🎄 Just published 🎉! Our ongoing genome sequencing of the basal dinoflagellate Oxyrrhis marina uncovered a new lineage of endogenized Polinton-like viruses, OmPLV. Notably, OmPLV encodes ... [cont] #VirEvol #MicroSky #Mevosky #SymbioSky #ProtistsOnSky

6 - These results highlight host traits and cross-kingdom microbial interactions as key drivers of colony-level microbiome assembly, beautifully illustrated by @lifesciencestudios.bsky.social in the final fig. We hope this guides discussions in microbiome research to bee eco-evo and conservation.

Our manuscript on the microbiome of a stingless bee hive is out! 🦠🐝 So excited! Here’s a short thread with some findings, going from the assembly of a consistent multi-kingdom microbiome to discussions on host traits that contribute to it. Please take a look and share : ) rdcu.be/eVNFJ

🚨 Surprise podcast episode alert! 🚨 This week on Tiny Living Beings, I interviewed @oliverio.bsky.social and @hbrappap.bsky.social who led the discovery of the ‘fire amoeba’, that can reproduce at the highest temperature ever recorded for a eukaryote! 🌋 #protistsonsky

Just on time for the holidays! Happy to share the published version of the discovery of leptophytes, a new deep-branching and widespread group of microalgae based on plastid MAGs (ptMAGs). Now with additional support from a mitochondrial MAG (mtMAG) of leptophytes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

De novo genome sequence assembly of the model algal endosymbiont Micractinium conductrix derived from its host Paramecium bursaria 186b. Guy Leonard, Irma Vitonyte, Fiona R Savory, Erika M Hansson, Duncan D Cameron, Michael Brockhurst, Thomas A Richards bioRxiv doi: doi.org/10.64898/202...

An alternative view of a Serpulidae (bristle worm) larva! Such a cutie! #marineplankton 🦑

New blog post for my microbiologist colleagues: merenlab.org/2025/12/15/r... In which Meren talks about a paper by Valentina Marcheselli on how microbiologists navigate the tension between reductionism and complexity in their everyday practices.

This light installation in @rbgkew.bsky.social is what I imagine #coccolithophores 👀 like in sunlight ocean 🫧🌊

Confused by all the histones that are cropping up in organisms that are decidedly NOT eukaryotes? check out our review - fantastic work by team NucEvo in the #Lugerlab The Expanding Histone Universe: Histone-Based DNA Organization in Noneukaryotic Organisms - www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

🦠🧪🧬🚨 New paper and database alert: the new IMG/VR release is now MetaVR ! We have a new website - meta-virome.org - with quick search capabilities for the >24M viruses, >12M vOTUs, and >42M protein clusters (including >790k with predicted structures !). academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

A dinoflagellate, Prorocentrum micans. #marineplankton 🦑

Come join us! Soon I will be advertising a postdoc vacancy in my group as part of my @erc.europa.eu AdG project 'DARK ROOTS'. Focus of the project will be on phylo- and metagenomic mining of novel prokaryotic lineages. I will soon post a link here - stay tuned, and please repost! #asgardarchaea

Introducing ** Incendiamoeba **, a eukaryote that can live at temperatures well beyond what we thought possible. 63C!! Read @hbrappap.bsky.social thread to see what we’ve already started to learn from this amazing organism! doi.org/10.1101/2025... #MicroSky #protistsonsky 🧪 #evobio

Strain-level diversity of #giantViruses infecting #chlorarachniophyte #algae in the subtropical North Pacific by @fischerlab.bsky.social doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Time to start planning for ASM Microbe 2026! Among the amazing sessions announced (see link), Chris and I are thrilled to be convening “From the Rhizosphere to Pollinators: Studying Agricultural Microbiomes Across Biological Scales”. We can’t wait to see you all there! More details coming soon!

journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... We have a new paper out, led by my PhD student Linda! Ni and Cu are common co-occurring contaminants. They are also synergistic in their toxicity. We examined the mechanisms of this synergism, finding that sulfur assimilation and Fe-S cluster biogenesis are targets.

New paper out: An archaeal genetic code with all TAG codons as pyrrolysine: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

14 years since we lost Lynn Margulis (November 22, 2011). Still can’t believe she’s gone. A giant of biology, through her co-creation of the Gaia Hypothesis, & her endosymbiotic theory, she changed the way we see life, evolution, our planet, ourselves. I feel so privileged to have known her. 🧪

Deadlline is soon!! Please repost!!

Look how beautiful is this capture by Enric Madrenas! The sea slug Elysia timida and its food and chloroplast source Acetabularia, a giant single celled algae. This sea slug can steal plastids from the algae and become a photosynthetic animal: opistobranquis.info/en/guia/saco...

The Europlanet Ireland & UK Hub is pleased to open a travel award call for Early Career Researchers (ECRs) to attend a conference, meeting, or other event pertinent to their planetary science research in 2025. Please submit applications here: www.europlanet.org/ireland-uk-h... #Astrobiology

Our session on symbiosis and biointeractions for the #Astrobiology meeting #AbSciCon26 was accepted! Please share widely and submit your abstract by 14 of January 2026; Let's put more biology into Astrobiology! agu.confex.com/agu/abscicon...

The call for applications for 2026 European Advanced School in Philosophy of Life Sciences is now open! Deadline 15 Jan 2026, theme will be “philosophy of biology for a healthy planet”, all info here: www.kli.ac.at/en/events/ev... graduate students &early postdocs, do consider joining us! #philsci

On Wednesday, Nov 19, 2025, at 7 pm (PST), Dr. Alfonso Davila (NASA Ames Research Center) will give a free, illustrated, non-technical lecture entitled: "The Search for Life on Saturn’s Intriguing Moon Enceladus" in the Smithwick Theater at Foothill College, in Los Altos. #bayarea 🧪

🚨vConTACT3 preprint live!🚨(Peer Review soon...!) vConTACT3 delivers a unified, scalable, and transparent framework for genome-based virus taxonomy — helping translate big viral data into systematic classification. 🔗 Read the preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025... Improvements details below 👇

Enjoying Portland’s fall moss before #EntSoc2025! Join me Sunday (8–8:20 AM, Room B114) for my talk on how space and species shape stingless bee colony microbiomes — part of the symposium 'Inside and Out: Roles of Environmental and Gut Symbioses' with lots of great talks!

NYC and adjacent friends: I'm thrilled and terrified to be giving a public lecture in Manhattan at 6pm on Wednesday, 19 November. If you feel like coming into the city* for the evening, I'd love to see you there! *Yes, NYC = "the city" for Jersey girls. www.simonsfoundation.org/event/trade-...

This paper has been a must! Great collaboration with @mkrupovic.bsky.social and @yifanzhou.bsky.social, a N&V by a legend of halophilic archaea tinyurl.com/yc3dcv72, and one picture of one of our expeditions to Dallol making the cover of the November issue of @natmicrobiol.nature.com rdcu.be/eLtCH

Can proteins fold and function with half of the amino acid alphabet? Using only 10 residues, we designed stable, mutation-resilient structures—no aromatics or basics involved. A minimalist foundation for ancient biology and synthetic design. tinyurl.com/37t8br4v #ProteinDesign #OriginsOfLife

Our lab website is up! gonzalezpech-lab.com

Hi folks! Is anyone recruiting masters students that pay a livable stipend? I have an excellent senior who is an incredible researcher and seeking a position. She is top notch and really interested in mechanistic questions- currently working on Aiptasia, Astrangia and Nematostella.

Here’s my #protist pico tank in the office. It’s home to Laurencia, Codium, Lobophora, Heterosiphonia, Valonia, and my favorite of all, the giant single-celled Acetabularia, also known as the Mermaid’s Wine Glass.

If you are planning to attend GSA Connects 2025 by @geosociety.bsky.social next week, stop by the 'New Advances in Geobiology' session! I will be talking about the evolution of skeletons as revealed by fossil biomolecules and biosignatures 🔬🧪🧬! #paleontology #fossils #astrobiology

Our work on viruses and virus satellites of haloarchaea and their DPANN symbionts is out today in Nature Microbiology! @mkrupovic.bsky.social @deemteam.bsky.social @anagtz.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How Do YOU Say “Astrobiology”? astrobiology.com/2025/10/how-... #astrobiology

1/10 Genome maintenance by telomerase is a fundamental process in nearly all eukaryotes. But where does it come from? Today, we report the discovery of telomerase homologs in a family of antiviral RTs, revealing an unexpected evolutionary origin in bacteria. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We have recently shown the large potential of organellar genome-resolved metagenomics by assembling 100s of new marine plastid MAGs (ptMAGs), including revealing the new deep-branching algal group leptophytes: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We are happy to share our latest work in @nature.com . We study the genomic and cellular basis of facultative symbiosis in Oculina patagonica - a Mediterranean coral remarkable for its ability to survive long periods without algal symbionts. Led by Shani Levy and @xgrau.bsky.social rdcu.be/eLbaZ

What is the physical basis of death? Can we manipulate cellular rules to avoid it? What does death mean for a machine? Is immortality possible? What does it mean for language, thought, or information to die? My new book @princetonupress.bsky.social is coming soon. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

We're excited to share with everyone a preprint of our manuscript that resolves the cellular origins of the symbiosome in cnidarian-algal symbiosis through proteomics of the symbiosome, RNAi, and CRISPR/Cas9 experiments. ⬇️ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Read on below! 1/12 🧵

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....

A giant virus awakens virophage-like PLVs in the green alga Tetraselmis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.09.676808v1

Pretty excited to share our new preprint! Non-photosynthetic Plastid Replacement by a Primary Plastid in the Making www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Is a healthy microbiome one that is rich in phages? 🦠 Excited to share our paper out in Lancet Microbe with @bkoskella.bsky.social & @dholtappels.bsky.social where we test whether virome diversity can be used a broad signature of microbiome health 📈

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

There's a PhD position now available with me in Bath, on the evolution of symbiosis. www.findaphd.com/phds/project.... The supervisory team also includes @anja1.bsky.social @phil-donoghue.bsky.social and others. NB, this is open both to UK-based students *and* to international students :)

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

Microscopic, yet seen from space. Invisible, yet astronauts watch them glow. Billions of tiny artists shape climate, feed the seas, and write history in calcium armor. Meet them in 2 days. #InvisibleHeroes #OceanGuardians #ClimateWarriors #protistsonsky Illustrations: Rosie Sheward

Cell size matters: a unifying theory across the tree of life www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...