Ben Karin

If you’re looking for the best loci for phylogenomics, take a look at Rapidly Evolving Long Exon Capture (RELEC). These loci maximize information content while maintaining presence and orthology across evolutionary scales. Happy to say the final version is now published at MBE!

Excited to share the final version of the Long Amplicon MitoGenome paper. Check it out if you're interested in saving money multiplex sequencing hundreds of mitogenomes or other long amplicons. Cheaper than Sanger per sample and you get the whole mtGenomes doi.org/10.1186/s12864…

@DPortik @PacBio @oxfordnanopore @berkeleyIB @MVZUCB haha I prefer MitoBenome

@SkinkBen @PacBio @oxfordnanopore @berkeleyIB @MVZUCB Congrats Ben - it's great to see all of this come together! Do I get to call you mito-Ben from now on?

MtGenomes for the Cost of a Gene! Check out the preprint that just came out. We used Long Amplicon sequencing on both @PacBio and @oxfordnanopore to sequence hundreds of lizard MtGenomes (only ~$7 each). Worked really well and the gene tree is WAY better. doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.…

It's here! Out today in @CurrentBiology. With continental-scale phylogenomics, we reconstruct the diversification of rodents across Sahul (New Guinea, Australia, Maluku, Solomon Islands) since the Miocene cell.com/current-biolog… free access>authors.elsevier.com/a/1fhE63QW8R%7… #ozrodents 🧵/1

And if you think this is cool wait until you see what this same group is doing on Sulawesi! Spoiler: mountains matter...a lot.

Our paper is just out in Evolution: Sean Reilly shows that skinks really do just break everything we expect them to do. Instead of dispersing across a simple straight chain of islands, they back-colonized several times leading to 11 species in the process. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…

For those of you at JMIH: interested in sequencing hundreds to thousands of mtGenomes for CHEAP? Or want to hear about the INSANE biogeography of Sulawesi’s Sphenomorpine Skinks? Then come to my talk Sunday 1:30, 206D!

In this five day field genomics course, students learned to catch lizards, collected confiscated plant dna and sequenced them on @nanopore #fieldgenomics2021.Just a little nervous as Serey loaded over 500 of my skink mtgenomes on the flow cell the day after learning to pipette🥶

@ketkisamel HA why didn't you tell me this last month??

@SkinkBen sure but you could’ve had “Lugubris, I am your father”

How do you not use the title "Who's your daddy?" after uncovering the paternal ancestor of a hybrid gecko? It turned out our recently described Lepidodactylus pantai ranges across much of the Pacific and hybridized with L. moestus to produce L. lugubris! mapress.com/zt/article/vie…

@AaronHGriffing thanks Aaron! I hope you enjoyed your quote shoutout in there ;)

@SkinkBen Well done, Ben! Cool paper.

Our large collaborative project as part of the @skinks_IUCN shows ~20% of skinks are threatened with extinction globally. It also shows that new skink species are being described rapidly and there is no sign of that stopping anytime soon!! doi.org/10.1016/j.bioc…

@HaydenDavis1 found exceptional morphological conservation among three independent and paraphyletic lineages of Cyrtodactylus on Borneo. Very cool to see so much variation next to this extreme morphological conservation. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…

What a nice treat this morning to wake up to two new collaborative papers published! One on Bornean geckos led by @HaydenDavis1 and the other on global skink conservation with @skinks_IUCN. BORNEO + SKINKS = HAPPY DAYS!

@toddrjackman @HaydenDavis1 @ian_g_brennan Yes happy birthday!

Desert researchers, here's a fantastic new review of the genetic underpinnings of desert adaptation in mammals by @joanocha. Looking forward to seeing how the foxes do it! sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

@jamesTstroud @MVLizards @MVZUCB so far yes, but things may be changing soon... 😉

@SkinkBen @MVLizards @MVZUCB Love this 😍 still considered variegatus?

What if you could get a whole mito genome for less than the cost of a sanger sequence? Using #PacBio, the idea is to sequence hundreds of mt genomes at once for only a few $ each. Like this cute #Sphenomorphus from #sulawesi! @MVZUCB Hoping for a seq run soon with #HiFiExhibit!

@ian_g_brennan @MVZUCB I like to keep up the mystery 🤫

@SkinkBen @MVZUCB Tell us more Benjamin! The people are thirsty for mtDNA.