7 February 2024
News coverage
Our study on the antlers of the Irish elk has been picked up by New Scientist!
29 January 2024
First paper of 2024
Fresh out in the journal Evolutionary Biology is our first paper of the year, a study led by Masahito Tsuboi and Thomas Hansen. In this study, we revisited an old question with new data, answering whether the massive antlers of the extinct Irish elk were exceptionally large, or whether they were just as expected given the overall large size of the animal.
21 June 2023
New group member
Benedicte Garmann-Aarhus has joined the Evoinformatics group as our third PhD student, transferring from the University of Oslo's Center of Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis. She is employed for four years within the ICEFISH project, aiming to resolve the evolution of Antarctic notothenioid fishes with genomic data. Just before getting fully involved in the project, she finished her own book! In this children's book, she explores the "world's strangest animals".
9 June 2023
Paper on Antarctic fish genomics
To the day one year after we posted it on bioRxiv, our paper on the evolution of Antarctic fish genomes is finally out after peer review. Led by Iliana Bista and Richard Durbin, this study supports a much younger age of the radiation of Antarctic notothenioid fishes (~10 myr) than previous studies, and documents both the evolution of antifreeze glycoproteins and the loss of hemoglobin in these fishes.
10 February 2023
Workshop paper out
Our paper about the history and the organization of the Workshop on Population and Speciation Genomics in Çeský Krumlov is now out in BMC Evolution: Education and Outreach.
9 October 2022
New paper in Polar Biology
A paper on the mitochondrial genome of Channichthys rugosus has finally seen the light of day. This genome was extracted from a museum specimen that was fixed in formaldehyde in 1974, in a team effort led by Moritz Muschick of the University of Bern and Michael. The methodology established in this paper will be used heavily in Michael's upcoming ICEFISH project.
1 September 2022
Project funded
Michael has been awarded funding by the Research Council of Norway for a project on phylogenomics and population genomics of notothenioid fishes. This will mean a PhD position in 2023, a postdoc position in 2024, and lots of icefish genomes!
18 June 2022
Workshop completed
The 2022 Workshop on Population and Speciation Genomics in Çeský Krumlov has come to an end. The workshop had 60 participants who had arrived from all over the world, and was taught by 19 faculty members. Being in Çeský Krumlov for the first time in summer was a very pleasant experience! And we posted a preprint about the workshop just in time on bioRxiv.
17 February 2022
Paper out in Nature Ecology & Evolution
A paper on supergenes in Atlantic cod, resulting from Michael's postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, has finally seen the light of day. It was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution today, together with a News & Views article by Anna Tigano. Michael also wrote a behind-the-paper blog post for the Nature Ecology & Evolution community, and a digest written by Eivind Torgersen has been posted to titan.uio.no.
11 February 2022
Workshop announced
Michael and the team behind the Workshop on Population and Speciation Genomics announced the 2022 version of the workshop. For the first time ever, this workshop will take place in summer, between 5 and 17 June. The location will be, as always, the fabulous UNESCO world heritage town of Çeský Krumlov in the Czech Republic.
1 December 2021
The annual ForBio meeting in Oslo
Thore and Micha participated at the annual meeting of the ForBio Research School, which took place in Oslo. It was great to meet with fellow researchers in person and on Zoom, and highly successful for Thore: He received not one but two awards for his contributions, one for the best talk, and one for the best questions.
9 September 2021
Three new publications in September
On 1 September, a study led by Athimed El Taher and Astrid Böhne came out in Science Advances, with a minor contribution from Michael. We demonstrate in this study that the cichlid fishes of Lake Tanganyika have an extremely high turnover of sex determination systems. On the same day, the preprint presenting version 1.0 of the simulation tool msprime appeared on bioRxiv. Michael played a small role in the development of this tool by contributing code for species tree parsing. Finally, a commentary by Michael on a genomic study of the history of rhinoceroses came out in Cell today.
13 August 2021
New study out
Our study on sea turtle genomics, led by Sibelle Torres Vilaça of the University of Ferrara, has now been published in Molecular Ecology. In that study, we reconstructed the species tree of five out of the seven living sea turtle species and recovered signatures of past hybridization from their genomes.
7 April 2021
New study out
A study on genomic changes in Atlantic cod over the last century, which was led by Malin Pinsky and Bastiaan Star and to which Michael contributed, is now out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
1 March 2021
New study out
Michael's new study on the evolution of supergenes in Atlantic cod is now out on bioRxiv.
12 February 2021
Difficult start during the pandemic
Michael moved to Norway on 25 January, just days before Norway closed the border to all non-registered foreigners to curb the numbers of COVID-19 cases. After ten days in quarantine, Michael was able to start at the museum; however, with a nation-wide recommendation of home office, interactions at the museum remain at a minimum