An intracellular meteor shower. EB3 comets tracking growing microtubule plus-ends in a cultured cell.

New paper out! Here's a puzzle: phototrophy, the ability to use light for energy, is one of life's great innovations. It evolved early and transformed the biosphere. But it evolved 2x. Why not just once, why not more? Our work suggests the answer is priority effects. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

BERNIE SANDERS: Do vaccines cause autism? BHATTACHARYA: I do not believe that the measles vaccine causes autism SANDERS: Nah. Uh uh. I didn't ask measles. Do vaccines cause autism? BHATTACHARYA: I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism

Do microbes get more food by swimming or staying still? Turns out both work, and cilia help them pull in nutrients no matter the strategy. buff.ly/vK3GmK5

Join us at the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University. We’re searching for an Assistant Professor in Biology. www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

Auschwitz was at the end of a process. We must remember that it did not start from gas chambers. This hatred gradually developed: from ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder. Auschwitz took time.

If you support this administration and think they will never come for you, you need to take a history class.

Trump has been in office for one year. We at @nature.com did a deep dive looking at the administration's disruption of science in numbers. Take a look—the numbers are staggering. By me, @dangaristo.bsky.social, Jeff Tollefson, @kimay.bsky.social, & help from @noamross.net @scott-delaney.bsky.social

Out now in Environmental Microbiome! 🧬 By re-analyzing microbialite sequencing data, we show that chromerid algae (the closest photosynthetic relatives of apicomplexans) are consistent and widespread associates of microbialites across diverse marine and freshwater environments worldwide 🌎

Seeking scientist volunteers for the 2026 spring semester! Want to practice science communication and help author a 🌟comic🌟 about your research? Apply by 1/25. Please share widely. bit.ly/comicscollabspring2026

The microbial keystone concept is a very cool topic in microbiome ecology. This review summarises mechanisms, prediction methods and implications, with "keystoneness" being highly context/time dependent + new methods approaches suggested. Very nice read! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It was an honor this week to speak about DNA transfer in the Sex Across Origins symposium at @sicb.bsky.social! It was interesting to step out of the genomics world for a bit and think about non-meiotic recombinative processes like HGT as “Sex0” in the “sex by numbers” framework. #SICB2026

Now published in Nature Biotechnology: go.nature.com/44P7nSm If you missed it, the TL;DR is in my April thread below

Excited to be part of this symposium!

I overlapped with Brenna for several years at Stony Brook before we both moved. She does brilliant work and this is devastating to read and makes me even further ashamed of our scientific establishment. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/s...

Who else is going to SICB this year? Would love to meet some of my parasocial Bluesky friends in real life! #SICB2026

Large-scale analysis of bacterial genomes reveals thousands of lytic phages | Nature Microbiology https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-025-02203-4

Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn’t Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden or Alice In Chains

Finally, we’ve solved a long-standing mystery: what tintinnid shells are actually made of: A new class of biomaterial formed by remarkable structural proteins unique to tintinnids. A major milestone after 3 years of work! Read about it in our preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202... #ProtistsOnSky

End-of-year preprint dump! A collaboration with @messorensen.bsky.social and German and Korean colleagues: "The phylogenetic context for the origin of a unique purple-green photosymbiosis " doi.org/10.64898/202...

A new amoeba species called Incendiamoeba cascadensis that lives & reproduces at the highest temperature ever described for a eukaryote, earning the title of “fire amoeba”. asm.org/podcasts/tin... A big welcome to Tiny Living Beings (@couchmicroscopy.bsky.social) as the newest ASM Podcast partner!

🚨 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

Update: they responded to my colleague and said it wasn’t AI but they actually manually pull titles from conference abstracts and use them word for word as proposed titles for other people’s work. Even worse! I’m furious! Does anyone have any suggestions for how I should take this up w the journal?

Organelles do NOT have a single uniform pH. And if you think they must, because “protons diffuse fast,” this paper is for you. A thread on why that assumption is wrong; and what we found instead. 🧵 1/n

We recently investigated how much and when tintinnid ciliates produce shell material during the cell cycle to construct a new shell (lorica) after division: tinyurl.com/49usp8xw We adapted a classical staining technique. Still no #UExM for tintinnids dudinlab.bsky.social‬? (wink)#protistsonskyky

I had an experience today with a journal that I know to be considered “legit” that was probably using AI to solicit an article from someone I knew and in doing so, plagiarized my work word for word. 1/

🧵 NSF is reducing external review requirements and eliminating routine expert panels, citing staff shortages that this administration implemented. This change expands program officer authority. But the solution to flawed accountability isn't less public accountability.

There is an entire Wikipedia page for the “Obama tan suit controversy” but the current president just posted this and we’ll all forget it by tomorrow when he posts something even worse or attacks another Venezuelan ship. I’m short circuiting trying to understand how this has become acceptable.

I wrote in @statnews.com about the emotional toll anti-vaccine rhetoric is taking on clinicians — and how it’s straining our relationships with patients. This isn’t abstract; it’s happening every day in exam rooms across the country. 🔗 www.statnews.com/2025/12/10/a... #Vaccines #PublicHealth

Environmental phylogenetics supports a steady diversification of crown eukaryotes starting from the mid Proterozoic https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.12.693929v1

This dinosaur menorah has been going strong for at least 30 years.

NSF - Forced reorg - POs down ~ 40% (DRP, most rotators not renewed, retirements) - Forced move (and we have to pack and clean) to a building with no furniture, little to no conference space for panels, inadequate 🛜, …) I personally love the boxes they gave us for packing. “Details matter” 🙃

Protist–bacteria partnerships are more common in wastewater treatment plants than we thought. In this ISME communications paper, we uncovered widespread denitrifying endosymbionts inside ciliates, their global distribution, and their temporal dynamics across WWTPs.🦠 academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a...

Thanks nature news for featuring our recent preprint on 𝘐𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘦𝘣𝘢 led by @hbrappap.bsky.social (check out preprint here: doi.org/10.1101/2025...) #protistsonsky

“Thousands of very competitive projects in areas like cancer, diabetes, aging, neurological disorders and public health improvements most like went unfunded in 2025. Similarly, at the National Science Foundation, the roughly 3,000 fewer new grants encompassed reductions to every area of science”

Natural and artificial variations of the standard genetic code www.cell.com/current-biol...

Our attempt to give multinucleate cells the spotlight they deserve (seriously, they’re everywhere), led by the fearless @mrosjac.bsky.social and with @Markus Ganter doi.org/10.32942/X2M... We’d love your feedback while this goes through the peer review process! #MicroEvoSky #ProtistsonSky 🧪🌏

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So happy to announce our new preprint, “A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes.” We cultured a novel amoeba from Lassen Volcanic NP (CA, USA) that divides at 63°C (145°F) 🔥 - a new record for euk growth! #protistsonsky 🧵

Understanding the relationship between #foraminifera & their #symbionts can help corals phys.org/news/2025-09... Specific host - #algae relationship, yet flexible bacterial #microbiome, in diatom-bearing foraminifera: Elsa Girard et al. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #Protists #Microbes #Diatoms

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

Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Nature research paper: Rare microbial relict sheds light on an ancient eukaryotic supergroup go.nature.com/486YtjW

Our latest paper is out with @adiop.bsky.social and @gmdouglas.bsky.social. We analyzed the extent of homologous recombination between bacterial species (introgression) and how it affects species borders (it can vary a lot depending on the approach used to classify species!). rdcu.be/eQAMf

Prashant Singh in the lab of Tina Iverson at Vanderbilt published this image of the bacterial 🦠flagellar motor, a detailed molecular model made possibly by CryoEM 🔬. The similarity to mechanical motors are strong enough we can use terms like stator, rotor, rod & gearing to describe it.

“Non-photosynthetic Plastid Replacement by a Primary Plastid in the Making”. This is cool as hell 😎 www.biorxiv.org/content/bior...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #protistsonsky

Getting Rosalind Franklin’s story right is crucial, because she has become a role model for women going into science www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Pleased to share our latest paper led by @tomlewin.bsky.social, now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! We present the first chromosome-level genome of a phoronid and show that shared chromosomal fusions unite phoronids and bryozoans as sister groups. www.cell.com/current-biol...

A Novel Protistan Trait Database Reveals Functional Redundancy and Complementarity in Terrestrial Protists(Amoebozoa and Rhizaria) #protists #eukaryotes #amoeba onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...