I’m looking for creative students for an exciting transdisciplinary project! Please share with potentially interested people 🎥🌴 @ecoresearchzoo3.bsky.social @biologie-uniwue.bsky.social

I'm looking for an enthusiastic student to join my team as a PhD candidate on archaeal genome evolution 🦠💻 Work in beautiful Utrecht, at @binfutrecht.bsky.social, an international group full of caring, amazing scientists, and with frequent cake breaks! www.uu.nl/en/organisat... Please share! 🙏

Can vouch! I worked a lot with Dani and he's one of the most thoughtful, generous scientists I know. If you're into archaea and want a PI who invests in his people (and yes, the cake breaks are real), apply. You won't regret it.

Excited to say that my new paper with @maxlechte.bsky.social (and others not on bluesky) has come out in @nature.com! Study of sediments, geochemistry and fossils from rocks 1.75 to 1.4 billion years old indicate that the oldest known #eukaryotes were aerobic and benthic! #protists rdcu.be/fjNgL

I really don't think the RETRACTION of this article is getting enough attention! Both for how Nature will seemingly publish anything if there's an ulterior capitalist agenda behind it, and for how this paper was used to beat people into submission to include LLM use in classrooms.

Have you registered for CGUE yet? Head on over to comparativegenomics2026.com Registration includes all meals and hotel nights.

Oh my. This is spectacular. sinceyouarrived.world/taken

The ERGA BioGenome Seminar Series is back! We return with Jérôme Goudet and Isabela do O for a seminar on the impact of population structure in identifying local adaptation. How do we know when population differences reflect adaptation, and when they are shaped by demography and structure?

We’re hiring! 🇸🇪🔬
 Tenure-track Assistant Professor in Prokaryotic Microbiology (molecular focus) at Stockholm University. Supportive environment + strong molecular research 👉https://su.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:921526/type:job/where:125/apply:1 Please share!!

Don’t reach for ChatGPT Images or Nano Banana as your first option when creating scientific images There are multiple free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations. #plantscience @stephenturner.us blog.stephenturner.us/p/free-open-...

Interested in working on the evolution of photosynthetic endosymbioses? Come join us! I have 2 open positions in my new group @cemess.bsky.social in Vienna 3yr postdoc info: tinyurl.com/4emkjpn4 4yr PhD info: tinyurl.com/mtxmsjpy Apply by 1st June! Please share/repost #Protists #Symbiosis #PhD

I wrote a thing on our current #ERC Consolidator project PlastidOrigin. Also the tree of eukaryotes is free to use, DM me if interested in a png version #protistsonsky edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/html5/reader...

Check out the draft program for the Comparative Genomics of Unicellular Eukaryotes meeting! Want to attend? Are you a speaker? Registration is open until May 4, please do this sooner rather than later to help us in the organization of the meeting comparativegenomics2026.com/program/

Really excited to share our new paper from @ibe-warszawa.bsky.social protist team! 🎉 We dive into protist symbioses and show how these interactions shape ecosystems and have played a key role in the evolution of eukaryotes 🦠

GOOD NEWS! Our BRILLIANT Red-ALERT CDT (@redalertcdt.bsky.social) has funding for one more home studentship at the University of Bath so we're re-advertising this project! New deadline: May 18th Come explore protist and invertebrate diversity with us!

World Ocean Database 2023: A Foundational Data Resource for and by the Global Ocean and Coastal Communities www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs 🌊

The first chapter of my PhD thesis is out: doi.org/10.1111/mec.... !!! This comparative study explores the presence and maintenance of a joint contact zone among three important forest tree species (formed during recolonisation after the LGM). Trees, genetics and evolution, just a perfect combo!

How every layer of science's "self-correcting machinery" failed when Iva Veseli and I simply wanted to reproduce the findings of a high-profile study on gut microbiome and autism: merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...

Quick taxonomic assignment of Nanopore metabarcoding data

This is from 7 years ago (merenlab.org/2019/02/24/f...). We are talking about the same things today. We will be talking about the same things 7 years from now. There is no one to blame for this apart from ourselves. I find it very depressing.

Hot off the press! We are sharing oligoN-design, an open-source tool to find specific probes and primers from large molecular datasets, without relying on specific databases, alignments or phylogenetic trees. @mariescopy.bsky.social @rmassanam.bsky.social @beaplab.bsky.social doi.org/10.1111/1755...

Happy to be featured in this gallery of Swedish natural history #collectors portraits featured in the The Guardian! 😊 (You might recognize several others). #naturalists

We stumbled upon an unusual gene called 'rqua' in the genome of some freshwater sponges. In microbes, this gene confers the ability to make a ubiquinone analog - rhodoquinone - which can help the respiratory chain run without oxygen.

This woman is facing a copyright claim for her own music by an AI company that took her youtube page and copied her.

Every time I open my mouth in my Phylogenetics seminar it's just to say the exact phrase- Yes, but ____ ITSELF is also evolving

Our new article on #protist global distributions combining the #Mixoplankton and #metaPR2 databases with newly revised functional annotations. rdcu.be/fanlx

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

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