Our new paper on what heterotrophic nanoflagellates do in nature doi.org/10.1111/1462... or www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/.... Data available at doi.org/10.5281/zeno.... Funded by @ncn.gov.pl #ProtistsOnSky

I had the honor of designing a field guide that spotlights 222 species of pollinators in Portugal. These creatures play a vital role in our ecosystems, supporting over 75% of agricultural crops. Yet, their populations are declining, a reality that makes this guide more urgent than ever.

Applications for MCSA are up 64%! 50% now come from outside the EU. Trump effect? The European Research market just got a hell of a lot more crowded. EU should turn on the tap marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/news/msca-po...

a huge effort and a huge service!

Great to see this finally published! Metalog: curated and harmonised contextual data for global metagenomics samples now out in @narjournal.bsky.social academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

Perfect bird design 10/10 peak A+ no notes #birds 🗺️

Maybe my favorite Food Map, ever.

Just learned you can convert JPG to PNG in R with {magick}. Did you know this? #rstats

This was such a neat study it got posted twice on our 'cool papers' channel in lab slack 😅 #ProtistsonSky

First neurons didn’t appear overnight. We trace their roots to ancient secretory cells - showing how lifestyle & behavior shaped the evolution of first synapses.🧠🌊 #Evolution #Neuroscience Our latest in @natrevneuro.nature.com Link: rdcu.be/eMX3E @jeffcolgren.bsky.social @msarscentre.bsky.social

Read the annual report from @elife.bsky.social: elifesciences.org/inside-elife... I welcome that eLife is no longer indexed by SCIE. And I admire that they have not backed away from their innovative model, which makes me even more motivated to send our best work to eLife.

«A global coral phylogeny reveals resilience and vulnerability through deep time» This looks great. Figure 2 is textbook material! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Please share this with anyone who may be interested in a post-doc in Germany: jobs.awi.de/Vacancies/20... This is quite an exciting opportunity to push the boundaries of what is known regarding the molecular basis of the formation and demise of photosymbiotic relationships in marine habitats.

Sprache der Dichter und Denker (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71740)

I'm delighted our paper is out: doi.org/10.1093/isme... With new SAR11 isolate genomes and time-series metagenomes, we reveal coastal and offshore SAR11 ecotypes, identify associated metabolic traits, and pinpoint selective gene sweeps as a likely evolutionary driver to niche partitioning. 🌊🦠

LLMs can be useful for some things, but simulating human research participant responses isn’t one of them

#microsky #mevosky @spp2389.bsky.social A PhD position is available in my lab to work on: Emergence and self-organisation of bacterial metabolism in consortia of cross-feeding bacteria. Please RT Deadline: 12.11.25 More infos 👇 shorturl.at/rAKAT

Lol the Nobels can't even acknowledge women's contribution to discovery. But sure let's acknowledge The Machines.

They are architects of the sea, engineers of the air—capturing carbon, atom by atom. While you breathe, they build. While you sleep, they safeguard our climate. #InvisibleHeroes #OceanGuardians #ClimateWarriors #protistsonsky Illustrations by Rosie Sheward

Victor Hensen coined the term "Plankton" in 1887. By 1910 it was an industry (still is)! Steuer's book ran 722 pages!

Curious, if someone wanted to annotate a large set of MAGs with KEGG, PFAM, CAZY, and then do some statistical comparison, how would you do that these days? Back in the day I loved EnrichM, but the backend databases for KEGG, etc, are woefully out of date now.

I am extremely happy to share our latest manuscript "Widely-distributed freshwater microorganisms with streamlined genomes co-occur in cohorts with high abundance". This project started back in 2021-2022 and after a long time, it sees the light today! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dear community, Bakta needs your help! To further improve the functional annotation of "hypothetical" CDS, me and @gbouras13.bsky.social, we are looking for the worst Bakta-annotated bacterial genomes ;-) (1/2)

"Put simply, this is bad science. Research that can’t be verified can’t be trusted. Research that can’t be built upon can’t advance knowledge." This is great! pracheeac.substack.com/p/scholarly-...

⚠️New paper ➡️ isolating >600 freshwater microbes using dilution-to-extinction and low-nutrient, lake-mimicking media. 🤯Expands cultured diversity to ~70 % of detected genera and enables physiological studies of streamlined oligotrophs. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #protistsonsky

I've seen this several times: when Acantharians get big enough they like to eat tintinnids. And they always orient with the lorica opening pointed in: like they are slurping up a little jello shot. That glass house can't protect you from these weird predators little ciliate! 🦑 #protistsonsky

The radiolarian hipster says to the diatoms "I was a spiky glass cell before it was cool" (first radiolarians appeared ~500 million years ago; first diatoms ~200 million years ago). But the diatoms grow *much* faster. No one even knows how radiolarians grow at all! They don't seem to eat diatoms 😅

This moment from our latest episode with science writer @edyong209.bsky.social is 🔥 We asked Ed — how do we talk up the benefits of science in the face of government cuts? He told us that's the wrong approach. 🧪 Listen wherever, or watch on Spotify 👇 open.spotify.com/episode/7Evh...

Another record month for bioRxiv - and further evidence the pandemic spike+dip was just that and growth continues. Thanks to all involved and that includes 🫵

Classic macroecological laws-long held as signatures of biological systems-also emerge in economic and geological systems. The real signal lies not in the static universal patterns, but in how those patterns shift with scale 🌐🧪 #scaling #macroecology journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Our latest #preprint led by Yumary M. Vasquez & Frederik Schulz @jgi.doe.gov The largest database of giant #virus MAGs (GVMAGs V2) with >18,000 genomes from #marine, freshwater, anthropogenic and terrestrial environments. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🌊 Happy to share our recent study on phytoplankton dynamics! We found that communities can shift dramatically in just a few days - driven by grazers like Cladocera and environmental factors such as silica concentration and wind speed. t.co/PaL0QcofrV

New week, new tool: Find our Protein Domain Designer tool to generate publication-ready protein domain diagrams here: domaindesigner.farnunglab.com

organizing works 😎 It is the only thing that works in the moment. Admins won't work. Funders won't work. If you're in academia, get involved and support @aaup.org, support your scientific societies, and help them learn to fight and speak out. Collective organizing is the only approach that works.

🎨 Theming got a huge overhaul with the latest #ggplot2 release. In honour of that @teunbrand.bsky.social has written a comprehensive deep-dive into styling your plots, covering both old and new functionality. Grab a coffee and dive in! #rstats

🚨 First pre-print from my team !! TL;DR: presence of polymorphism (sequence differences between the homologous chromosomes) can *increase* the local rate of recombination in Arabidopsis thaliana, turning cold regions of the genome hot (purple v. grey) !

Sparkles in the night, an acantharian and radiolarian in semi-dark field (or two arms of a goose-neck lamp pointed at the sides of the dish 😅). #protistsonsky 🦑

Some little circus performers. #protistsonsky

interesting bit in a Lancet article re: Australia's teen social media ban: surprisingly the amount of socialising in person hasn't dropped significantly in the past 25 years, and certainly not by the average amount of social media use.

New preprint 🌊🫶 "A diverse community constitutes global coccolithophore calcium carbonate stocks" Three large coccolithophores together hold about half of the global CaCO₃ stock! G. huxleyi <10% ➡️ climate models need to include this broader diversity! 📄 doi.org/10.1101/2025... #protistsonsky

I offer you a guy in these troubling times

trait-space maps are cool.

#Arctic #algae aren't immobile or entombed. They're not just surviving either—they're gliding into record books phys.org/news/2025-09... Ice gliding #diatoms establish record-low temperature limits for motility in a eukaryotic cell www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #protists #microbes #extremophiles

X-Mapper 🦠🧬🧪 - a sequence aligner developed for microbes, now on Bioconda! 🚀 • 11–24× fewer suboptimal alignments (same for human genome) • 3–579× lower inconsistency • improves on ~30% of reads aligned to non-target species github.com/mathjeff/map... bioconda.github.io/recipes/x-ma... #microsky

Check out our new paper on adopting a trait-based framework for protist diversity! We make the case for a unified protist trait database, how to build it, and how it could transform research on protist ecology and evolution. #protistsonsky

A microscopic horror story. The brown stuff is 3 billion year old organic matter. The milky white stuff is the modern fungus that is eating the ancient organic matter. #geology #paleontology #fungus #protists

Sometimes you meet absolutely incredible bioinfo-magicians. It was a huge privilege when @shenwei356.bsky.social joined our group for a year on an @embl.org sabbatical. While here, he developed a new way of aligning to millions of bacteria, called LexicMap 1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The New Yorker asked me “how bad” today’s Supreme Court ruling was. I boiled it down to one paragraph: link.newyorker.com/view/5bda429...

🚨 Save the date! Thrilled to be co-organizing the next iteration of the @embl.org Symposium on the Cellular Mechanics of Symbiosis (📅 March 17-20), w/ @floravincent.bsky.social, @hassansalem.bsky.social & Tom Richards. www.embl.org/about/info/c... #EESSymbiosis #Symbiosis #SymbioSky #MicroSky 🦠