We got some amazing denovo genome assemblies of Pogonomyrmex barbatus! They were done as part of our collaboration with Deborah Gordon’s lab. These super-high-quality, near-chromosome-level assemblies

We had a super busy trip to America! Aparna and Eyal represented the lab in the Cold Spring Harbor Lab meeting on Biology and Genomics

We concluded our latest installment of the Haifa winter workshop in genomics and bioinformatics – the 9th actually! (see more info about the workshops under

Max has some preliminary results from training a machine learning model (deep network) to identify and track ants in videos with multiple ants. You can

After considerable delays…. Hive2, the new computer cluster for our Faculty, finally arrived on campus today. It was assembled by Matrix at their facility, now

Now this event was truly something else! We travelled all the way down to Avdat in the Negev highlands to celebrate the planting of a

We had two PhD proposal presentations in the departmental student forum today! Yoann presented his project titled: “Exploiting the evolution of odorant receptors in ants

Pnina’s paper on ancient DNA population genomic analysis of grapes from the Byzantine era is out in PNAS!https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2213563120 Ancient DNA is so cool! It allows

The 4th meeting of the Israeli Society of Evolutionary Biology was hosted by the Institute of Evolution, co-organized by Eyal Privman and Eran Tauber. About

Our 8th Haifa Winter Advanced Bioinformatics Workshop attracted a diverse assemblage of students and researchers, and included this time a number of lecturers from abroad

Yoann, Felix, Volans and Eyal attended Camp Evolution VIII in Sede Boqer. This is a unique one-week course organized by Ariel Novoplansky. Every time Ariel

אתמול היה יום מוצלח במיוחד ליחסי הציבור של הנמלים! איל דיבר בתכנית העולם היום (כאן 11) על מחקר חדש שחישב כמה נמלים יש בעולם, ובתכנית שלושה

The lab got a new 5-year ISF grant to study the supergene we discovered in the desert ant Cataglyphis niger. Graduate student and postdoc positions are

Eyal is back from the one year sabbatical in London where he refined his expertise in Bayesian population genomics and the art of luggage packing.

Our lab participated in IUSSI 2022 (the meeting of the International Union for the Study of Social Insects) in San Diego, which is the ultimate

Just in time for the IUSSI meeting in San Diego, Felix completed the development of the web tool ddgRADer: http://ddgrader.haifa.ac.il/ This user-friendly tool will assist

Felix have just received, safe and sound, the shipment of a large collection of samples from Deborah Gordon’s lab. These priceless samples were collected over

Eyal started a one-year sabbatical in University College London, hosted by two hosts: Ziheng Yang and Seirian Sumner. The Yang lab develops methods in molecular

Our lab expanded our phylogenetic scope beyond the Cataglyphis bicolor species group and into the C. albicans sister clade. We went on a two day sampling trip

Mazal tov! We celebrated Pnina’s PhD today with a concluding PhD lecture (“public defense”) and the general ceremony of the University for awarding the PhD

Not yielding to the coronavirus! Eyal visited Jessica and Alan in Riverside, to discuss the BSF project on genome evolution (linkage mapping 10 formicine species),

Doaa Tehawey and Yara Ghnamah concluded their third-year projects and presented them today as posters! They both managed to finish and wrap up their analyses

Today we (Eyal and Aparna) went out sampling Cataglyphis for the first time of this reproductive season, looking for drones (for their haploid genomes). We

Shani and Pnina’s paper was published in PLoS Computational Biology! https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007653 This methodological study was actually a pilot for our GWAS of cuticular hydrocarbons. We

Aparna and Doaa are conducing 1000 aggression assays to determine which of the 30 nests we sampled are separate monogyne colonies (so they aggress ants

This year, Eyal and Pnina represented the lab in SMBE and ESEB. Pnina presented a poster on her mutation rate study and Eyal gave a

Our paper is online at Scientific Reports! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45950-1 This was a collaboration led by Tali Reiner Brodetzki and Abraham Hefetz (TAU) to resolve species delimitation

Pnina’s paper was published in BMC Evolutionary Biology! https://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12862-019-1437-9 This is a demographic history study that developed from our collaboration with DeWayne Shoemaker. Pnina used

On the first really hot day of spring Camponotus have their mating flights. Today we collected C. fellah from the population that lives on campus

We kick started our joint BSF project on genome evolution in ants. Jessica Purcell and Alan Brelsford visited us in Haifa and we started to

איל נתן הרצאה על ״פרדוקס האבולוציה של אלטרואיזם״ במועדון של קיבוץ מעברות

Our workshop on “Omics for environmental and host-associated microbiomes” was a smashing success (see the program). With more than 40 participants we could not find

 Shani found an interesting link between the level of aggression between workers from different monogyne Cataglyphis niger colonies and whether or not sexuals (gynes or

איל ידבר על ״פרדוקס האבולוציה של אלטרואיזם״ במסגרת סדרת ההרצאות ״מדע על ההר״, המיועדות לקהל הרחב

This year we had the most important meeting for ant researchers – the international conference of the IUSSI that takes place only once every four

We organized a German-Israeli Minerva School on “New Frontiers in Sociobiology and Sociogenomics” together with Guy Bloch from the Hebrew University, Juergen Gadau from the

התפרסמה בהארץ כתבה על מחקר שלנו: נמלי האש משגשגות בזכות כישורים חברתיים

Rana’s evolutionary study of the gene family of the odorant receptors (ORs) in ants was published in Genome Biology and Evolution! We found evidence for

Our new Tecan liquid handling robot is here! It started to learn the TruSeq protocol for constructing genomic libraries. Shani will use it to construct

Rana and Pnina received their M.Sc. diplomas! Pnina is already on track for her direct Ph.D. and Rana will hopefully also come back soon to

A big day for the lab! We got the sequencing results for the first RADseq (Restriction-site Associated DNA sequencing) library, and they look great! Shani

Eyal gave a talk in the Nola Socks pub on “The paradox of the evolution of altruism”, from Darwin’s ants to our genomic age research

איל יתן מחר הרצאת מדע-על-הבר בנושא ״פרדוקס האבולוציה של אלטרואיזם״ בפאב נולה סוקס

This was it! after several failed attempts we came back to the Dead Sea with full intent not to let those difficult Camponotus cericeus ants

IBS 2016 (http://ibs2016.haifa.ac.il/) For the first time in IBS history we hosted the symposium at the University of Haifa, and it was a huge success!

We (Daniel Sher and Eyal Privman) held a whole week workshop on transcriptomics at the University of Haifa. Five full days packed with lectures and

First footage of beautiful tandem runs of Camponotus sericeus ants in our lab. These ants were collected south of the Dead Sea to participate in

We celebrated moving into our new lab (the construction was actually completed in September). We had a great crowd of friends and colleagues gathering together

We celebrated the signing of the ATP (for those unfamiliar with hi-tech jargon: Acceptance Test Procedure) of our Faculty’s new computer cluster: The Hive. We

In addition to the BSF funding of our collaboration with DeWayne Shoemaker’s lab at the USDA, we now received the Bergmann Award:   http://www.bsf.org.il/bsfpublic/DefaultPage1.aspx?PageId=697&innerTextID=697

Our lab starred in IBS 2015! Rana presented the first poster from our group on the evolution of odorant receptors in seven ant species and

We began our Cataglyphis digging season in Bezet beach (close to Rosh Hanikra). It was lots of fun and hard work! We came back with