New #ISEPpapers #preprint! Environmental #phylogenetics supports a steady diversification of crown #eukaryotes starting from the mid Proterozoic www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #Protists #Microbes #Evolution #Phylogeny #Proterozoic #Eukaryogenesis

A free, open-access library of high-quality organism illustrations for science communication

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

De novo genome sequence assembly of the model algal endosymbiont Micractinium conductrix derived from its host Paramecium bursaria 186b. Guy Leonard, Irma Vitonyte, Fiona R Savory, Erika M Hansson, Duncan D Cameron, Michael Brockhurst, Thomas A Richards bioRxiv doi: doi.org/10.64898/202...

Thanks @jcellsci.bsky.social for this opportunity to contribute to your centenary collection with our take on the state of the field - 10 years after its modern reincarnation 🧪🌍 W/ @alebenoit.bsky.social @eelcotromer.bsky.social @fritzlaylin.bsky.social journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

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...

So excited to see this preprint out!! There is so much gold hiding in public eDNA studies, just waiting for taxon-focused investigations to pull out stories like this. Congrats on a great analysis @annaschreck.bsky.social @symbiosisrox.bsky.social

Our raxtax tool for taxonomic classification is published: it is 2.7–100 times faster than competing tools but equally accurate - raxtax has increasing speedups with growing query and reference sequence numbers compared to existing tools: academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

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...

It has been so rewarding to combine all these different expertise

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...

Aha, I realized that I forgot to add #ProtistsOnSky and #SymbioSky to this thread highlighting our recent respiratory endosymbiont paper.

We’re excited to announce the opening of the Geneva Expansion Microscopy Facility (GenExM)! GenExM is a full-service U-ExM platform (U-ExM, Cryo-ExM, iU-ExM), delivering nanoscale imaging. Led by Dr. Olivier Mercey, GenExM welcomes academic & industrial collaborations. 👉 www.unige.ch/genexm/

Those interested in performing maximum likelihood phylogenomic analysis on data sets made up of eukaryotic nuclear genes using site heterogeneous mixture models like C60, I suggest you use the ELM model in IQ-TREE instead of the LG model /1

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

One more week to apply to this PhD position on working out an endosymbiosis relationship in a protist. Please share widely to prospective PhD student #protistsonsky

#Diplonemids are among the most diverse & abundant #protists in the deep #ocean. This study localises >5,000 proteins of #Paradiplonema papillatum, revealing #organelle compartmentalisation, including a membrane coated with carbohydrate-degrading enzymes @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3XvmpIO

Sequence alignments are notoriously prone to error. Our latest preprint offers a new tool for filtering errors out, assesses it and other filtering tools, and recommends new best practice. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @phylowheeler.bsky.social 1/10

Microflora Danica: What can you learn from collecting and sequencing 10,000+ samples from a single country? Check out our new paper in @nature.com to find out. Incredible work led by Caitlin Singleton, Thomas B. N. Jensen, and Mads Albertsen from @aau.dk. 🦠🧫🧬 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I just published: ERC-Plus: jackpot science or missed chance to fix academia? My reflections on ERC-Plus, Europe’s newest ultra-competitive research grant and what it tells us about the academic culture we’re building. medium.com/p/erc-plus-j...

Wow! Radler et al. doi.org/10.1101/2025... These are #asgardarchaea with what? Pseudopodia? Should we call them archaepodia analogously to archaellum? Mindblowing anyway!

Sharma & Kumar present the Net Bootstrap Support (NBS) approach that accounts for phylogenetic variation in the estimates of bootstrap confidence. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf296 #evobio #molbio #phylogenetics

Long Term Copepod Culture Houses a Rich Microbial Eukaryotic Community Including New and Known Symbionts onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #protists #symbionts #microbiome

Check out our latest paper on mirusviruses, one of the most remarkable new groups of protist viruses - extremely diverse, carry lots of spliceosomal introns (including new homing introns) and are at the evolutionary crossroads between tailed phages and herpesviruses! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to release the Herculean efforts of @scottchisholm.bsky.social &Co. defining the subcellular #hyperLOPIT spatial proteome of #Plasmodium schizonts. Proteomes defining 24 subcellular niches, including exported compartments in the blood cell, are identified. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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 🧪🌏

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

A Mitochondrially Related Plastidial Transporter Regulates Photosynthesis in the Diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

www.nature.com/articles/s41... #protistsonsky

🎉 There are currently 4 opportunities to join the Holt lab in beautiful Bath! 🎉 If you're interested in protists, parasites, and/or biodiversity then please check out our website: theholtlab.com/posts/ln5-21... 🚨 Deadlines vary between project. ✉️ Please reach out if you have any questions!

Fluorescent microscopy is beautiful🔬✨ People who are pushing the envelope will not only uncover new biology, but captivate (and entice!) new generations of brilliant minds to love biology the same way we do

Each such discovery is a game changer for our understanding of eukaryote evolution, and this paper is no exception. Meet Solarion, which displays yet again novel types of subcellular structures. Congrats to all authors on a fascinating story. #protistsonsky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Weird word of the day: "kleptosquamy." The testate amoeba Awerintzewia cyclostoma steals scales from other amoeboid organisms to build its own shell. This one has robbed Quadrulella, Netzelia, various euglyphids, and even an Acanthocystis. Kleptosquamy! #amoebae #ProtistsOnSky #biology #nature

I’ve released a tool to sketch and edit phylogenetic trees! yawak.jp/PhyloWeaver/ Load a Newick file and intuitively add/remove/resize branches. Useful for quick conceptual trees, extracting subtrees, or turning ideas into Newick.

Come and Join Us. Not only will it be fun, but you will be learning a lot of methods & travel some more ;)!

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

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #protistsonsky

We've used this pipeline a lot (and will continue), and I can only highly recommend it

The amoeba Difflugia bacillifera builds its shell from things that contain silica, and it is not particular about the source. These ones have incorporated whole shells from another testate amoeba (Euglypha), along with diatoms, algal cysts and chunks of rock. #Amoebae #ProtistsOnSky #peatlands

Europe's MSCA postdoctoral fellowships are now attracting many researchers who would have gone to the US. So the payline has dropped below 10% (~1,600 fellowships to 17k applicants). Super tough situation. One more reason to double the next Horizon budget, as proposed by the EU Commission.

Congrats on the paper, and beautiful cover

✨X-ray crystallography reveals surprising twist in how proteins enter the unique photosynthetic organelles of Paulinella. The chromatophore targeting peptide (crTP) folds into a 3D structure, hinting that folded proteins cross peptidoglycan and inner membrane. (1/2) academic.oup.com/plphys/artic...

Mind blowing

Super, congrats Flora et al

Thirty novel fungal lineages: formal description based on environmental samples and DNA mycokeys.pensoft.net/articles.php...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #protistsonsky