Our study on the first rhodopsin channels known to respond to UV light is now published in PNAS! And they come from our favourite protists, apusomonads! #protistonsky www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

🚨 In case you missed it… our 4-year time-series analysis of Arctic Ocean viruses is out now! Near-monthly samples — including through the dark, cold, polar winter ❄️ — using long-read metagenomics. Short thread 🧵👇

Happy to see our latest work out in @molbioevol.bsky.social. We revisit the evolution of 5-methylcytosine across neglected eukaryotic supergroups, establishing an ancestral repressive role silencing genome invaders, both transposons and viral elements👾: academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-... 🧵 1/7

1. 🧵 New preprint out! WitChi: a fast, open-source Python tool to detect, quantify & prune compositional bias in MSAs. Lightweight, tree-free, scalable to 5k+ taxa... so we applied it to the GTDB archaea MSA. #ArchaeaSky #MEvoSky #MicroSky 🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025... 💻 github.com/stephkoest/w...

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

First study from the lab is out! We describe ApuRs, a new family of microbial rhodopsins unique from apusomonads. ApuRs represent the first anion-conducting rhodopsin channels that can be controlled by UV light, offering potential as new optogenetic tools. #protistsonsky doi.org/10.1101/2025... 👇

Happy to have played a small part in this. Prometheid is a proposed supergroup that contains previously deep orphan lineages. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #protistsonsky

Asgardarchaea & Alphaproteobacteria: key players for the assembly eukaryotic central carbon metabolism! Our new study reveals their gene contributions to glycolysis & TCA cycle, supporting synthrophic scenarios of eukaryogenesis. rdcu.be/eb0aK

tidk: a toolkit to rapidly identify telomeric repeats from genomic datasets. #TelomericRepeats #AssembledGenomces #LongReads #Bioinformatics 🧬 🖥️ academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

Interested in protist parasites? Want to learn some fun bioinformatics? Think this apicomplexan looks cool? Great! Come and do some protist genomics at @uniofbath.bsky.social! We're advertising a fully-funded PhD studentship open to UK & International applicants! www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Stoked about this manuscript, many years in the making. We present an original resource of ~700 highly curated plastid MAGs of marine pelagic algae. Among these we found a novel deep branching group of plastid genomes; we informally call them leptophytes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Out today! Our review on the current evidence of protein import into endosymbionts/early organelles. We cover protists, insects and plant systems, so something for everybody! With Mygg Stiller, Lena Kröninger and Eva Nowack. #protistsonsky #SymbioSky febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

We found new #Crassvirales clades on #Antarctica (prospective families): @goncalopiedade.bsky.social's new paper on the viruses in Antarctic waters is out! Check out the manuscript (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) and Gonçalo's "Behind the Paper": communities.springernature.com/posts/unveil...