Very proud of my talk about genomic diversity in #Africa at the #HumanEvo25. Kudos to the Scientific Committee for their impressive work this week at the @sangerinstitute, UK. 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

#NewProfilePicture 👋🏽😀 After a few months, I finally recovered my account and I'm back on Twitter now. I'll be posting things about science and culture again.

I'm thrilled to be the Guest Editor of the new @NaturePortfolio Collection on "𝙃𝙪𝙢𝙖𝙣 𝘼𝙙𝙢𝙞𝙭𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙈𝙞𝙜𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣". This cross-journal collection includes publications in @CommsBio, @SciReports, @NatureComms & @NatureGenet. +Info here: communities.springernature.c…

🎓 Big day at the @genomicstartu : our colleague @KaiTatte is defending her PhD— agnst @AnnaSapfo. Defenses are high-pressure, but she’s handling it with courage and focus. Rooting for you, Kai—make us proud! 💪 🇪🇪 #PhDDefense @unitartu @researchestonia #AcademicTwitter #popgen

#Review 𝙂𝙚𝙣𝙤𝙢𝙞𝙘 𝙞𝙣𝙨𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙨 𝙞𝙣𝙩𝙤 𝙣𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙖𝙡 𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙞𝙣 𝙧𝙚𝙘𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙝𝙪𝙢𝙖𝙣 𝙝𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙤𝙧𝙮. Skoglund, P. and Mathieson, I. Nat Rev Genet (2026). doi.org/10.1038/s41576-026-0…

New paper out in @iScience_CP about an enigmatic minority social group from the Iberian Peninsula. A great collaboration with Alicia Portela, Antonio González, and the team. "Genome-wide evidence for the local ancestry of the Agotes from Navarra, Spain". cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S…

A new study from the Schlebusch Lab is out today in Communications Biology: Revisiting the African mtDNA landscape through complete mitochondrial genomes. Lankheet I, et al, ..., Schlebusch C. @CommsBio 9, 754 (2026). doi.org/10.1038/s42003-026-1…

🧬A new preprint from the FamilyTreeDNA team presents what is probably the largest human mitochondrial phylogeny built so far: Mitotree. It is based on about 330,000 complete mitochondrial sequences and contains 53,588 haplogroups — almost 10 times more than PhyloTree v17, the old reference tree that has not been updated for many years. One detail I found especially interesting: of those ~330,000 sequences, about 177,000 were unique haplotypes. That does not fit very well with the common stereotype that mtDNA is “less interesting” for genealogy and population history than the Y chromosome simply because it accumulates fewer mutations per generation. At this scale, mtDNA still turns out to carry an enormous amount of phylogenetic structure. The tree has not only grown — it has also become much “younger.” The median age of terminal subclades moved much closer to the present: from 1262 BCE in PhyloTree to 741 CE in Mitotree. The paper is full of historically interesting examples. One of the most elegant stories is about Ötzi, the famous “Iceman” from the Alps. His maternal lineage K1f long looked almost like a dead end. In Mitotree, however, it gains relatives. The authors report an exact K1f match in a modern individual with Algerian Shawiya Berber maternal ancestry, as well as ancient related branches in Europe. So Ötzi’s maternal line is no longer just a lonely Alpine oddity, but part of a broader lineage with deeper roots in southeastern Europe. There are much deeper discoveries too. The authors describe around 180 newly identified branches older than 30,000 years. One of the most striking is a split within the African lineage L2e dated to about 83,000 years ago. It is a reminder that ancient African population history was not a simple single line, but a deep and complex landscape of old divergences, migrations, and bottlenecks. I was also glad to see that the authors examined mtDNA structure in different Jewish subpopulations. It was especially nice to see that their results for Mountain Jews and Georgian Jews match what we have found in our own research on these groups. One thing I would have liked to see is a more detailed comparison between FamilyTreeDNA’s Mitotree and YFull’s actively developed MTree. The authors mention it only briefly, but a systematic comparison of the two resources would be very interesting. biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… #MitoTree #mtDNA #phylogeny #haplogroups #PopulationGenetics

🧬 A beautiful @NatureGenet paper on how to handle polygenic risk more carefully in family-based data. The core idea is to compare a child not with random people, but with the genetic set they could have inherited from their own parents. This better protects against population stratification, geography, social structure, and assortative mating. The authors introduce PGS-TRI, a method that estimates not only the direct effect of the child’s PGS, but also gene–environment interactions and asymmetric indirect effects of maternal and paternal genetics. For the educational-attainment simulations, the authors used UK Biobank to create a realistic confounded setting with geography, BMI, and assortative mating. Standard regression became biased, while PGS-TRI stayed well calibrated. In real autism trios, the method found a direct polygenic effect close to previous case–control estimates. It also showed that the score’s effect declines smoothly with genetic distance from the European training population. nature.com/articles/s41588-0… #Trio #PopulationStratification #Autism #PRS #PGS

1/ New paper out in Nature Communications! We studied the salivary amylase gene, AMY1, in Indigenous Andean populations and found evidence that high AMY1 copy number rapidly increased in frequency, likely through recent positive selection. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-7…

New paper from @NFontPorterias finds pathogen-driven selection in the HLA region of Papuans. Interestingly the selection and HLA landscape differs between highland and lowland groups, potentially due to different malarial burden. Read it here: cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002…

I'm delighted to share that my first PhD paper is now out in Nature Genetics! "Insights into human adaptation from ancient DNA" can now be accessed here: nature.com/articles/s41588-0… Many thanks for @christiandhuber's support! #AncientDNA #Genomics #EvolutionaryBiology #HumanHealth

The 11th International Conference on Bantu Languages will take place from August 18 to 21, 2026, on-campus and online. These are the Keynote speakers. Early-bird rates are available until May 1. You can register here: event.ugent.be/registration/… +Info: bantugent.ugent.be/bantu11

🚨 Check out our new paper in Nature! In our new study, we sequenced 128 high-coverage genomes from Indigenous peoples across Latin America and uncovered their unique genetic diversity and history. 👇🧵 nature.com/articles/s41586-0…

Great visual summary of the latest MX Biobank paper published in @NatureMedicine by @BarjonCar from @moreno_lab @cinvestav @inspmx. Youtube video: piped.video/YlP1FDHveio?si=4q0X… Study source: Barberena-Jonas et al. 2026. Nat Med 32, 725–735.

Congratulations to Ali Akbari @aliakbari23 on his amazing new work on selection in Western Eurasia that is finally released as a preprint after years of painstaking work. Accompanying it is a selection browser (beta) reich-ages.rc.hms.harvard.ed… biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…