“Lichens of Britain & Ireland” by Rebecca Yahr and Frances Stoakley is finally available for purchase. This has been a much needed ID guide for beginners to intermediates and the publication is finally here!! www.bloomsbury.com/uk/lichens-o... #bloomsbury #lichens

Firmly believe this would serve multiple needs.

Huge congrats to @ddiazescandon.bsky.social and @spribille.bsky.social! What a massive amount of work and such exciting results!

Can't wait for this meeting!

One week left to apply for the PhD position in my group in Stockholm!

Check out this amazing paper on the Umbilicaria lichen and a black yeast fungus that appears to be its ever-present component!

Inviting applications for #PhD (3y) & #Postdoc (2y) to work on alpine #lichens: evolution of #SecondaryMetabolism & #Chemodiversity. #genomics #metabolomics #fungi #biosyntheticGenes. Send your CV +motivation letter ➡️ [email protected] Please share 😊

Almost lost amidst the cow excitement (cow-motion?) was that @currentbiology.bsky.social featured a brilliant paper on #lichen fungi in this week’s issue by Victoria Keller et al. including @veera-t-nogerius.bsky.social — what is not to lichen about this new double ascomycete living arrangement

The Department of Ecology, Environment and Plant Sciences at @stockholm-uni.bsky.social has two open PhD positions, help us spread the word! 📣 We are looking for a PhD student in Lichen Biology, and one in Ecology & Evolution. Find more information and apply by 1 February below!

I realise I'm just a freak, but living in a multicultural city is the best thing of all time, it's just the best possible human experience and i can not understand why anyone on earth would be like "weve got to destroy this"

Want to get the data out of a PDF figure? As in, the actual data – not a rough trace-along-the-lines version? I made an app you might like: adamkucharski.github.io/pdf2plot/ It all started a few years ago... 🧵

⚡️Fully funded #PhD position in my lab at Stockholm University / SciLifeLab! If you’re interested in #lichens, #symbiosis, fungal biology, or meta-omics, please apply. Deadline Feb 1. Read more here: su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

My (recent) work environment vs the quality of work that actually gets done there

So once upon a time, I got savaged on Twitter for saying that all a man in the games industry had to do to end a woman’s employment at the same company was sexually harass her. As soon as it happened, the timer began counting down. (Thread)

Plant Science Research Weekly -- Genomic analysis of a lichen photobiont alga (New Phytol.) @metalichen.bsky.social @talbotlabtsl.bsky.social (Summary by Mary Williams @PlantTeaching.bsky.social) buff.ly/IQC6qOT #PlantaePSRW

Doing great here, yes, thanks for asking: “Stockholm on track for darkest December since 1934” www.thelocal.se/20251216/sto...

Thrilled to share that I recently got a position of an Assistant Professor/SciLifeLab Fellow at Stockholm University, where I will continue my work on #lichen symbiosis. The lab opens in April 2026, and if you are interested in joining please get in touch! #newPI

I had such a blast at the French Phycological Society conference in Paris! Huge thanks to the organizers for the invitation. I really appreciated the opportunity to discuss the algal side of the lichen symbiosis and learn about cool research on all kinds of algae!

Everything you always wanted to know about mushroom-forming fungi! Great collab with amazing mycologists. Thanks Laszlo Nagy for leading this effort! www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Our paper on Zymoseptoria tritici 3D genome organization is officially out! @iglavincheska.bsky.social link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New preprint from our group led by @metalichen.bsky.social on the discovery of a Starship giant transposable element in the genome of a lichen-forming fungus.

PhD opportunity in our lab - deadline passes on Dec 2nd - don’t miss out!

New preprint: 🚀🧬 Starship in the genome of the lichen fungus Xanthoria. Discovery of giant transposons Starships challenged what we thought we knew about fungal genomes. But what about Starships in #lichen fungi? Let us present Tangerine! 🖥️ 🧪 🦠 🧫 #SymbioSky doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Huge honor to receive this price! Glad to see the lichen research rewarded with such a distinction Thanks @pierremarcdelaux.bsky.social and @kellerjeanphd.bsky.social for your SUPERvision ✨ Merci @academiesciences.bsky.social pour cette opportunité et cette belle cérémonie!

Nitrates can really mess up lichens, but Xanthoria seems to deal with it pretty well. This article suggests that hydration plays a role, with Xanthoria better able to cope with stress when moist and metabollically active. #lichenresearch www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We're looking for a PhD student! If you're interested in #fungal #genomics & #TEs, meiotic drive, or pathogens, please consider applying. The project is about toxin/antidote genes in the human fungal pathogen A. fumigatus. uu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

Maybe not my wokest opinion (I do have lots of woke opinions, hard to pick), but probably most pressing one: the freedom to choose where and how to live is a fundamental right. Immigration is good. I hate seeing how sealing off countries is now the common sense position across the political spectrum

I would posit that if the international treaties against torture are what is holding your country back then your country doesn't deserve to get ahead and holding it back is a moral obligation for everyone else

#Fungi at all levels matter! From tiniest to largest, they are an essential part of our world. Here we map familiar fungi on #fungal tree of life: doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.7… @VaianaAnna @fmartin54.bsky.social, @spribille.bsky.social @rasmus kjolle#lichensn#mushroomo#yeasts#supermarioi#moldl#medicineses

New paper led by @metalichen.bsky.social from our group presenting a chromosome-level assembly of the Trebouxia photobiont alga from the lichen Xanthoria parietina - a resource we hope will enable significant new insight into the symbiosis @newphyt.bsky.social doi.org/10.1111/nph....

Our paper on the #genome of the Trebouxia #photobiont from Xanthoria is now out in @newphyt.bsky.social! Check below for a near-chromosome level assembly, secretome analysis, evidence of ancient HGT, and transcriptomic comparison of the alga in symbiosis and in pure culture doi.org/10.1111/nph.70728

We are looking for a PhD student to work on an exciting plastid endosymbiosis in microbial eukaryotes. This position involves sampling, exciting microscopy such as CARDFISH, ExM and FIBSEM, single-cell transcriptomics and more. #protistsonsky 1/2

Chromosome‐level #genome assembly of the #photobiont microalga Trebouxia sp. ‘A48’ from the #lichen Xanthoria parietina 📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... by Tagirdzhanova et al. @metalichen.bsky.social @talbotlabtsl.bsky.social @WileyPlantSci

#Lichens form their complex thalli through a partnership involving at least a fungus and an alga. But can these living structures be rebuilt in vitro? For more than a century, people have tried. With @spribille.bsky.social we revisited 150 years of #lichen #resynthesis to ask: has anyone succeeded?

I had such fun thinking, reading and writing this Tansley Review on #arbuscular #mycorrhizal #fungal mycelia. We need a more fungal-centric view to better understand not only the AM fungi, but also their many ecological roles. @newphyt.bsky.social 🔗 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/DHGB3S....

1/ Ever needed to annotate TEs in a fungal genome, but didn't know where to start? We have released #MycoMobilome, a community-focused non-redundant database of transposable element consensus sequences for the fungal kingdom, constructed from >4,000 fungal genomes! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

In this paper, we show that photobiont diversity increases as lichens age. Interestingly, as the thallus grows, autosporine algae become more prevalent at the expense of zoosporine algae, likely because the latter play a key role in lichen establishment. 1url.cz/@Proto

Wooo!

VACANCY: Trainee Lichenologist @n-t-s.bsky.social Not seen one of these advertised before! www.asva.co.uk/jobs/trainee...

🚨 Save the date! Thrilled to be co-organizing the next iteration of the @embl.org Symposium on the Cellular Mechanics of Symbiosis (📅 March 17-20), w/ @floravincent.bsky.social, @hassansalem.bsky.social & Tom Richards. www.embl.org/about/info/c... #EESSymbiosis #Symbiosis #SymbioSky #MicroSky 🦠

We have several open positions in my group, funded from the ERC Grant on the Early Sequestered Germline of Fungi. We search broadly for applicants at both PhD and master-level, with a dedicated interest in fungal evolutionary biology. Please forward and RT! Find the positions here: su.varbi.com

Delighted that our work on the Sanctuary Starship #transposon is now published! A big thanks to all co-authors, especially to the ever-amazing @mcdonaldmeganc.bsky.social for her mentorship! doi.org/10.1128/mbio...

The grave risks for science as the whole of leaving fundamental scientific infrastructure in the hands of for-profit capitalist company. Essential scholarly services should be internationally curated by value-based societies/orders/colleges. 🧪

📣 NEW PREPRINT 📝 We identified evolutionary origins of many fungal effectors! We show that fungi secrete lots of antimicrobial proteins, and that some of them were repurposed by plant pathogens for host immune suppression. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... cc @teamthomma.bsky.social

It started as a master thesis project by Markus Hiltunen, and ended up in this publication in Science. What a fun project to work on! Thanks Markus - and all other coauthors, too, for a great team work! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Reminder about our special issue on lichen symbiosis in Lichenologist 👇 the deadline for submission is in September

Happy to share that I’ve now joined @hannajohannesson.bsky.social's group in Stockholm University! Thanks to support from Wenner-Gren Foundation, I will be working on self/non-self recognition in lichen symbionts

Which both were great and both made me cry my eyes out. I have resigned myself to the world being horrible and getting worse, I can function pretty well despite it, but