Recombination between strains fuels pervasive adaptive evolution among human gut commensal bacteria, and strongly implicate host diet and lifestyle as critical selection pressures @nature.com @nanditagarud.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Introducing ** Incendiamoeba **, a eukaryote that can live at temperatures well beyond what we thought possible. 63C!! Read @hbrappap.bsky.social thread to see what we’ve already started to learn from this amazing organism! doi.org/10.1101/2025... #MicroSky #protistsonsky 🧪 #evobio

Now out in @asm.org #mSystems! journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... Congratulations to Robert and thanks to all collaborators. See thread below for a summary of the work, exploring the use of cross-species coexpression analyses to predict primary and secondary metabolic interactions in microbiomes.

Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

What a hook. Also, cool work!

You like phages ? In this publication, we use metaHiC and our new version of the MetaTOR pipeline to challenge the traditional view of phages with a narrow host range. @rkoszul.bsky.social @natmicrobiol.nature.com @cnrs.fr @institutpasteur.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Assistant Professor (Quantitative Microbe-Plant-Environment Interactions), Dept of Microbiology, Fall 2026 apply.interfolio.com/173345 at University of Tennessee - Knoxville. Position is part of a faculty cluster hire in Bioinformatics, Genomics and Quantitative-based Solutions for Food Security.

Such a delight to share our work on the evolution of a cheese rind fungus in @currentbiology.bsky.social. This is the fantastic PhD work of @nicolasleonlouw.bsky.social and resulted from amazing collaborations, a wedding proposal(!), an undergrad course, & more! 🧵 www.cell.com/current-biol...

🎙️ Job Announcement: Penn State is seeking an ASSISTANT PROFESSOR in MICROBIOLOGY (any subdiscipline) in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Learn more and Join the Microbiome Jubilee: psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/PSU_Ac...

The Department of Biology at Colorado State University is hiring an Assistant Professor in the area of plant-microbe interactions! Please spread the word! jobs.colostate.edu/postings/165...

Cool paper - pathogen bullies Candida into releasing arginine, increasing pathogen virulence

Towards a trait-based framework for protist ecology and evolution www.cell.com/trends/micro... #jcampubs

New lab pre-print up! "Twelve species of human parasites make up half the literature on microbial eukaryotes" doi.org/10.1101/2025... We (led by UG Joanna Lepper and with @hbrappap.bsky.social) quantified all mentions of protist species in the scientific literature 🧵 #protistsonsky #microsky

🍄 UGA Plant Pathology is hiring TT faculty in Mycology/Fungal Biology/Fungal Ecology at the Asst/Assc level! Please pass along this opportunity to anyone you know who may be interested. I'm on the search committee and happy to answer questions. 🍄 www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/445...

Early germline sequestration in a basidiomycete fungus | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Excited to see my review on gut protist ecology and evolution out in Current Opinions! This is part of a special issue on evolutionary genetics which has a lot of great work. Check it out here - authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

How may theoretical ecology & evolutionary theory push microbiology forward? At Environmental Microbiology, I am commissioning a series of Perspectives exploring that question. Excited to share them in the 🧵 below The series is open, so do get in touch if you'd like to propose a new contribution!

A great blog post by @math-rachel.bsky.social on this preprint describing failures of an ML approach for gene annotation: rachel.fast.ai/posts/2025-0... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... "how challenging (or even impossible) it can be to evaluate AI claims in work outside our own area of expertise"

Global Metagenomics Reveals Hidden Protist Diversity. #ProtistsonSky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨New paper alert!🚨 We show that hummingbird beaks have changed in shape & size since around WWII, driven by the rise of commercialized feeders! 🧵 📄 Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb.... #ornithology #evolution #GlobalChangeBiology

I'm reviewing applicants later this week and will continue to accept new applications until the position is filled

📢Excited to share our new paper in Nature Physics @naturephysics.bsky.social: Cooperative hydrodynamics accompany multicellular-like colonial organization in the unicellular Stentor! How do single-celled organisms benefit from teamwork? Let’s dive in! #Multicellularity nature.com/articles/s41...?

Recruitment time! You're a junior postdoc and want to discover and produce bioactive fungal metabolites that are involved in the chemical warfare between fungi and plants? Then apply here! jobs.vib.be/j/108923/pos...

Anaerobic protist survival in microcosms is dependent on microbiome metabolic function www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #jcampubs

In my 25 years since high school I’ve seen 1. HIV/AIDS go from death sentence to manageable with drugs 2. Cystic fibrosis go from pretty much an extended death sentence to manageable with drugs 3. Sickle cell go from a horrible disease to (almost maybe) cured by gene therapy Simply incredible

Good discussion, which applies to the rest of the tree of life as well

New isolates from eukaryote's closest archaeal relative: ‘Hodarchaeales’!! Syntrophic microaerotolerant peptide-degrading anaerobic archaea w/ simple cell structure & protrusions. Features conserved across the phylum provide new insight into our ancestor’s biology! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Wondering if your study section cancelled? I update this sheet daily. As of today, 56/124 study sections that should have met since Jan 2, 2025 have "not met as scheduled." docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Introducing "Metagenomic Estimation of Dietary Intake", or "MEDI": a data-driven approach to estimating dietary and nutritional intake from stool DNA 💩 - 🍌🥦🐟🥩📈 See @cdiener.com's excellent thread below. We are really proud of this work, and we hope it is useful to the scientific community.

I am a little late, but I am very happy to see this work published. Congrats to @ellistorrance.bsky.social for all the hard work on her last chapter! doi.org/10.1093/nar/...

OUT NOW - Gut microbiome signatures of vegan, vegetarian and omnivore diets and associated health outcomes across 21,561 individuals @cibiocm.bsky.social @fackelmeister.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I did not know this and it blows my mind. it seems that tRNAs, like US $, are accepted as currency *everywhere*, no matter whose wallet their genes are in and how they got there 😳 #MicroSky #ProtistsOnSky #FungiFriends

(1/6) Our new short paper on incidental bacterial domestication between patient isolation and creation of frozen stock. Geno/phenotype changes are obscured by rich media and more prevalent than we previously thought. #MicroSky

"There's a maximum likelihood I'm doing phylogenetics wrong" floats through my mind unbidden at least once a day

Good lord, the FoldSeek clustering of all AlphaFold structures is incredible. Just stunning. Vastly expands the taxonomic breadth of microbes that encode homologous structures that we care about. Paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41... and website to search here: cluster.foldseek.com