If you are a scientist, working on biology, wondering where to submit your manuscript given the current issues with the academic publishing system, check out wheretopublish.github.io! We did this thinking change is possible. Let’s make it happen!

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...

In Rhizaria, 8-20% of protein-coding genes arrived via lateral transfer. Eukaryote-to-eukaryote transfers outnumber prokaryote-derived ones, and they're concentrated in nuclear/informational processes rather than the cell surface. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.27.525846

New: Wikipedia has officially banned AI-generated content. After months of heated debate and previous attempts to restrict the use of LLMs, volunteer editors accepted a new policy that prohibits using them to create articles for the online encyclopedia www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...

If you want to be part of this movement and make your own automated 3D microscope—sign up by TOMORROW and join us in #Roscoff in June for "Smart DIY Microscopy for Marine Biology" www.sb-roscoff.fr/system/files... 🤖🔬🌊 @sbroscoff.bsky.social @gdrimabio.bsky.social @embrc-france.bsky.social

🤖AI tools for peer-review? I want to share my experience using q.e.d. science (www.qedscience.com), a reviewing tool with high-profile endorsements. I will report results and my impressions from the use /1

Friendly registration deadline reminder. It's TOMORROW! (...and I heard that the short video is in fact not mandatory ;) )

Fun workshop coming up in Roscoff. You can learn building your own low-cost microscopes. Smart DIY Microscopy for Marine Biology 3-5 June 2026 🔬🌊🦠 Application deadline April 02 www.sb-roscoff.fr/en/workshop-... @embrc-france.bsky.social @gdrimabio.bsky.social @sbroscoff.bsky.social #EnderScope

I am looking for short papers using phylogenetic trees to test alternative hypotheses regarding evolution that can easily be grasped by undergraduate students in biochemistry. Please RT and share your ideas.

Hi all. I am very excited that after 6 years I finally got my phylogenetic comparative methods book and online exercises online. Feel free to use and share. The book is here: nhcooper123.github.io/pcm-primer/. Note that it is not finished, we had to abandon it before the sunk costs fallacy broke us

'The findings are uncomfortable. Students are submitting work they cannot fully explain, facing AI policies that do not function in practice, and responding strategically to assessment systems that reward production over understanding.' 1/3

In a sea of opinions about the role of LLMs in academics I offer my own. Apart from being harmful, exploitive plagiarism machines, LLMs rob us of the opportunity to experience the gift of friction in writing, which changes how we think. We must not give away that gift. doi.org/10.1002/fee....

So you are using IQ-TREE to estimate a tree for "deep time" phylogenetics using amino acid alignments. There is a lot of confusion about how to test model fit. Here are some suggestions.

Open access makes the rich get richer #science #publishing #academia 🧪🗺️ nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

A Comparative Analysis of Long-Term Effective Population Sizes Across Eukaryotes onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Our phylogenetic classification of >400 diatom genera is now published in Journal of Phycology. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus). Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A new era for #ONT amplicon sequencing? We show that #ONT #amplicon sequencing now achieves accuracy sufficient for #ASV resolution using standard Illumina-based pipelines. We validated this by sequencing identical amplicons on #ONT and #PacBio. @nanoporetech.com www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

If you are protist enthusiast early in your career and you want hands-on training in collecting and handling protists for all your research goals, please apply to join us in Roscoff for a week-long course this summer! opbc.sciencesconf.org

Can't wait to release a 10-year-old birthday version for SeqKit! - 10 years - 2 papers, 3500 citations - 20 contributors - 40 subcommands - 880 commits - 500 issues - 685.5K Bioconda total downloads Thank you all, dear contributors and users! I'll keep maintaining it. github.com/shenwei356/s...

Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating). A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)

Huge news 🌍🧬 The Protist 10,000 Genomes Project is joining the Earth BioGenome Project. Protists may represent the majority of eukaryotic diversity — yet only a tiny fraction have reference genomes. Time to change that. 🚀✨ Learn more 👉 ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/p10k/ #EBP #Protists #Genomics #TreeOfLife

Protist lovers: Please apply for a week of rhapsody! Learn by doing: MicroSEA (Microbial Sea Eukaryotes) course is a one-week, field-based summer school to train early-career researchers in the diversity, ecology, and single-cell biology of marine protists. opbc.sciencesconf.org #protistsonsky

Reading this, I can't help but think about a male former colleague who defended Larry Summers to me in... 2024. All while telling me that my work on open science, public engagement, and equity was "cute." 19thnews.org/2026/02/epst...

Phage–host interactions are a key driver of microbial ecology, but observing them in nature is hard! With metaHi-C, we detect freshwater phage–host pairs and link their infection dynamics to evolution. Together with @nadal-molero.bsky.social & Ana Martin-Cuadrado www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

So I did something a bit different :). Thrilled to see this fun project out! 🐟 #genomics "Female-biased sex ratios despite stable genetic sex determination across a climatic gradient in a marine fish" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Dear followers, please follow @ap.brid.gy so that people on Mastodon (and the Fediverse in general) can see your posts, and you can see theirs. Spread the word and help keep the web open 🌱🕊️ Thank you!

Christ

Want to learn the ins and outs of diversification, trait and biogeographic evolution models? I will be giving another edition of "Dive Deep into Probabilistic Phylogenetic Comparative Methods" in Oct! @tscourses.bsky.social www.transmittingscience.com/courses/evol...

🚨 Hot off the press: Our look into of the palaeontological database landscape and its sustainability into the future. Palaeo databases are invaluable and continue to transform our research field - but they are vulnerable... (1/6) 🧪 ⛏️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Plants animals and fungi are just the weird really big protists.

Just the Browser helps you remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from desktop web browsers. justthebrowser.com

We just released #anvio v9, "eunice" 🎉 This version represents over 2,000 changes in the codebase since v8, increasing the total number of programs in the anvi'o ecosystem to 176. Read the release notes: github.com/merenlab/anv... Visit our up-to-date web page: anvio.org

🗜️⚡ If you use gzip/gunzip a lot in your pipelines, switch to the faster"libdeflate" versions instead! They use modern CPU capabilities to achieve a 2-3x speedup. libdeflate is in conda, and "libdeflate-gzip" and "libdeflate-gunzip" are drop-in replacements. #unix github.com/ebiggers/lib...

If you’re interested in extinction risk, please check out our new paper in @science.org led by my former PhD student Cooper: www.science.org/doi/full/10....

New postdoc funding opportunity in Sweden! If you're interested in applying for this 'Data-Driven Life Sciences' fellowship, please get in touch, we'd be happy to host and help with the application (and talk options beyond the 2-year position). www.scilifelab.se/data-driven/...

If you're interested in biodiversity in freshwater ecosystems, there's just a few days to apply for our PhD project: Ecological Surveillance using High-Throughput Quantitative Imaging at @uniofbath.bsky.social . Deadline: January 16th! Apply: is.gd/svXBcr Image: www.planktoscope.org/how-it-works

⚡️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/...

Nucleotide diversity is a poor predictor of short-term adaptive potential https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.05.697705v1

I have a postdoc position in metagenomic exploration available in my group. Candidates with documented experience in phylo & metagenomics and preferably with petabase-scale data mining and GLM workflows are encouraged to apply. Come join us! 🧬🦠💻 Please repost Apply here: www.wur.nl/en/vacancy/p...

It was speculated that there's some degree of DNA exchange between algae & sea slug to create the "support system" for the chloroplasts, but in at least one species, that appears not to be the case. Changes in the expression of the sea slug genes were sufficient to support the kleptoplasty.

Everything is everywhere but Escherichia coli adapts to different niches academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc... #jcampubs

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...

Just a few days left to apply to the PhD position in our group. It focuses on selfish genes in #fungi and how they might affect the spread of giant #TEs called Starships.

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...

Environmental phylogenetics supports a steady diversification of crown eukaryotes starting from the mid Proterozoic https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.12.693929v1

Would you say that Neurospora crassa is declining as a model organism for fungal biology? 💛 No way, that orange fun-guy is alive and well! 🔴 Yeah, not so many people work with it nowadays ... 🔵 Neuro-who? 📅 Ends: December 31, 2025, 10:03 PM UTC 📊 Show results

I salute the honesty and courage of these authors, and I am sure we all share a collective shiver from knowing that we all could easily make (and maybe have made) similar analysis mistakes in our own work #academicchatter

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