Peter Andolfatto

I joined the University of Tokyo as an assistant professor! I'll research the genetics and evolution of the silkworm & other lepidopteran insects.

@sciencegirl Ummm 🤔

For the first time, scientists connected two human brains over the internet. One person in India sent simple thoughts, which were converted into signals and transmitted to a person in France. The receiver’s brain interpreted the signals into words, without any speaking, typing, or movement. This experiment shows that direct brain-to-brain communication is possible, though it’s still at a very basic stage. Future research may allow sharing of thoughts or feelings directly. "Humans Perform First Brain-to-Brain Communication Over the Internet." Big Think.

I am thrilled to announce our new paper published in PLOS Biology!!!! “Cis-regulatory evolution of Wnt family genes contributes to a morphological difference between silkworm species” doi.org/10.1371/journa…

bsky.app/profile/50501n… NYC, it’s time to take to the streets again. We’re joining over 40 cosponsors to protest authoritarianism, and march for a planet where we place people over profit. 📅 Saturday, April 19 ⏰ 12pm 📍 Bryant Park We’ll see you in the streets.

Oof, just realized that this July is the 10 year anniversary of the release of Bioinformatics Data Skills. Writing my book was one of the most fun, difficult, and rewarding things I’ve done. Can’t believe it’s been a decade; now I feel old 🥲

longcallD is a new variant caller for genomic long reads. It jointly calls phased small and structural variants. Single binary, one command line for the whole process. Comparable accuracy to mainstream callers. Great work by Yan Gao. github.com/yangao07/longc…

Modern GWAS can identify 1000s of hits but it can be hard to turn this into biological insight. What key cellular functions link genetic variation to disease? I'm excited to present our new work combining associations + Perturb-seq to build interpretable causal graphs! A🧵

New year, new beginnings! I am absolutely delighted to share that I have joined @HarvardMed @MGH_RI @BroadInstitute to start my research group in Boston in January 2025! 🎉🧬🔬#NewPI #AcademicTwitter #NextChapter (1/7)

@dandolfa @nytopinion Black workers rose steeply during Donald Trump’s presidency and essentially stagnated under Biden, according to data from the St. Louis Fed. Did they really "stagnate" or did they "remain elevated" under Biden?

Bingo. nytimes.com/2024/10/22/opi… via @NYTOpinion

New preprint! We examine the carotenoid composition, genetic architecture, and evolutionary history of bill color evolution in an Australian songbird called the long-tailed finch with two hybridizing subspecies that differ prominently in this trait. tinyurl.com/yc276pce

Strong condemnations by professors this afternoon @Columbia. Here’s a speech by Christopher Brown, a professor of history, who says the university and president Minouche Shafik made a mistake calling in NYPD to arrest pro-Palestinian protestors last week 🧵

@keithgessen Here's a link to the petition from @AAUPCU for members of the Columbia/Barnard community to add their names to this statement: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…

Statement from Columbia and Barnard faculty about the arrests on campus.

Joint statement by the Barnard-Columbia chapters of the AAUP regarding the mass suspension of students. Currently at least 100 students have been suspended, with more apparently in process.

USC are being worse than cowardly. They're not abandoning a commitment to free speech because they're worried about public safety. They're doing this because they're worried about offending donors.

Here’s the new @ScienceMagazine article from the @molly_przew lab, featuring Athanasia from @lanevol. Corn snake pedigrees generated by Athanasia reveal that both PRDM9 and promoter-like features specify the location of recombination events 🐍 science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Gene expression involves thousands of proteins that bind DNA, yet comprehensively mapping these is challenging. We developed ChIP-DIP – a method for simultaneous, genome-wide mapping of hundreds of DNA-protein interactions in a single experiment. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

On the topic of fireflies, these pics are amazing tinyurl.com/abynx9s9

@evolvwing @ArlinStoltzfus @Columbia_Bio @Columbia @IUCNFireflies But we have not yet tried AlphaFold for the homology modeling. Perhaps I am wrong but my sense is that it wouldn't be very different - ?

@evolvwing @ArlinStoltzfus @Columbia_Bio @Columbia @IUCNFireflies It's unclear how we would gauge "properly" since there are no insect crystal structures to benchmark against. In the past homology modeled the insect proteins on vertebrate crustal structures and performed ligand docking on those - see pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23019645/.

Our latest publication on toxin resistance evoution in fascinating #Fireflies is out -> tinyurl.com/24fank9zand and is available for free until January 9, 2024! @Columbia_Bio @Columbia @IUCNFireflies #Lampyridae. Start thread 1/13 ->