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/...

Scientific breakthroughs are rarely unique; someone else would’ve made them soon enough. But when prominent scientists cause harm, that harm isn’t inevitable; the world might simply have been better had the harm not been inflicted. liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/j...

I just wrote the following sentence in a manuscript: “Using pulled Pasteur pipettes, micropipettes, and tools made from toothbrush bristles superglued onto colored pencils, individual cells were isolated and washed in 0.22um-filtered ambient water…” @burnsajohn.bsky.social 😂😂😂

Exciting day for the lab: our 1rst paper is officially out in @currentbiology.bsky.social 🥳 Wonderful collaboration wt @gautamdey.bsky.social showing how Cryo-ExM achieves consistent immunostaining in diverse diatoms, from the lab and the natural environment 1/n #ProtistsOnSky tinyurl.com/2zxaund7

I’m still disgusted that @jjinsing.bsky.social’s PRFB was terminated and that we’re learning about this important work in Lost Science instead of in an article that features positive outcomes of his work/our government’s investments in young scientists. Thanks for speaking out but what a nightmare.

Exciting things coming soon...

Excited to share this perspective article out now! Come read about Streptocarpus and other great model systems! More extraordinary model systems for regeneration journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Python was awarded a funding grant, funding grant asked Python foundation to remove all diversity and inclusion initiatives they have. Python foundation said no and rejected the grant. If you use Python, send a few dollars to the charity to keep it going. I’m pushing a dono on behalf of ScamGuard.

It’s a very exciting day at Rutgers today! The 100th anniversary of the Chrysler Herbarium! Thanks to @drgentian.bsky.social and Megan King for organizing, training so many students/botanists, and taking such good care of the collections! It’s been really fun to learn from you over the years!

Just another normal HHS week: CDC researchers cannot present work at an annual Infectious Disease conference in (checks notes) Atlanta. As a CDC researcher put it: “It appears to me that HHS’s goal is to prevent the dissemination of scientific information. It’s insane.” apnews.com/article/infe...

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

“As recognized for over a century, faculty should be able to engage as individual citizens in extramural speech. Faculty should exercise these rights responsibly and professionally, but when they fail to do so, it is not the role of the government or the university to sanction them.”

Gen Z and millennial voters will make up more than half of the electorate in 2028. They're a crucial bloc for both parties, but many are facing daunting economic realities and feel unseen by leaders. n.pr/42MPNgJ