Could animals have originally evolved by cell aggregation? we believe they could!. See two different relatives of animals aggregating and deploying key multicellular genes. Nice collaboration with JP Gerdt, T. Alarcón, koryu_kin, Ruibao, Gonzalo, @jennahed.bsky.social & Kyle. #protistsonSky

New vacancy in my team! PhD student position on microbial genome evolution, focusing on the evolutionary principles underlying bacterial genome architecture. Please repost and share with talented MSc students in #evobio, bioinformatics or related :) www.uu.nl/en/organisat... #MEvoSky #MicroSky

On this day, 10 years ago, my lab published the @nature.com paper reporting the discovery of the Asgard archaea (Lokiarchaeota at the time), revealing the archaeal nature of eukaryotic cells, and reshaping the Tree of Life. What a ride it has been since then... www.nature.com/articles/nat...

Despite 150+ years of Radiolaria diversity research, we have just scratched the surface. Nearly half of Radiolaria diversity might be naked hiding in plain sight! We unveiled the diversity and evolution of Radiolaria beyond "the stars of the ocean" doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

We must have been super lucky that contamination was all from different lineages to each Njord MAG and yet all from the same clade of unknown Asgard so that Njord form monophyletic groups within Asgards in individual gene trees.