News

In April, I talked about the current state of how to detect admixture at the Human Evolution Conference in Hinxton (UK). Thanks to the organisers, particularly Carina Schlebusch!

Then I dropped by at UCL for a lab visit with Aida Andres, presenting the recent state of work on great ape genomes from modern and historical perspectives, and meeting many people at UCL. It was a really great day, and we forgot to take photos with all being nice.

Other team members are also travelling, Konstantina was in Tübingen (Germany) for collaboration, Michelle is at RIKEN (Japan), Xin was at ICLR in Singapur, and Aigerim is set to go to the IGPH2025 in Almaty (Kazakhstan)!

There is a new book, the The Oxford Handbook of Approaches to Language Evolution, for which I provided a chapter with Cedric Boeckx & Juan Moriano – check it out!

There are also new preprints: here and here – more to come!

It has been a while since the last updates, but the lab has been busy.
In January, we had a group dinner to celebrate the paper of Xin and Josef.

Also in January, we had Ilan Gronau from Reichman University visiting to give a HEAS genomics seminar, and to discuss ancient DNA, G-PhoCS and other things (unfortunately we forgot taking a photo).

The FWF released a nice article about the RNA virus project, and there was interest in the media as well, including Ö1 and Die Presse!

In March, Barbara started an internship on great ape museum viruses – exciting things to come!

Also in March, Mehmet Somel from the Middle East Technical University was paying a visit, also for the HEAS genomics seminar, meet people and discuss ongoing work. This time, with photo:

And finally, on 2nd of April I was invited by Elmira Mohandesan at the VetMed Vienna to give a Wilhelminenberg Seminar, which was very nice!

More things are coming up – stay tuned!

Last paper of 2024 paper from the lab by Josef & Xin, in Infection, Genetics and Evolution: Revisiting adaptive introgression at the HLA genes in Lithuanian genomes with machine learning

We screened more than 200 great ape specimens from museums for DNA viruses, and found even high-coverage virus genomes there. Tremendous work led by Michelle, and together with many others!

Here is the paper.

The paper on bonobo population structure is finally out in Current Biology! Congrats to Sojung, Aida, Cesare, and all collaborators!

Here is a summary on our results in German.

Here we are out for celebrating:

In Barcelona today (26th Sep 2024) for the PhD defense of Harvi Pawar – a great presentation on gorilla genomics, and a well-deserved highest grade. Congratulations, Harvi!

Just going back from the very nice EMBO/EMBL conference on the human past in Heidelberg!
Great talks by PhD students Ina and Michelle, many interesting talks & posters, and a fun party.
Also from the department – Katerina & Susanna.

Hola from a successful SMBE conference in tropical Puerto Vallarta, Mexico!

An oral presentation on RNA viruses in great apes by Sojung, posters by Aigerim, Michelle and Martin, and lots of fun during the conference.

Busy weeks for the team: Aigerim presented her work on Eurasians at the AABA in Los Angeles, Xin presented his teaching at the ProbGen conference here in Vienna. The ProbGen was a nice opportunity to meet people again.

Also, Yun Song visited our lab after the conference, which we very much appreciated. Discussing our work with great scientists is a always a pleasure.

Our paper on Monkeypox in museum specimens is out! Orangutan skulls from the natural history museum König in Bonn turned out to belong to individuals that died during a Zoo outbreak in Rotterdam in 1965. After decades, we recovered Monkeypox genomes at high coverage.

Here we are enjoying group lunch for paper acceptance!

As part of the HEAS lectures, we had Jenny Tung, director of the primatology department at MPI-EVA Leipzig visiting us! Very happy to meet such great scientists!

Chiara Barbieri vom University of Cagliari visited as part of the HEAS Ancient Genomics series, and we were happy to have the opportunity for some nice discussions!

We were very happy to have Ainash Childebayeva from the MPI-EVA & Uni Kansas visiting, with a great presentation for the HEAS genomics lectures, being part of the thesis committee of Aigerim, and nice discussions about Central Eurasia and beyond.

Congratulations to Sojung for the FWF ESPRIT grant to work on great ape museomics! Celebrated at a Korean Restaurant today.

We just published a review article in Nature Reviews Genetics: Everything you ever wanted to know about deep learning, its application to population genetic inference, and the potential of this field! Led by Xin Huang, in collaboration with Oscar Lao.

Finally, the Gorilla ghost admixture study is out in Nature Ecology & Evolution!

Great conference in Ferrara, learning a lot, meeting many people, and presenting the work of our group with several posters (in presence & online).

Harvinder Pawar presented the gorilla ghost admixture project at the SMBE2023 conference in Ferrara, Italy! Congrats again to winning the Graduate Student Excellence Award!

Several studies on primate genomic variation have now been published in the journal Science, with some contribution from the PI. High-quality genomes from 233 primate species will help us understand evolution and help conservation. Their variation is useful to predict the impact of mutations in humans. And we get a better insight into the history of baboons specifically.

An interesting aspect is that many recent genetic changes in humans turn out not to be unique to us, but shared with other species. Genetic changes that might make us human seem to be more rare.

The publications can be found here:

Kuderna, L.F.K et al., ‘A global catalog of whole-genome diversity from 233 primate species’ Science, 2023. DOI:10.1126/science.abn7829

Sorensen, E, et al., ‘Genome-wide coancestry reveals details of ancient and recent male-driven reticulation in baboons’ Science, 2023. DOI: 10.1126/science.abn8153

Gao, H, et al., ‘The landscape of tolerated genetic variation in humans and primates’ Science, 2023. DOI: 10.1126/science.abn8197

Press release of UniVienna

Announcement via HEAS

A few things happened over the past few months:

• I gave a talk at the PopGen Vienna seminars on 2nd of May, and visited the University of Zürich for the Anthropological seminar series on 27th of March
• At the Münster Evolution Meeting in mid-March I also had the opportunity to present the work of our group and the newest results on ghost admixture in eastern gorillas
• The FWF 1000 ideas project got started, with Sojung as postdoctoral researcher
• Michelle very successfully defended her master’s thesis last Friday (photo above from celebrating it yesterday), and we are preparing a paper – stay tuned!