Great thread on budding yeast centromere evolution! (Bonus points for avoiding “it’s not x; it’s y” sentence structure) 😊

Perpetually in awe of the astonishing creative capacity of retrotransposons in eukaryotic cell biology — makes you wonder what remarkable, still-hidden origin stories centromeres across the tree of life carry.

"Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres" #yeastevolution

Our paper is now out in Nature: “Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres” www.nature.com/articles/s41... A short thread on how retrotransposons helped give rise to yeast point centromeres. 1/14

The first centromeres to be cloned (by chromosome walking) by Clarke and Carbon (should have won them a Nobel) were mysterious in their origin. Max et al have solved the mystery.

"In this model, two linked innovations—the single Cse4CENP-A nucleosome and the CBF3 complex—emerged before the canonical CDEI, CDEII, CDEIII structure, marking an early phase of sequence-dependent centromere evolution."

Our paper is now out in Nature: “Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres” www.nature.com/articles/s41... A short thread on how retrotransposons helped give rise to yeast point centromeres. 1/14

I don't envy people who start their PhDs now. What they should be trying to do - I think - is to first become confident experts in certain things, and this might involve using as little AI as possible not to become dependent or have their view distorted.

I appreciate the comments by Max Raas, Eelco Tromer and others on my paper published last year "Hypothesis that ancestral eukaryotes sexually proliferated without kinetochores or mitosis". However, I do not think their critiques can reject my hypothesis. For details, please read the paper. 1/n

Love a good disagreement, means the field is alive and well! One wonders wether lost genes are truly lost in highly divergent lineages or they are just hiding in plain sight?

someone should tell the physicists that biologists found dark matter sitting right in our genomes!

No, DeepMind has not solved the protein folding problem. #Alphafold predictions are valuable hypotheses and accelerate but do not replace experimental structure determination.

It’s out! 🥳 Excited to share our new paper (with Kai Walstein, @andrea-musacchio.bsky.social and all others) on the role of M18BP1 in CENP-A loading! “M18BP1 valency and a distributed interaction footprint determine epigenetic centromere specification in humans” link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Two new papers from the lab published in The EMBO Journal! link.springer.com/article/10.1... By Kai Walstein, @louisa-hill.bsky.social and others – On role of M18BP1 in CENP-A loading link.springer.com/article/10.1... By Arianna Esposito Verza and others – On mechanism of activation of PLK1

Arianna Esposito Verza, @andrea-musacchio.bsky.social et al describe the long-sought-after mechanism of Bora dependency of PLK1 activation by Aurora A kinase during mitotic entry Another #RefereedPreprint ℅ @reviewcommons.org link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Excited to announce our latest publication in reporting evidence for three (3!) new whole genome duplications (WGDs) in yeasts. Scientists have often wondered why WGD is so rare in fungi, it turns out we may just not have been looking hard enough! 🧪 🍄 🧬 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We warmly welcome our new independent @maxplanck.de Group Leader Andrija Sente. His group will investigate the molecular mechanisms of neuronal communication. Learn more about Andrija and his work and click on the link🔗 www.mpi-dortmund.mpg.de/news/new-max...

Excited to share a new paper led by Cristina Santarossa (Bhabha & Ekiert groups) on LetA, a bacterial phospholipid transporter that defines a structurally distinct transporter family. Really enjoyed working with Cristina on their deep mutational scanning work. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Absolutely thrilled to share the latest work from my lab focused on the variation and evolution of human centromeres among global populations! We assembled 2,110 human centromeres, identifying 226 new major haplotypes and 1,870 α-satellite HOR variants. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Fellow yeast enthusiasts, does anyone have the genomic or amino-acid substitution for the cdc20-1 ts mutant - thanks!

Very cool to see Jana’s epic on point centromere evolution published. Congratulations to all! Although, it makes one wonder how these strange centromeres evolved in the first place?

www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.... Our latest now online at EMBO Journal. Read if you are interested in how epimutations mediate antifungal resistance & how this might result in heteroresistance in human & cereal crop fungal pathogens. Big Thx & congrats to Andreas Fellas, Pin Tong & Alison Pidoux

1/ 🐶💤 In Tony Hyman–style LLPS land: Scaffold = the dog bed Clients = extra dogs + toys that hop on Rule of the game: The bed decides where the nap-pile forms. Other dogs can jump on, but somehow they don’t change how the bed behaves.

How do new centromeres evolve while staying compatible with the division machinery? Discover it in our new Nature paper! We show centromeres transition gradually via a mix of drift, selection, and sex, reaching new states that still work with the kinetochore. 👉 doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09779-1

Happy to share our latest preprint. We uncover a previously uncharacterised and evolutionarily conserved chromatin architecture in premeiotic gonadal germ cells, revealed through integrated cytological and high-resolution Hi-C approaches. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Thread🧵🔽

Sooo.... um... it appears trump gave bill clinton a blowy? And Putin has photos 😳 Fake news or not, I'll believe this as canon for now on journaliststudio.google.com/pinpoint/doc... drive.google.com/file/d/1uwNM...

NEW pub in @science.org 🥳 Is it sponges (panels A & B) or comb jellies (C & D) that root the animal tree of life? For over 15 years, #phylogenomic studies have been divided. We provide new evidence suggesting that... 🔗: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Men will really come up with every stupid reason not to recognize their women colleagues’ contributions. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Apparently termites have spent the past few millennia secretly building the "equivalent to ∼4000 great pyramids of Giza" in Brazil. www.cell.com/current-biol...

New preprint from the lab: we show that the ability to switch mating type was lost at least 13 times independently in the evolution of S. cerevisiae. At least 27% of isolates are heterothallic with a strong association with polyploidy and heterozygosity www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The BUB1 and BUBR1 paralogs scaffold the kinetochore fibrous corona | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Congratulations @vcmentowski.bsky.social for solving a remarkably challenging molecular puzzle

One may argue unicellular life still rules the earth. Us multicellular forms are just really big and especially self-absorbed

People who upload preprints without the supplemental materials should go straight to jail

New preprint from lab adding to recent interest in yeast centromeres. There are dramatic changes in structure, but location is conserved www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Finally out! Check out our new work on how M18BP1, known so far to be important for the epigenetic maintenance of centromeres, supports chromosome condensation when the cell enters mitosis. We also uncover a regulatory ménage á trois between condensin II, M18BP1 and MCPH1.

NEW pub: The role of metabolism in shaping #enzyme structures over 400 million years. Now out in @nature.com Super grateful to have played a small role in this project - congrats to lead/corr authors Oliver, Benjamin, and Markus! www.nature.com/articles/s41... #alphafold #evolution #genomics

We have an opening for postdoctoral training! Please apply by 15th August 2025 for full consideration. Here is the ad: hittinger.genetics.wisc.edu/People/Join/...

A paper I have been working on with Oliver Lemke in the Ralser lab has just come out: www.nature.com/articles/s41... We used predicted structures to gain insight into the evolution of metabolic proteins in yeast. A bit more in this linked-in post (www.linkedin.com/posts/benjam...).

This is a good time to remember that Moas, Emus, and the other ratites diverged so long ago, they FLEW to different continents, and then lost the ability to fly and became giants independently. You can't just sprinkle a few variants to make one into the other. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New favorite worst graphical abstract just dropped.

Finally out in Nature Chem Bio: SNAP-tag2 for faster and brighter protein labeling www.nature.com/articles/s41... Thank you Steffi and Veselin.

Very happy to support someone in applying for a MCSA fellowship to work on either choanoflagellates or Nematostella! If you have a competitive CV then get in contact! marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/actions/post...

This gets passed around like it was instruction manual that trump and co followed. But it’s a parody of America as it was in 2012 (and now). The fact that’s lost on so many is why Americans elected trump.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... @vcmentowski.bsky.social reports a direct interaction of BUB1 with the RZZ that is necessary for RZZ recruitment when CENP-E is depleted. This may complete the identification of the receptors of the RZZ required for fibrous corona assembly

the lesson of this is that tucker is a useful idiot for the kremlin and toppling of the Iranian regime is net loss for putin

Insanity. HMMER is a fundamentally critical tool for biomedical research, biotechnology, AI, etc,.

Just out - a collaborative effort examining gene family evolution across yeast species. We found that fast-evolving yeasts lose more genes - especially ones for splicing, metabolism, and cell division. This is consistent with their narrow metabolic niche breadth. www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....