New article online: Modulation of archaeal hypernucleosome structure and stability by Mg2+ In this work, we dissect the effects of Mg2+ on hypernucleosomes formed by the canonical histones from M. fervidus (HMfA and HMfB) and T. kodakarensis (HTkA and HTkB). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Soon available in my group: 1 PhD position to investigate prokaryotic histones. See our recent work that highlights the existence and diversity of prokaryotic histones (e.g. Schwab et al., TIBS, 2025; Schwab et al., Nat Comm, 2024; Hu et al., Nucl Acids Res, 2024). Please DM for informal enquiries.

The DeNoFo format & toolkit for annotating, assessing and comparing the tools and tresholds used in studies of de novo evolved genes is out now in Bioinformatics! Great effort led by @drdomain.bsky.social and Anna Grandchamp! academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

Looking for a PostDoc in Origins? The Wisconsin Center for Origins Research might be the right place for you! Apply here: wicor.wisc.edu/postdoc/

Our new preprint is out 🥳🥳🥳 Henipaviruses, like Nipah and Hendra, package their genomes inside helical shells built by thousands of nucleoproteins. These nucleocapsids are essential to protect the viral RNA, but how do they ever let the polymerase in to read the sequence? 👇

Ancient amino acid sets enable stable protein folds https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.29.685319v1

Lab’s first paper is out!! We show the first structures of #Asgard #chromatin by #cryo-EM 🧬❄️ Asgard histones form closed and open hypernucleosomes. Closed are conserved across #Archaea, while open resemble eukaryotic H3–H4 octasomes and are Asgard-specific. More here: www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

Join our next ProSe seminar 11th November 5PM CET and follow us @proteinstructure.bsky.social!

Protein Structure Evolution (ProSe) Seminar is now on BlueSky! Every 2nd Tuesday, 4PM GMT. Sign-Up: tinyurl.com/prose-seminar2 Organized by Claudia Alvarez Carreño, Zachary Ardern, Lars Eicholt, Carolina Sanchez-Rocha, Sergio Romero Romero and Md. Hassan Uz-Zaman.

We need to have a conversation about random seeds. Don't use 42. blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/if-your-ra...

A fun little side project I've been working on with @stepadenisov.bsky.social , Mato Lagator, and Andreas Wagner: "Strong promoters are mutationally robust". Briefly... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I’m excited to announce the launch of my lab at EPFL in Jan 2026 🎉. We’ll combine evolution & synthetic biology to study and (re)engineer bacterial communication. I’m recruiting PhD students to start in the first semester of 2026. Apply via EPFL PhD programs by Nov 1 drive.google.com/file/d/1cm-t...

How does catalysis emerge from non-catalytic domains? In our new paper, we show that catalytic activity can arise without conserved active-site residues — through multimerization and electrostatic features instead. A striking case of catalysis evolving from binding.

Join us Tuesday for the next Protein Structure Evolution Seminar (ProSe Seminar) with Stephen Fried!

Never thought I would say this, but I need a Dane.. novonordiskfonden.dk/grant/postdo...

The paper is a masterpiece of modern evolutionary genomics with a potential for synthetic biology. Imagine designing new genes from scratch to improve plant traits. Beautiful work from colleagues at Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan. Link to the paper in Cell: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Please re-post: Interested in chromatin and its evolution? Good news! There's still time to join us in beautiful Catalonia (9-12 Dec) to discuss eukaryotic, bacterial, archaeal, and viral chromatin and how it all hangs together meetings.embo.org/event/24-evo... Abstract deadline: 30 September

Dear scientific community, I am looking for two postdoctoral structural biologists to join my group at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford. my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru... my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

The ProSE seminars are back after a summer break. The next speaker is Nir Ben-Tal on "Contrastive learning unites sequence and structure in a global representation of protein space". Date: September 9 Time: 5pm CET Register here: tinyurl.com/prose-seminar2 Please share! 🧪 #mevosky

*Postdoc in Evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University* We are recruiting a postdoc for a large interdisciplinary project to investigate evolutionary drivers and genomic consequences of pollen evolution in response to pollination mode shifts in flowering plants. 1/5 su.varbi.com/what:job/job...

The #MaxPlanckPostdocProgram offers a guaranteed contract of at least 3 years, targeted mentoring, and career workshops. The call for applications is open now! 🚀 Take advantage of this opportunity and browse the job vacancies. www.mpg.de/en/max-planc...

Excited / nervous to share the “magnum opus” of my postdoc in Andreas Wagner’s lab! "De-novo promoters emerge more readily from random DNA than from genomic DNA" This project is the accumulation of 4 years of work, and lays the foundation for my future group. In short, we… (1/4)

Please re-post: If you know (or are!) somebody who might fancy doing a PhD (Oct 2026 start) in my group @oxfordbiochemistry.bsky.social, working on chromatin evolution in prokaryotes (or other things we're interested in), please have a look at www.bioch.ox.ac.uk/supervisors-...

Beautiful work from @claudiaalcar.bsky.social, congrats! Piecing Together the History of Protein Folds From a Fragmented Evolutionary Record academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

This first-author publication is my… first! Archaea kill bacteria by targeting their Achilles’ heel: peptidoglycan. Big shoutout to @ahocher.bsky.social‬, @valeriesoo.bsky.social‬, Pauline Misson, @tobiaswarnecke.bsky.social‬ and MRC LMS Proteomics. A thread 🔽 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

If you’re interested in learning more about protein folding and misfolding, I’ve created a convenient reading list with a few essential papers: scholar.google.com/citations?us... scholar.google.com/citations?us...

Happy to share our new paper out today in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social in collaboration with @tobiaswarnecke.bsky.social @akihisaosakabe.bsky.social about how evolution can do big things with small changes. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨 🔬 Ever wondered how new genes emerge from scratch? Meet DESwoMAN, a fully automated pipeline to detect and analyze newly expressed ORFs (neORFs) from transcriptome data — giving us a window into the earliest stages of de novo gene emergence! (Thread 🧵👇)

Wie alt Tiere werden, ist je nach Art extrem unterschiedlich. Hanna Kokko von der Universität Mainz spricht am 10. Juli über die evolutionäre Bedeutung der unterschiedlichen Lebensspannen.

Join us for the next ProSE Seminar! We are excited to welcome Sophie Heiding for a talk on "Computational Insights into Protein Adaptation Across Environmental Gradients" Date: June 10 Time: 4PM CET Register here: tinyurl.com/prose-seminar2 Please share! 🧪 #MEvoSky

Joining the race to the bottom has never been cooler... www.biorxiv.org/node/4580343... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This took us a while and I am all the happier it is finally out! I thought that simply adding ATP to purified potassium channel KtrAB should be sufficient to stabilize its active state. I was so wrong... Read the full story on how an IDR facilitates channel opening upon membrane interaction.

Very interesting new study from authors including Nobel Prize winner David Baker. I'm glad that it cites one of my related papers 😀 I've faced plenty of skepticism from editors & others about the importance of this line of research, perhaps this will shift ... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to share our new preprint on HLp—a bacterial histone from Leptospira perolatii that forms stable tetramers and wraps ~60 bp of DNA: "DNA Wrapping by a Tetrameric Bacterial Histone" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social

Deep origin of eukaryotes outside Heimdallarchaeia within Asgardarchaeota www.nature.com/articles/s41...

While it is a dark time for US science, I'm grateful to be able to celebrate some recent lab successes! A brief thread... 🧵 First, the final version of our article on the katherine johnson (kj) gene came out in GENETICS @genetics-gsa.bsky.social in March! academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

We also just posted to @biorxiv-genetic.bsky.social a new manuscript led by our superb staff scientist Dr. Prajal Patel in collaboration with @lacholt.bsky.social from @bornberglab.bsky.social. We explored the functionality of orphan gene orthologs in D. melanogaster. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We are pleased to announce that the next speaker in the ProSE seminar series will be Dr. Klara Hlouchova with a talk on "Protein Structure Before LUCA" May 13, 4PM CET Registration link: tinyurl.com/prose-seminar4 Please share!

New Paper Alert! Together with the Parsch lab, we investigated the expression of neORFs (newly evolved expressed open reading frames, identified in a previous study) in Drosophila populations using publicly available RNA-seq data. (1/2) doi.org/10.1002/jez....

This has been a long journey, but it's now out in final form. @kjamali.bsky.social academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

This week in @science.org: Multicellularity in archaea when cells are mechanically compressed. 🧪 Read the paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... And the Perspective here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🚨MPI Biology Tübingen is actively recruiting #Postdocs through our #PostdocProgram. postdocprogram.mpg.de We have 5 projects within the Departments of Complex Biological Interactions, Integrative Evolutionary Biology & Algal Development and Evolution. 5 weeks left till the deadline! Please share

Tomorrow’s ProSE Seminar features Dr. Devlina Chakravarty (@devlinac.bsky.social) presenting “Mutations Switch Folds in Proteins”. Don't miss out! April 8, 3PM GMT Registration link: tinyurl.com/prose-seminar3 🧪 #MEvoSky

Check out DeNoFo Toolkit to annotate, convert and compare the methodology used in studies on de novo emerged genes! @drdomain.bsky.social @margaubel.bsky.social @lacholt.bsky.social and more!

De novo genes research community 🧬 - please consider using for your future or past work our new methodology annotation format for better comparability of studies and higher reproducibility. (1/3)

DeNoFo: a file format and toolkit for standardised, comparable de novo gene annotation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.31.644673v1

Next up in the ProSE Seminar Series: Devlina Chakravarty (@devlinac.bsky.social) presents "Mutations Switch Folds in Proteins". Join us to explore how mutations reshape protein structures! April 8, 3PM GMT Register here: tinyurl.com/prose-seminar3 #ProSESeminar #ProteinEvolution #StructuralBiology

A failure to act is not an act of political neutrality. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Join us this August in Barcelona for the @eseb2025.bsky.social. In "The Future Meets The Beginning: Synthetic Biology, Evolution & Origin of Life," we will explore the connections between these topics. Submit your abstract before the 25th of April! #evolution #science #synthetic_biology

Reminder about two open positions: 1) tenure track group leader position on data driven infection research lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/... 2) post-doc in mine/Vasili's join team lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/... #phagesky #microsky