Cryptic Sex in Leishmania Depends on SPO11 Paralogs https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.05.703715v1

Applications are now open for our EMBO Practical Course in Computational and Experimental Microbiomics! 🧫🔬🖥️ meetings.embo.org/event/26-mic... Come learn a mix of computational and experimental microbiome techniques from 6-8th July in beautiful Bath, UK! Registration Deadline: 11 May 2026

Postdoc position on Asgard archaea in Thiago’s new lab for someone well trained in biochemistry, cloning, and protein purification: international.au.dk/about/profil...

Heartbroken

"If you’re a parent dreading the first experiment or conference abroad, my best advice is what I was told: The hardest part is often thinking about going." #ScienceWorkingLife https://scim.ag/4bzRGTb

Spatial Proteomics Workshop for Protists (see more in thread below) Registration Early Bird Monday 22nd June 2026. Regular Monday 10th August 2026. There will be a conference dinner on day 1. To register visit protistology.org.uk/autumn-meeti...

Isadonna Tengganu and Ke Hu develop transfection and ExM protocols for Chromera velia, enabling direct comparisons with its parasitic apicomplexan relative, Toxoplasma gondi. journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

The day is finally here!! On behalf of all the co-organizers the Comparative Genomics of Unicellular Eukaryotes website is open. comparativegenomics2026.com Invited speakers will be added to the website in the coming weeks. Watch this (well, that^) space!

Mitosis has a timing system. If chromosomes attach properly, cells divide on schedule and keep proliferating. If attachment is slow or incomplete, the delay is recorded — and daughter cells stop dividing. We explore this link in our new preprint. 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

FoldMason is out now in @science.org. It generates accurate multiple structure alignments for thousands of protein structures in seconds. Great work by Cameron L. M. Gilchrist and @milot.bsky.social. 📄 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🌐 search.foldseek.com/foldmason 💾 github.com/steineggerla...

Visualizing pairwise genome comparisons? No need to run BLAST separately anymore! 🧬 ​#gbdraw has implemented #LOSAT, a WASM-powered Rust reimplementation of BLASTN/TBLASTX. ​✅ No local installation ✅ No data transfer (Serverless) ​Try it here: gbdraw.app

Genetic modification in dinoflagellate algae: Some successes, many failures www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #protists

A new extreme of meiotic evolution: ✔️ 𝗻𝗼 crossovers ✔️ 𝗻𝗼 gene conversion ✔️ 𝗻𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗹 meiosis & fertility Sex mimics clonality without becoming asexual, in the holocentric multicellular eukaryote 𝘙𝘩𝘺𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘢 𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘶𝘪𝘴. more about it: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This is only those employed in government labs. How many PhDs lost from US universities?

This Muslim American Heritage Month, we recognize the many contributions this diverse community has made in MoCo, Maryland and across America. Together, we commit to opposing Islamophobia and all forms of hate that divide us.

"ICE will leave Minnesota if you hand over your voter rolls" tells you everything you need to know. This was never about immigration or fraud. It was always about rigging elections.

NYT video analysis confirms victim’s gun was removed before he was shot. So he was unarmed. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/us/minneapolis-shooting-federal-agents-video.html

This witness to Alex Pretti's murder not only refutes the governmen't story, but says she is afraid to go home because federal agents might arrest her. This is what it feels like to live under state terror. www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

My second PhD project is now out as a preprint! Our observations of the synaptonemal complex in wild-type Nematostella suggested an incredible degree of conservation. Then, our mutants told a story of dramatic functional divergence. We were bamboozled on a regular basis with this one! 🧪 #meiosis4eva

Eukan: a fully automated nuclear genome annotation pipeline for less studied and divergent eukaryotes academic.oup.com/nargab/artic... #protists

National media should really be covering the fact thay every major school, museum, and arts institution in the Twin Cities, and hundreds of local businesses are closed tomorrow to protest federal occupation. Nothing like this at this scale has happened anywhere in America anytime in living memory.

Jack Smith: "My fear is that we have seen the rule of law function in our country for so long that many of us have come to take it for granted. The rule of law is not self-executing. It depends on our collective commitment to apply it."

For the 1st time, archaeologists have direct proof of far-flung social networks during the last Ice Age. “In times of climate crisis, cooperation—not conflict—was a successful strategy,” says @cnrs.fr's @solangerigaud.bsky.social. “It’s good to recall that as a lesson from our past.” 🏺 @science.org

Pregnancy loss is common in humans, and chromosomal abnormalities are the leading cause. Using genetic data from ~140,000 IVF embryos, we show that maternal variation in meiosis genes influences recombination and aneuploidy risk. First authors: @saracarioscia.bsky.social & @aabiddanda.github.io

🚨HOLY CRAP. An ICE whistleblower just revealed a secret memo authorizing ICE officers to break into homes without a judicial warrant, which DHS's own legal training materials say is unconstitutional! ICE then hid the memo from the public, passing it along by word of mouth and private conversation.

15 January is the deadline to file a brief Expression of Interest to be nominated for a Canada Impact Chair @UBC. Only candidates working and residing outside of Canada are eligible to apply, including expatriate Canadians. More info and the EOI portal are at research.ubc.ca/federal-rese...

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...

This is one of the wildest deep-sea mining stories to me. Paleodictyon is a 500-million-year-old trace fossil from an unknown organism. In the last 50 years, we've found their honeycomb traces on the seafloor. There is a living organism that has been doing its thing for half a billion years.

While our updated paper is fast approaching book-length, the results remain the same: our method (reconcILS) is still highly accurate. So if you want to reconcile gene trees and species trees--and you might have any ILS at all--this is the best method out there! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Sharing our lab’s first publication! Probing clinical isolates of Cryptococcus, a disease-causing fungus of the lungs and brain, we found multiple heat-mobile elements that ‘jump’ in the genome at body temperature (!) with the ability to drive adaptive changes. journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...

Added many features (search, phylogenetic tree navigation, session persistence) to the excellent terminal-based multiple sequence alignment viewer github.com/sib-swiss/termal and have made a landing page at msafara.carltonlab.org

I’ve been spending some of the time when I’d normally be writing grants working on a new course about how and why we built the university/science/government collaboration in the US…for those who will someday need to build the successor to that system. +sending my best students job ads from Europe.

1. Overall, there’s never been a better time to be a biologist. Technology, international collaboration, myriad areas for translation 2. If you are fortunate to be able to be a scientist today, double down so you can truly fly when tailwinds return

Dominant contribution of Asgard archaea to eukaryogenesis www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The National Science Foundation starts 2026 with a new management structure that affects every scientist with--or applying for--NSF funding. Here's what you need to know. www.science.org/content/arti...

evolutionary genomic evidence for sex in the human-specific Giardia duodenalis subassemblage AII

How a parasite gave up sex to find more hosts—and why its victory won't last phys.org/news/2026-01... Host range expansion of asexual parasite can be explained by loss of adaptions in Muller’s Ratchet www.nature.com/articles/s41... #Protists #Microbes #Parasites #Giardia #Evolution

WITNESS: "I just can't let this narrative of self-defense go any further. That’s absolutely not what it was… ICE agents didn’t let anyone help her for 15 minutes, then medics couldn’t get through with their ambulance.”

Nature research paper: Early hominins from Morocco basal to the Homo sapiens lineage go.nature.com/49cjLyk

Thousands of Minnesotans gathered last night to honor Renee Nicole Good. We will never accept that a single federal agent can be judge, jury, and executioner in our streets. ICE needs to get out of Minneapolis.

Red algal Spo11 expression detected www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #meiosis4eva

Open up this picture fully. Then look at the surface of Mars. Then look up to the top right. Spot Mars' moon Phobos high in the sky. Then notice the bright spot beside Phobos. That's Earth.

Chia-Hsuan Hsu waited 18 months before chasing an editor for a decision on a paper go.nature.com/4j47KhM

New #ISEPpapers! Eukaryotic Recombinases Duplicated After Divergence From Known Asgard Archaeal RadA: Implications for the Evolution of Sex During Eukaryogenesis academic.oup.com/gbe/article/... by Lisa Matsuo, @dackslabecb.bsky.social #Microbes #Archaea #AsgardArchaea #Eukaryogenesis

What a great way to end the year! This work, with a superb team, gave us the chance to put out some ideas about the evolution of meiosis (and other organellar systems) during eukaryogenesis. Congratulations especially to our undergrad Lisa Matsuo on her first ever paper:) @cloeucl.bsky.social

My article on aeonophiles (ultra-long lived organisms) came out in Aeon Magazine today!

My book Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth was long-listed for the PEN E.O. Wilson Award! I've been inspired by E.O. Wilson's science writing since I was a kid, so this is a huge honor! pen.org/announcing-t...

🚨 Postdoctoral Opportunity for Female Scientists🚨 The University of Vienna is awarding at least 20 fully funded 4 year postdoctoral positions to outstanding female scientists Interested? Get in touch via direct message careers.univie.ac.at/en/postdoc/e... #MicroSky 🧪 #PostDoc @univie.ac.at

Are you a long-time fan of Archaea, an extremophile-phile, or are you simply curious? Either way, we have good news. We’re delighted to announce the 2026 EMBO Workshop on Archaea, 6–10 July. Sign up: meetings.embo.org/event/26-arc... We look forward to seeing you in Cambridge, UK. Please repost!

“.. The US economy is in a hiring recession. Almost no jobs have been added since April. “Wage gains are slowing. “710,000 more people are unemployed now versus November 2024.” @byheatherlong.bsky.social