Excited to share a preprint from my postdoc research at @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social in the @banfieldlab.bsky.social! We surveyed soil microbiomes for autotrophy - and found it nearly everywhere, but most abundant in deep, saturated soils. Check it out below! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🧪 That sourdough starter on your counter? It's a microbial community that's been evolving the whole time you've fed it. @oliverio.bsky.social's lab just won a $2.1M NIH grant to use starters as a model system for studying how microbiomes evolve.

hi #abscicon26! I’m looking forward to talking about Incendiamoeba and friends (“Microbial eukaryotic interactions in geothermal springs”) in tomorrow’s 2-3:30 Symbioses session

While BioNtech & Moderna become household names because of their Covid vaccines, those emerged from different projects: finding ways to treat the most challenging cancers. They hypothesized that we could vaccinate patients against their own tumors, & evidence is mounting that they were right! 1/n 🧪

Hey #GSB2026! Want to hear about soil protists? Want to learn more about long-read sequencing and assembling protist genomes? My talk tomorrow morning in the "Technological, Methodological, and Omics Advances - II" session will highlight some recent advancements in these realms 🦠🧬

1/ BRAKER4 hatched! The Earth BioGenome Project is on track to sequence ~1.5M eukaryotic species. Every one needs a structural annotation. No Perl monolith was going to survive that. So we rewrote BRAKER from the ground up. github.com/Gaius-August...

We tested the efficacy of semi-permeable capsules to capture protists from cultures and environmental samples using the Onyx from @atrandi.bsky.social. Tremendous effort from everyone in the lab and led by Marco Fantini and Nik Brask - check out the videos here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#ProtistsOnSky #FungiFriends in soil, it's not just fungi entrapping worms for dinner with their hyphae, it's also the protists that feast on fungal hyphae. after all, it's a jungle... thx to kenneth @dumack.bsky.social for this highly interesting 🧵

Undergraduate researcher extraordinaire @melpaige05.bsky.social presented some of her recent findings on the role of temperature for the three life stages of a Heterolobosean protist (Fumarolamoeba sp.) today! Melanie's passion for pink posters and characterizing this amoeba is inspiring 💓🦠

I have a new review out in TiG titled, “The ecology of horizontal gene transfer”! I’ve been thinking about these ideas for years and this field is growing so fast it’s becoming impossible to review it. I hope this paper sparks discussion on different ways we can look at DNA transfer!

journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... We have a new paper out that looks at metabolic adaptations to mildly acidic conditions in a denitrifier isolated from acidic, nitrate-contaminated groundwater. 🧵

We are accepting applications for up to 3 Peggy Cotter Travel Awards ($1,650 each) to support early-career professionals attending ASM Microbe 2026. Apply by Feb 16, 2026 by emailing a 1-page letter to [email protected]. ASM membership required; branch membership may be completed once that is live.

Excited to announce the re-establishment of the Central New York Branch of the American Society for Microbiology (CNY ASM)! Founded in 1921, revived in 2025 to support collaboration, inclusive programming, and microbiologists at all career stages! This is our official BlueSky account!

🚨 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 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...

"A newly identified amoeba can survive at the temperature of a medium-well done steak" lol @scifri.bsky.social an apt comparison a hadn't previously considered... A pleasure chatting about our research led by @hbrappap.bsky.social & with a wonderful team of colleagues.

Announcing our next #NSFfunded workshop on "Telling Stories Through Data", co-lead by myself + @vgwschutte.bsky.social! It’s half bioinformatics data viz & half #SciComm - this year’s focus is host-associated microbiome datasets. Apply here to join us (form closes 1/10) bit.ly/TSTD2026 #symbiosky

New preprint led by @annaschreck.bsky.social that capitalized on the wealth of publicly available 18S rRNA datasets to explore the oceanic distribution and diversity of understudied anaerobic ciliates. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

NSF - Forced reorg - POs down ~ 40% (DRP, most rotators not renewed, retirements) - Forced move (and we have to pack and clean) to a building with no furniture, little to no conference space for panels, inadequate 🛜, …) I personally love the boxes they gave us for packing. “Details matter” 🙃

Delighted to share some coverage of our new preprint (doi.org/10.1101/2025...) from Scientific American and thank you @sciam.bsky.social @andreatweather.bsky.social for taking the time to chat with @hbrappap.bsky.social and I about why we are so excited about the geothermal 𝘐𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘦𝘣𝘢

Thanks nature news for featuring our recent preprint on 𝘐𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘦𝘣𝘢 led by @hbrappap.bsky.social (check out preprint here: doi.org/10.1101/2025...) #protistsonsky

Our attempt to give multinucleate cells the spotlight they deserve (seriously, they’re everywhere), led by the fearless @mrosjac.bsky.social and with @Markus Ganter doi.org/10.32942/X2M... We’d love your feedback while this goes through the peer review process! #MicroEvoSky #ProtistsonSky 🧪🌏

Well actually... 𝘐𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘦𝘣𝘢 just encyst 😜 they can recover from 70C fine! (but not 80C) @hbrappap.bsky.social

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

What a cool paper, and this feeding video!!!! 😱

🚨Our collaboration with @centriolelab.bsky.social & @gautamdey.bsky.social is out today in @cp-cell.bsky.social We show that #Expansion #Microscopy is a broad-spectrum modality for Euks, enabling 3D phenotypic maps rooted to phylogeny. #ProtistsOnSky #SciComm #SciSky www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Just looking for two guests for my #MattersMicrobial podcast. Slots open between 7AM and noon on Friday, November 28th and Friday, December 26th. DM me, email, and please spread the #GoodMicrobialWord. Always looking for #MicrobialEnthusiasts.

And this paper! @jfreude2.bsky.social @dumack.bsky.social I've been so curious about Rhogostoma since they can be incredibly abundant in soils, awesome to see this!! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This was such a neat study it got posted twice on our 'cool papers' channel in lab slack 😅 #ProtistsonSky

Accepted version of our article "Half of microbial eukaryote literature focuses on only twelve human parasites" now out in ISMEJ! Awesome effort led by undergrad Joanna Lepper and with @hbrappap.bsky.social.

New #ISEPpapers! Towards a trait-based framework for protist ecology and evolution: Mahwash Jamy et al. www.cell.com/trends/micro... #protists #algae #microbes #ecology #evolution

I wrote about how revoking access to medical care for trans people affects all of us in science. reskeets (are we calling them that?) appreciated. www.ascb.org/society-news...

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

📣 New paper alert 📣 Out TODAY in GCB! We have a lot of evidence that microbial communities are important for litter decomposition but we haven't evaluated those microbial community effects in ecosystem-scale models using empirical data. Now this work has! doi.org/10.1111/gcb.... 1/n

I am working with ASM to re-launch the Central NY ASM Branch! 🧫🦠 We have funds allocated for us and now just need 25 signatures from ASM members in the geographic region in support of this branch. More info is in the form and also I’ve attached a FAQ sheet. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Its that time again - the list of Ecology/Evolution/Marine Bio Labs recruiting grad students for Fall 2026 is live! PIs enter your position info here: forms.gle/2XTHBP6CZGEn... Prospective students (and PIs not recruiting) share the composite list: docs.google.com/spreadsheets... Please share! 🧪

Our commentary on the elegant in vitro microbiome coalescence experiments from @goldmandoran.bsky.social @ksxue.bsky.social et al is out. It was a pleasure to write about one of my favorite microbiome papers of the last few years. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Announcing the new release of the PR2 database, version 5.1. pr2-database.org/post/news/20... Very big thanks to all the contributors: @fonamental.bsky.social @ambonacolta.bsky.social @krabberod.bsky.social and more... A few highlights:

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is being decimated right now. Mass layoffs happening across agencies (NIH, FDA, CDC etc). Some employees found out by security badge being denied. Others got email. Line outside Health Resources and Services Administration this AM shared with me:

Link here- www.sujobopps.com/postings/108... Please get in touch if you are interested!

We are hiring a postdoctoral scholar to join us in the sometime in the next ~6 months. oliveriolab.org with a focus on microbial eukaryotes in extreme environments. Please email w/CV if you'd like to chat. Official ad soon. #MicroSky #MicrobiomeSky #ProtistsOnSky

I'm pleased to introduce our new paper rooting the eukaryote Tree of Life (eToL) that resulted from a collaboration led by PhD student Kelsey Williamson and a large group of collaborators doi.org/10.1038/s415...htt

An PLEASURE chatting with @markowenmartin.bsky.social on the #mattersmicrobial podcast about microbial **eukaryotes**, including the super high temp amoebae we (notably @hbrappap.bsky.social) have found in geothermal springs. 
If you want to hear more:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxxi... #microsky 🧪🦠

Exactly this 👇👇👇

People who left tenured positions recently to come to NSF now terminated...

What’s happening today to many of our amazing and dedicated colleagues at numerous scientific agencies is heartbreaking. I keep vacillating between thoughts that this must be a nightmare I’ll wake up from soon and knowing this is exactly who we’ve become.

This.

Librarians are awesome. Our data librarian has been compiling efforts to archive and preserve federal data. Preliminary list here: researchguides.library.syr.edu/data

NSF's budget is about 10 billion but only has about 1500 employees. Cutting employees will save very little money. The goal is to cripple the US system of generating scientific research, including higher education.