New manuscript out today in @ecol-evol.bsky.social, led by my grad student Anais. We collated data from thousands of recent animal pop-gen studies to test 3 simple hypotheses: does genomic (1) diversity decrease (yes), (2) differentiation increase (yes), both with increased IUCN-endangerment?

Bioinformaticians / computational biologists take note - know where you should take your OS tool chain from and do not introduce backdoors.

Today in the AI hellscape we are building for ourselves, people are easily creating "official looking" websites of popular bioinformatics software that are not at all linked to the developers.

An Intergeneric Hybrid Between Historically Isolated Temperate and Tropical Jays Following Recent Range Expansion | doi.org/10.1002/ece3... | Ecology and Evolution | #ornithology 🪶

Interested in evolutionary ecology and genetics? Check out this PhD position in Pau Carazo's lab in Valencia - we look forward to your application!

Anyone with experience doing #metagenomics #microbiome of small insects, e.g. mosquitoes? 🦟🦠 Trying to figure out feasibility of doing individual metagenomes vs pools of individuals. I see both approaches are still used in the literature. My concern would be getting enough DNA from individuals.

Thanks #ESEB2025 for a great conference! Our group had a lot of fun meeting people, learning new things, and talking about our research! @madeleinebergstrom.bsky.social @estermart.bsky.social @cenkvist.bsky.social @matiasbeck.bsky.social

Many of us are using LLMs in coding and scientific writing. They are very helpful tools, but we need to be thoughtful as we integrate them into our work flows to preserve accountability, voice and trust. academic.oup.com/evlett/advan.... An editorial at @evolletters.bsky.social for discussion:

60+ people currently queuing for S24 Forecasting evolution in natural populations at #eseb2025. 👥👥👥😅 We need bigger rooms ! @eseb2025.bsky.social

Final day at #eseb2025 starts with a great plenary by @jmappes.bsky.social about aposematism. 🦋 @eseb2025.bsky.social

Great to see Tom Gilbert still holding the #microbiome flag high, focusing mostly on why we need to study wildlife microbiomes more, even in the #museomics session. 🦠 #hologenomics #eseb2025

Very interesting plenary about deep-time #paleogenomics 🦣 and #aDNA by @lovedalen.bsky.social at #ESEB2025

#eseb2025 #eseb #sciart

I'm not very good at live posting (I tend to overthink my posts and then lose track of the talks). For #ESEB2025 live posts, I recommend following @marcrr.ecoevo.social.ap.brid.gy and @mrtnj.bsky.social, who have been good at it at every conference I've attended with them

We're five people from our group presenting posters tonight at #ESEB2025 ! In the #microbiome adaptation symposium S07. Come chat with us about our research!

Great first plenary by Michael Lynch on drift, mutation, and the origin of cellular features. #eseb2025

Come meet all the WAME organizers at the #Microbiome symposium S07 at ESEB today! We're in meeting room 116. 🦠 #eseb2025 @eseb2025.bsky.social

Wild Animal Microbiome Evolution (WAME) @stn-wame.bsky.social satellite meeting today prior to #ESEB2025 was fun!

The @scilifelab.se ancient DNA unit is looking for an bioinformatician placed at Uppsala University. This is a great way to be part of diverse #aDNA research projects as a staff scientist with permanent (!!) employment: www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

Archaea kill bacteria by targeting a component of their cell wall. 🦠🗡️🦠

On my way to Barcelona to attend @eseb2025.bsky.social ! ✈️ And the WAME satellite meeting. 5 people from our lab will be at ESEB, presenting posters on Monday. Me, @estermart.bsky.social, @cenkvist.bsky.social, @madeleinebergstrom.bsky.social, @matiasbeck.bsky.social. Ask them about their research!

Interested in host-associated microbiomes? Attending @eseb2025.bsky.social? Then come check out Symposium S07 on Monday August 18th and hear all about how microbiomes contribute to adaptation. Gut microbiomes, climate change, thermal physiology, behaviour, invasion biology, blood-feeding, and more!

You can get an accurate estimate of total bacterial biomass from stool metagenomes by simply normalizing by host read count, without needing any additional measurements. Excellent work by UW Master's student Gechlang Tang in @asm.org #mSystems Journal. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... 🧵

Amazing dataset compiled here! • ~85k public metagenomes from 40 habitats (~46k human gut) • >2M isolate genomes and MAGs ➡️ Microbiomes primarily structured by host/environment association, not geography ➡️ Generalist species are key mediators of HGT and spread of AMR www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Just saw this cool preprint from @contaminatedsci.bsky.social's lab that used the bacterial-to-host (B:H) read ratio (doi.org/10.1128/msys...) to quantify absolute bacterial biomass in skin swab samples: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Worked well in high, but not so well in low biomass settings.

A diverse and distinct microbiome inside living trees 🌳 www.nature.com/articles/s41... "We demonstrate that a single tree hosts approximately one trillion bacteria in its woody tissues, with microbial communities distinctly partitioned between heartwood and sapwood" @nature.com

“If these trends are not stopped, science is going to be destroyed." Here's my story on the accelerating growth of systemic research fraud--aka paper mills. Gift link: nyti.ms/45rDirw

Colossal Foundation Announces the Colossal Species Reintroduction Fund; Dedicated Accelerator for Rewilding Animals to Native Habitats Globally. www.businesswire.com/news/home/20... I think this is a wonderful incentive to support efforts to conserve threatened species. @itiscolossal.bsky.social

Parasite extinctions in threatened species may be far more prevalent than previous estimates suggest. Our new study of kākāpō dung spanning from ~1,500 years ago to present, finds >80% of parasite species were lost as the host species declined.

Consider joining Nikolay's lab! 🎉 He's a brilliant researcher and bioinformatician!

We have spent the last week on fieldwork, sampling #reindeer calves. 🦌 We've been in the mountains in Jämtland, at the Tåssåsen Sámi reindeer herding community. Fantastic experience being part of the calf marking event. #microbiome

Matias Becker Burgos @matiasbeck.bsky.social presented and successfully defended his MSc thesis a while ago! 🎉 #microbiome #hologenomics 🐓🦠🧬

Congratulations Gabriel Hedman Slottner on a successful MSc thesis presentation and defense! 🎉 #microbiome 🐸🌡️🦠

🌍🦠 World Microbiome Day shout-out: we’ve just unveiled the Microbiota Vault—a planetary backup for microbial diversity. Built on equitable, One Health values & linked to the new IUCN SSC Microbiomes. Read our Nature Comms piece: doi.org/10.1038/s414... #MicrobiotaVault #Conservation #WMD2025

Guidelines for preventing and reporting contamination in low-biomass #microbiome studies. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @natmicrobiol.nature.com

Excellent piece. LLMs can be useful for automating tedious tasks, but for tasks that require rigour and critical thinking, such as peer review, it's problematic on multiple levels.

📢New Publication Alert 📢 I’m proud to share a major milestone in my PhD journey. My first paper has officially been published: “Eukaryotic composition across seasons and social groups in the gut microbiota of wild baboons”. animalmicrobiome.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Madde @madeleinebergstrom.bsky.social and I are preparing for fieldwork in the mountains with these guys. 🦌🏔️🥰 Photo by Ingebjørg Helena Nymo.

Reading about the gut microbe #Blastocystis, a eukaryote protist, and how our view of it has changed over the recent years. 🦠 Previously believed to be as "bad bug", now believed to be beneficial for our health. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Thanks to the @qvarnstromlab.bsky.social and @elinvidevall.bsky.social I had the great experience of participating in the fieldwork on Öland where we collected data from pied and collared flycatchers for the flycatcher project at Uppsala university! 🐦🐣

The biggest "meta-analysis" ever? - 17 million effect sizes - elifesciences.org/articles/95857 With wonderful @coreytcallaghan.bsky.social and Will Cornwell We question the abundance-occupancy relationships using ebird data - we find ~ zero correlation

Matias Becker Burgos @matiasbeck.bsky.social presented his MSc thesis work about genome-microbiome interactions in feral chickens today to the program! 🐓🦠🧬 Well done! @animecol-uu.bsky.social #microbiome #mGWAS #hologenomics #feralization

We will look for a postdoc after the summer to start a new project on transmission of microbiota and antimicrobial resistance in lake flies. 🦠🧬🦟 It primarily involves experiments in the lab (transmission between predator-prey, vertical, species) and metagenomic sequencing to find AMR genes.

Our lab’s latest paper just came out & I ❤️ it. Look at all the Archaea in wild bird poop that Universal primers miss. Amazing job by @thunterbio.bsky.social! #birds #archaea #AcademicSky Archaeal diversity in the microbiomes of 4 wild bird species. Check it out —> journals.asm.org/eprint/3VYAS...

We got great results on the bioanalyzer today from the genomic and metagenomic museum samples! 🧬 Thanks to @madeleinebergstrom.bsky.social! Now we're looking forward to send these off for sequencing; they're part of a small pilot project. #microbiome #metagenome #hologenome

I agree with this. Ecologically expanding the One Health framework to unify the microbiome sciences. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... #microbiome #pathogens #OneHealth

Our new paper, just out “Superspreaders have lower gut microbial alpha-diversity and distinct gut microbial composition in a natural rodent population”. Highlights gut microbial signatures for those individuals that have the potential to spread the most infectious disease. doi.org/10.1186/s425...

🧵5 Top Free Alternatives to BioRender for Scientific Illustrations! These five websites offer free scientific illustrations for biologists. Great for presentations, research papers and other research communication needs. Save and share the post!

New vacancy in my team! PhD student position on microbial genome evolution, focusing on the evolutionary principles underlying bacterial genome architecture. Please repost and share with talented MSc students in #evobio, bioinformatics or related :) www.uu.nl/en/organisat... #MEvoSky #MicroSky