Will Booker
@wbooker.bsky.social
440 followers 470 following 230 posts
I used to study frog genetics, now I work on other genetics to help make gooder plants. Got a soft spot for things with doubled genomes, mutts, and fish eating dry flies.
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Reposted by Will Booker
We're excited to be recruiting an NIH funded postdoc to work in the Coop lab at UC Davis. We're specifically interested in candidates who are want to work at the intersection of human genetics, GWAS, and population genetics modeling. Please RT
Potentially some stuff from Molly Schumer's work in swordtails on this too, and maybe introgression of DMI loci but I can't remember the details
Does mitochondrial capture count? In my PhD I found evidence repeated introgression of mitochondria from diploid to polyploid lineages of gray treefrogs as the polyploids expanded academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...
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did it come with the costume or do you buy those and switch them out
Reposted by Will Booker
Barren Planet (Part 1) - Sopranos: The Next Generation #startrek #sopranos #edit
Reposted by Will Booker
I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA

10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)
Reposted by Will Booker
"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply."

me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually

www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...
How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review
Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.
www.bostonreview.net
Reposted by Will Booker
Friends: I'm recruiting at least one PhD student to join our lab in Atlanta in the Fall of 2026. Information about our research can be found at the link below. Please pass along to any students interested in the quantitative study of speciation, secondary contact, and the build-up of biodiversity!
The Anderson Lab at Georgia Tech
my academic website
seanasanderson.github.io
Reposted by Will Booker
This is truly an incredible breakthrough IMO. Really exemplifies what you get when deep domain expertise (popgen/evolution/disease genetics in this case) fuses with cleverly crafted ML. What u get r sleek, well thought out architectures that absolutely destroy the behemoths. Wow!! 1/
We are excited to share GPN-Star, a cost-effective, biologically grounded genomic language modeling framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of variant effect prediction tasks relevant to human genetics.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
(1/n)
Good lord what a garbage piece of writing
Reposted by Will Booker
Reposted by Will Booker
truly one of the most unintentionally funny things i've ever seen someone post online about themself
Colin Wright 
@SwipeWright
X.com

Convincing my left-wing former close friends on
Facebook that Charlie Kirk wasn't a Nazi or a
fascist is completely futile because I can't even
convince them that I'M not a Nazi or a fascist, and
many have known me since early grade school.
1:20 PM • 9/15/25 • 850K Views
Oh goddamn hell yea they got the dome-a-dillo
Prehistoric Planet Ice Age out later this year... such a thrill to put this series together, oh my goodness are you in for a treat :) Hopefully news on events and publicity coming soon! Sloths, cats, rhinos, glyptodonts AND SOOOO MUCH MORE!!
Prehistoric Planet Ice Age homotheres, white and touching faces together. Prehistoric Planet Ice Age Woolly rhino old adult and youngster. Prehistoric Planet Ice Age Glyptotherium. Prehistoric Planet Ice Age sloth mother with juvenile on back.
Not technically what the post is discussing but using this opportunity to bring up the end credits song for Deep Blue Sea, a rap from the perspective of the mutant shark that goes incredibly hard youtu.be/6cYcdBVQ8NM?...
Guy who allegedly saw a deer captured in a net:
Petroglyph of a weird wicker man many legged looking thing that apparently is a deer in a net
Reposted by Will Booker
First pop gen paper from our lab! We find repeated evolutionary turn over of sex chromosomes in darters contributes to reproductive isolation. Turnover may be an escape hatch to resolve mitonuclear conflict & neo sex chromosomes evolved via a rare recessive mutation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Top left: Results of genome-wide association study (GWAS) for sex in E. caeruleum, E. radiosum, and E. spectabile showing sex chromosome turnover has occurred repeatedly. Top right: Phylogeny showing sex chromosome turnover in darters and non-darter percids. Chromosome 9 is the putative ancestral sex chromosome, shared by Perca flavescens and multiple members of the orangethroat darter complex (e.g., E. spectabile, E. pulchellum). Bottom: Schematic depicting repeated turnover of sex chromosomes as a mechanism to resolve mitonuclear conflict and promote speciation.
Reposted by Will Booker
Just catching up – good grief. This man is unfit for office, as he has been since Cassidy voted to put him into it.

Please call your congresspeople about this – this kind of nonsensical waffling on life and death matters, with no attention whatsoever to facts, will cause needless death & suffering.
Sen. Bill Cassidy: "Do you agree with me that President Trump deserves a Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed?"

RFK: "Absolutely."

Sen. Bill Cassidy: "But you just told Sen. Bennet that the Covid vaccine killed more people than Covid?"
Reposted by Will Booker
The cool thing is their pee
Reposted by Will Booker
I wrote about gene-gene interactions (epistasis) and the implications for heritability, trait definitions, natural selection, and therapeutic interventions. Biology is clearly full of causal interactions, so why don't we see them in the data? A 🧵:
Beneath the surface of the sum
When genetic interactions matter and when they don't
open.substack.com