Let your party streamers fly like a ctenophore! As the year draws to an end, we’re celebrating a year of supporting international teams of scientists on board R/V Falkor (too) off the coasts of Antarctica, the South Sandwich Islands, Argentina, & Uruguay. Happy New Year to all!

Read through this preprint this morning and LOVE it. A beautiful use of single/low cell number methods plus use of our growing pool of global bio-information to answer a *very* long-standing question. The basis of the discovery was 20 single cell transcriptomes and mass spec data from 1,700 shells!

Finally, we’ve solved a long-standing mystery: what tintinnid shells are actually made of: A new class of biomaterial formed by remarkable structural proteins unique to tintinnids. A major milestone after 3 years of work! Read about it in our preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202... #ProtistsOnSky

ER-associated single-capped vaults are surprising and really cool!🤩 Some even contain ribosomes. Vault function is still mysterious but a role in protein quality control seems plausible. Also great to see Dicty in the #TeamTomo spotlight! #ProtistsOnSky @kgeissler.bsky.social @becklab.bsky.social 🧪

New biomaterial just dropped!

So happy for you @archaeon-alex.bsky.social ! Fully deservd ! & more awesome science to come!

Another #notTHECover unfortunately. But this gorgeous, Tron-like vibe, drawn by the amazing @munafomarzia.bsky.social for our recent #ExM work with @gautamdey.bsky.social & @centriolelab.bsky.social will still be printed out in the lab. Read here: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

In my queue! I just hope one of the questions is: how satisfied are you with the name "Incendiamoeba"? Bc I am stuffed 😃

🚨 Surprise podcast episode alert! 🚨 This week on Tiny Living Beings, I interviewed @oliverio.bsky.social and @hbrappap.bsky.social who led the discovery of the ‘fire amoeba’, that can reproduce at the highest temperature ever recorded for a eukaryote! 🌋 #protistsonsky

🎄 Just published 🎉! Our ongoing genome sequencing of the basal dinoflagellate Oxyrrhis marina uncovered a new lineage of endogenized Polinton-like viruses, OmPLV. Notably, OmPLV encodes ... [cont] #VirEvol #MicroSky #Mevosky #SymbioSky #ProtistsOnSky

End-of-year preprint dump! A collaboration with @messorensen.bsky.social and German and Korean colleagues: "The phylogenetic context for the origin of a unique purple-green photosymbiosis " doi.org/10.64898/202...

Amazing several millimeters diameter single* celled acantharian. It is huge. *presumably it is multi-nucleated and has hundreds of symbionts, but still! Way bigger than the ones I see locally. Only one set of spikes!

Discovery of the most intron-rich eukaryotic genome phys.org/news/2025-12... New #ISEPpapers: Nuclear #genome sequencing reveals the highly intron-rich architecture of the chlorarachniophyte alga Amorphochlora amoebiformis academic.oup.com/dnaresearch/... #Protists #Algae #Microbes #Genomics

Are you very busy but still want to learn what Aphelids are and why they are important to understand the evolution of Fungi? Then check out our “Quick guide” on Aphelids published in collaboration with @deemteam.bsky.social, Sergey and Guifré. #protistsonsky doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

We recently investigated how much and when tintinnid ciliates produce shell material during the cell cycle to construct a new shell (lorica) after division: tinyurl.com/49usp8xw We adapted a classical staining technique. Still no #UExM for tintinnids dudinlab.bsky.social‬? (wink)#protistsonskyky

Check out our preprint!! So many cool analyses you can do with public rDNA datasets. Especially if you work with understudied groups or habitats! #ProtistsOnSky

Just on time for the holidays! Happy to share the published version of the discovery of leptophytes, a new deep-branching and widespread group of microalgae based on plastid MAGs (ptMAGs). Now with additional support from a mitochondrial MAG (mtMAG) of leptophytes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you had to read one thing, next to whatever fireplace, waiting for Santa... well that's your read !

Getting ready to head out on the RV Sally Ride in the Gulf of California. Am mostly serving as a scientific diver on this cruise (!!!!), but will also be looking for cool plankton (rads, Dinos, obvi) and sharing lots of plankton pics :) #microbialsky #microsky 🌊

NSF bio hour - NSF BIO lost 40% of its staff 😑

This is really cool and important.

Siphonophore. @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 880 #argentiniandeepseeps #MarineLife

Congratulations to Prof. Omaya Dudin for receiving the Friedrich Miescher Award 2026! Find out more: www.ls2.ch/awards/fried... Prof. Dudin will present his award lecture at the LS2 Annual Meeting 2026 in Zurich: annual-meeting.ls2.ch/2026 @dudinlab.bsky.social @fmiscience.bsky.social

have you ever heard of "bacterial heterologous multicellularity" ? meet 𝘊𝘩𝘭𝘰𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘶𝘮 𝘢𝘨𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘨𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘮, once thought to be one species, but it's actually two... #MicroSky #SymbioSky (from the STC archive)

New paper from @zhixingchen2.bsky.social's lab! It turns out that, in addition to its very low phototoxicity, PKmito Deep Red (PKMDR) directly reports on mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP) in live cells through its lifetime! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Good sized benthic siphonophore. From @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 878 #argentiniandeepseeps #MarineLife

New blog post for my microbiologist colleagues: merenlab.org/2025/12/15/r... In which Meren talks about a paper by Valentina Marcheselli on how microbiologists navigate the tension between reductionism and complexity in their everyday practices.

New preprint out! Using ~75k environmental OTUs + 77 fossil calibrations, we reconstructed a Proterozoic timeline of eukaryote evolution. Our results show crown eukaryotes were already diversifying >1.6 Ga, long before the first undisputed fossils (~1.05 Ga). 🔗 DOI: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🚨 PhD Position Available 🚨 I’m recruiting a PhD student to join my lab at the Multiscale Imaging Centre (MIC), Münster, Germany. www.bischofflab.com/jobs Fully funded ✅ #Cellbio #Morphogenesis #Microscopy #Drosophila #PhD (Details Below) Original Posting: stellen.uni-muenster.de/jobposting/d...

I /think/ this is a Sabellariidae larva (a kind of bristle worm), but a little more mature than the ones I usually see. #marineplankton 🦑

Cells can sense the geometry of their environment, from tiny subcellular features to whole-tissue patterns. How can we engineer environments to systematically probe these responses? 🧵 I'm @lhinderling.bsky.social from @olivierpertz.bsky.social lab, let’s do a short tour on microfabrication!

Shadow dog enjoying the Maine snow.

eggNOG v7, the first release implementing a fully phylogenetic, domain-centric workflow - Speciation and duplication events are detected using a noise-tolerant algorithm to generate hierarchically consistent, evolutionarily dated OGs academic.oup.com/nar/advance-... #orthology #evolution

Microbial eukaryotes keep challenging assumptions about eukaryotic cell and genome biology. Our upcoming workshop explores the frontier of protist genomics and how it shapes cell biology, ecology and evolution. Please save the date! Talks, posters and ECR events Websites and details coming soon

This is so cool.

Happy Holidays from a very festive algal microcolony.

Interesting paper by the groups of @zhizhou1619.bsky.social and Xiang Sheng in @natcomms.nature.com. They developed a system, with which thiophenols can be fed to cells, converted into non-canonical amino acids and used for genetic code expansion in protein engineering.

It is amazing that @dudinlab.bsky.social beautiful #ExM composition has been selected to highlight our #6mA work for the cover of @natgenet.nature.com. #Protists (and ichthyosporeans in particular) in the cover of NG must be quite unique!

#Microbial #Eukaryotes in #UExM on the cover of @natgenet.nature.com ! Unbelievable !!! Also read the amazing work by @alexdemendoza.bsky.social and co !!!

New paper from our lab and @friedrich-group.bsky.social !! Insights into morphogen gradient scaling to regenerate a limb at the appropriate size. #axolotl, #limbregeneration

At first glance, looks like a Gray–Scott reaction-diffusion But it’s a fertilized starfish 🥚: proteins self-organizing into spiral waves across the membrane Same dynamics seen in ❤️/🧠/🌊, even quantum fluids. Universality in action! #ComplexSystems news.mit.edu/2020/growth-...

Now we add a picture, which we source from /images, a directory relative to our .Rproj file. $ toot post 'text of toot' --media images/Nemertean_SEM.jpg --description 'SEM image of a nemertean larva'

#phylo #phylogenetics

A new community-driven lab handbook for reducing conflict and creating more positive and equitable work environments gets strong support from a survey of 200 researchers. buff.ly/K7CGFLV

When you go for a walk with a geologist, you see some things you wouldn't otherwise see ... Here is a fossil coastal dune with lots of holes from ancient roots!! Moraira/Teulada, Alacant, Spain 🧪 🌿🌱🌾🪴🦖 Geology geoscience #fossil

Having just finished teaching Genetics, including three weeks at the end on complex genetics, GWAS and other approaches to measuring the genetics of complex traits, including neurodevelopmental ones, this piece was very informative 🧪 1/n theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/the-missin...

People working with #protists and #fungi might be interested to hear that we in this study sequenced 13.4 mio. eukaryotic rRNA operons from 450 representative samples. #ProtistsOnSky #Metabarcoding

Environmental regulation of ciliates in corals: A secondary pathogen in coral disease www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #corals #protists #symbionts #holobiont #microbiome

Had a great time interviewing Dr. Lilach Sheiner (@sheinerlab.bsky.social) for the latest edition of ISOP’s Protistology Newsletter. Check it out here! #ProtistsOnSky #Toxoplasma #Science

I've been gone for awhile because bluesky was (is) banned in Mississippi :) Now that I have a VPN, here is a timelapse of diatoms from @hhmijanelia.bsky.social pond! #protistsonsky #protists