? Nominate them for the Chairs’ Choice Plenary Talks by December 4, 2025 app.smartsheet.com/b/form/7986e...
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityI am so excited to share new work on a TE insertion that regulates iridescence in swordtails, led by fantastic grad student @nadiahaghani.bsky.social and with help from many coauthors! In a time that has been so difficult to navigate, this & other projects have kept my spirits up: shorturl.at/NE65A
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityWith @linder-surprise.bsky.social and the @rokaslab.bsky.social, we recently expanded upon an analysis where glucose uptake rates were inversely correlated with the cell surface area-to-volume ratio, testing 282 species in the Saccharomycotina yeast subphylum. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityMy book 'The Tree of Life' is published in the USA and Canada today. Available as book, on kindle and as audio. I would be really grateful for reposts. www.amazon.com/Tree-Life-So... www.amazon.ca/Tree-Life-So...
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- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityPleased to share our preprint which builds off of recent work connecting glucose uptake rates and cell morphology across yeast species: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityWelsey Roberts presents his evidence that teaching #evolution works and it doesn't have to be religion OR evolution. @ncse.bsky.social #teaching #scicomm
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- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityWe just joined Southern Hemisphere efforts and co-authored a review on yeast research from this side of the world 🌎 Turns out, there’s a lot to tell—and much more to come! Huge thanks to Varela’s team and @pablo-villa.bsky.social for the great collaboration 🍻 academic.oup.com/femsyr/artic...
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityCheck out our newest issue where we interview Antonis Rokas, who uses DNA data from fungi, animals, and plants to study the patterns and processes of evolutionary diversity at Vanderbilt University. @rokaslab.bsky.social www.cell.com/current-biol...
- Registrations and abstract submissions are now open for the always stellar #fungal #genetics conference at lovely Asilomar, CA - March 17-22, 2026. Thank you to @genetics-gsa.bsky.social for the amazing partnership with the fungal community. Hope to see you there!
- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityI built a small app (GenomeCheck ✅ - github.com/meadm/Genome...) for assessing genome assemblies and catching mislabeled data. It can be run on Streamlit Community Cloud (genomecheck.streamlit.app), Docker (meadm/genomecheck:latest), or locally via the GitHub repo. Let me know what you think!
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- Great workshop, fantastic location, amazing instructors! If you are interested in obtaining advanced training in phylogenomics / comparative genomics research, apply now!
- Come join the Workshop on Phylogenomics in Cesky Krumlov, Czechia, from January 25 through February 7, 2026! Applications close November 15! #phylogenetics #evolution #genomics #ai evomics.org/apply-worksh...
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- Reposted by The Rokas Lab at Vanderbilt UniversityHot of the Press! Check it out! From @rokaslab.bsky.social and Oberlies Lab @uncgresearch.bsky.social Machine-Readable Structural Information Is Essential for Natural Products Research | Journal of Natural Products pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
