Ariel Chipman

The manuscript is currently under review. I would be happy to have feedback from the community on the preprint as well. 5/5 PS - I am moving away from this platform, and this may be my last post here. Find me in the blue butterfly space.

This paper is "disruptive" in a number of senses. It questions the validity of long/short-germ distinction, which has been at the center of segmentation research for years. It also forces a rethinking of the role of Hox genes in defining segment identities in arthropods. 4/5

New preprint just dropped. This is the first of my "sabbatical papers" - conceptual/synthetic papers trying to address broader questions of body-plan evolution. 1/5 ecoevorxiv.org/repository/vie…

Here it is! This incredible result is the product of great work led by @AparnaLajmi with lots of contributions from the rest of the lab. Our best paper ever, by far. The discovery of the antiquity of the social chromosome opens the way for future studies in many other species.

On the bus home after publishing the preprint of our best paper ever, by far. Have you ever wondered how complex traits have evolved repeatedly across the tree of life? May be we have some answers...

I´m excited to announce that we have a venue and dates for the next International Congress on Invertebrate Morphology (ICIM-6)! All invertebrate lovers, let's meet in 🇨🇱 next year from August 10th to 14th. 👇👇

I am also joining the mass migration to bluer skies. I will continue to lurk here, but mostly for local/current affairs. All of my science activity will move to the other place.

@iskander Not sure I see the point of your example. The distinction is one that is relevant for comparing animals that exist today. It’s an evolutionary explanation for the intuitive feeling of some animals being primitive.

@ChipmanLab Do you think that's a significant distinction though? Like...if you teleported a coelacanth from 300M to the present and found its genome was a 99.9% match for a living one, is the teleported fish "ancient"? Is the modern one?

In all my various outreach activities I’ve found that one of the most difficult ideas to explain to the general public is the fact that there is no such thing as ancient species and modern species. Many professional biologists fall for that error.

@iskander Of course there is. I usually make the point that there is no such thing as a primitive organism but there are primitive (or ancestral) characters. Some organisms are more conservative in the sense that they maintain more primitive characters, but that doesn’t make them ancient.

@ChipmanLab You don't think there's a way to operationalize the general intuition into a meaningful concept? Like...reconstruct an ancestral genome at the root of an evolutionary tree and then have some threshold of similarity between a leaf and the root to be considered ancient?

The first two people to like this post are scientists working on so-called “ancient” animals. They know exactly what I’m talking about.

@YehuMoran @EvoDevo_BMC @AMBLVit Thanks Yehu.

@ChipmanLab @EvoDevo_BMC @AMBLVit Congratulations, Ariel & Ariel and the rest of the team!

New paper in @EvoDevo_BMC, led by @AMBLVit, on the early development of the German cockroach. Cool embryology and weird deviations from most of the well-studied insect models. Note teasers for an upcoming paper on the evolution of arthropod tagmosis. rdcu.be/dYeNI

Excited to report the final version of our paper out today: In @eLife: Regulatory genome annotation of 33 insect species doi.org/10.7554/eLife.… Kudos to all involved in this monumental effort that provides a preliminary regulatory annotation of 33 insect genomes. (1/3)

@C_Blei @BastianFromm Not to mention polyphyletic Arthropoda.

@BastianFromm Cnidoecdysozoa hypothesis - textbooks need to be rewritten, again

@TelfordLab @C_Blei @BastianFromm No other explanation for it.

I still have three weeks before the semester starts, and I hope to finish and submit a few papers and proposals by then. Then, it is back to routine, and counting the months until the next sabbatical. 10/10

I was free from teaching and admin, but I did not stop editorial and reviewing commitments. I felt that since I was writing papers, it was only fair that I should also review and handle papers. Some of these commitments took up much more of my time than I expected. 9/10

As my six-month sabbatical draws to its end, I want to summarize what I did and achieved in that period. (A summary of the past year in general will be in a separate post, if I can muster the emotional strength). 1/10