Arnaud Martin
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evolvwing.bsky.social
Arnaud Martin
@evolvwing.bsky.social
2.3K followers 1.4K following 230 posts
Associate Professor of Biology at the George Washington University
Interested in Pattern Formation, Evolutionary Tinkering, Genetics,
#lociofevolution #dnacrobatics #evodevo #lepidoptera
dnacrobatics.com
pubs: https://rb.gy/nfg8p
Posts Replies Media Videos
evolvwing.bsky.social
🚨New paper! 🚨
@jasminealqassar.bsky.social led this work on the silk glands of the pantry moth.

These two long tubes inside the caterpillar continuously make a ton of silk
How does this special organ work?

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
@cp-iscience.bsky.social

🧵THREAD🧵
November 16, 2025 at 2:06 AM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
jlsteenwyk.bsky.social
NEW 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/...
November 13, 2025 at 8:34 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
mollyschumer.bsky.social
I 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
Insertion of an invading retrovirus regulates a novel color trait in swordtail fish
For over a century, evolutionary biologists have been motivated to understand the mechanisms through which organisms adapt to their environments. Coloration and pigmentation are remarkably variable wi...
shorturl.at
November 12, 2025 at 8:34 PM
evolvwing.bsky.social
It's out, Minos transgenesis in the pantry moth by
@donyaniyaz.bsky.social
@lucalivraghi.bsky.social

High efficient, glowing eye and silk gland markers

peerj.com/articles/202...
@peerj.bsky.social
November 12, 2025 at 2:40 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
evolvwing.bsky.social
@royalsocietypublishing.org
@royalsociety.org

Greetings, is your journal server down? please let me know if this will fixed shortly or if there is a workaround, I need students to access Biology Letters for a class 🫶

Thanks!
November 10, 2025 at 6:23 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
antonioregalado.bsky.social
A month after Bari Weiss hired to lead CBS News division, heretic eugenics philosopher Jonathan Anomaly is on the morning show pitching bell curves and embryo scores.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvVM...
November 10, 2025 at 2:27 PM
evolvwing.bsky.social
We must debunk this crap.

Preimplantation diagnosis is much safer than germline editing & w/o slippery-slope ethics in 99.9% of hered. disease cases.

Only exceptions are dominant genet conditions where 1 parent is homozygous, with extremely rare occurences for Huntington's, some AD and BRCA
November 8, 2025 at 4:53 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
ebablab.bsky.social
Looks cool 👀
biorxivpreprint.bsky.social bioRxivpreprint @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · 17d
Sensory receptor expansion and neural accommodation in butterfly color vision https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.30.685642v1
November 1, 2025 at 10:35 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
samtmugford.bsky.social
When all your PCRs fail, except for the negative control 😱
A pumpkin carved to depict an agarose gel electrophoesis with all lanes blank apart from the size ladder on the left and a single band in the lane on the far right
October 30, 2025 at 7:43 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
Heredity did a podcast on our paper from Nitin's dissertation! Listen to learn more about the cool results.
heredityjournal.bsky.social @HeredityJournal @heredityjournal.bsky.social · 19d
🎙️ New podcast!

We often hear that invasive species are bad for ecosystems they invade, but the consequences can seem fuzzy.

We hear from @naikasanuchara.bsky.social and @carolboggs.bsky.social about their study system, where an invasive plant has very tangible effects for a native butterfly.
October 30, 2025 at 1:00 AM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
caterpillar-coevo.bsky.social
I'll be heading to @sacnas.bsky.social #NDiSTEM later this week to shamelessly plug my soon-to-open lab (Fall 2026). If any students are interested in studying the plant-insect interactions of the Sonoran Desert, please get in touch!
A Manduca sexta adult specimen, pinned in a drawer at the Harvard Museum of Natural History A desert landscape. Large Saguaro cacti are in the foreground. Rugged mountains in the background. A large Datura flower with a moth inside it drinking nectar
October 28, 2025 at 9:21 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
monteirolab.bsky.social
news.nus.edu.sg/dna-switch-b...
NUS study: A simple DNA switch helps tropical butterflies change wing patterns with the seasons
Singapore, 24 October 2025 — Scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have discovered a simple DNA “switch” that helps tropical butterflies adjust the size of their wing eyespots in ...
news.nus.edu.sg
October 25, 2025 at 2:17 AM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
jlsteenwyk.bsky.social
Not today, parasitic #wasps!✋🚫

#Stinkbugs use a fungus-carrying organ on their hind legs to coat their eggs in #fungi🍄🦵

This provides a physical defense against #parasitic wasp oviposition🛡️

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
October 22, 2025 at 5:12 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
nicolekearney.bsky.social
Rod Page @rdmpage.bsky.social spoke today at #LivingData2025 about journals that disappear from the web. To learn more about his example: the hijacking and fraudulent DOI Assignment of The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera, see our BHL blogpost: blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2022/10/jour...
The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera: A Story of Pirate Publishers, ISSN Hijacking and Fraudulent DOI Assignment
In 2017, The Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera published its final issue. The journal’s website was turned off and, to ensure ongoing access to the biodiversity knowledge contained within its …
blog.biodiversitylibrary.org
October 22, 2025 at 8:20 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
dparichy.bsky.social
New preprint up with collaborators Jianguo Lu, @mpodobnik.bsky.social, Uwe Irion, Braedan McCluskey, John Postlethwait and others. New Danio genomes, evolution and pigment pattern variation. Long time in the making www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
October 19, 2025 at 10:28 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
danielkronauer.bsky.social
The final version of our paper on how ants and possibly other insects use a crazy mechanism involving extensive transcriptional interference to regulate odorant receptor expression is now open access in my favorite journal, @currentbiology.bsky.social

authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
ScienceDirect.com | Science, health and medical journals, full text articles and books.
authors.elsevier.com
September 19, 2025 at 3:44 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
jefferis.bsky.social
Neuronal diversity is written in transcriptional codes 🧬. But what is the logic of these codes that define cell types and wiring patterns?
To find out we built a #scRNAseq developmental atlas of the Drosophila nerve cord and linked it to the #connectome 🪰🧠
#preprint thread ⬇️1/8
ALT text: A UMAP representation of a single cell RNAseq dataset from the Drosophila ventral nerve cord as well as images of the Drosophila nerve cord connectome and different stages of fly development.
August 21, 2025 at 4:04 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
shumpeim.bsky.social
We're excited to share with everyone a preprint of our manuscript that resolves the cellular origins of the symbiosome in cnidarian-algal symbiosis through proteomics of the symbiosome, RNAi, and CRISPR/Cas9 experiments. ⬇️
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Read on below!

1/12 🧵
October 13, 2025 at 10:00 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
artologica.net
Courtney Mattison, Gyre I, stoneware and porcelain, 2023. "references the fragility, diversity, and resilience of marine ecosystems" #sciart
swirling wall-mounted ceramic sculpture in blue, gold and pink
October 13, 2025 at 1:11 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
peiferlabunc.bsky.social
I'm very excited to announce that UNC Biology has 6 faculty positions open this year! The first is for an Asst Professor who studies organismal resilience using an integrative approach 1/n
unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...
Poster with QR code linking to the position
October 12, 2025 at 2:20 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
artologica.net
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lake Superior, 2003, silver gelatin print
Photograph of the horizon over a lake in black and white
October 7, 2025 at 2:05 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
fcicconardi.bsky.social
New paper out! A nice collaboration.
We explore how olfactory brain structures and receptors evolved across this remarkable group, Heliconiini butterflies.
Evolution of the olfactory system during the radiation of Heliconiini butterflies
Abstract. Sensory system evolution plays a crucial role in shaping species’ interactions with their environment, yet the extent to which olfactory system d
academic.oup.com
October 7, 2025 at 6:43 PM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
maikbischoff.bsky.social
My entry for today’s #FluorescenceFriday: a pupal #Drosophila testis with muscles expressing
🔵 lifeact &
🔴 RFP-nls

Honored & grateful to receive an honorable mention at @healthcare.nikon.com Nikon Small World 🌍🔬✨

🔗 www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/20...

#NikonSmallWorld #Microscopy #ScienceArt
October 3, 2025 at 9:06 AM
Reposted by Arnaud Martin
gallseeker.bsky.social
It's official! We are moving to Stowers!
Very exciting opportunity to expand our studies of insect-plant interactions. We have many opportunities available in biochemistry, development, behavior, genetics, evolution, genomics, AI, and even pest control. Interested in any of these things? Reach out!
stowersinstitute.bsky.social Stowers Institute @stowersinstitute.bsky.social · Sep 30
NEWS🎉 We’re excited to announce @hhmijanelia.bsky.social Investigator David Stern will join the Institute from Janelia Research Campus. His lab studies how aphids transform plants at the genetic level, uncovering secrets of #evolution & new strategies for pest control. @hhmi.org bit.ly/4np96Fb
Stowers Institute recruits renowned developmental and evolutionary…
David Stern, Ph.D., brings groundbreaking research on insect–plant interactions for next-generation pest control to the Institute.
bit.ly
September 30, 2025 at 8:15 PM