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

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-...

I wrote a new tutorial on competitive metagenomic read recruitment (and profiling of the results with #anvio), for those of us nerds who would like to get their hands dirty with data: anvio.org/tutorials/co...

Evidence from 14 research funding programmes confirms that early winners tend to keep winning (Matthew effect). But the idea that an early setback makes you stronger later doesn’t replicate widely. buff.ly/UEtcRd4

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.

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.

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. 🌊🦠

A new review study shows the invisible transport pathways for #iron through #hydrothermal plumes. More on Iron’s Irony here ➡️ www.marum.de/en/Iron-sIro... @icbm-uol.bsky.social #ConstructorUniversity @geomarkiel.bsky.social @awi.de @marumunibremen.bsky.social

One of the things I find hardest to get used to in science is seeing how scientists can completely mischaracterize approaches developed by others just to justify their own. Here is a fresh example in which the highlighted statements are 100% objectively wrong about what PlasX or MobMess does

TL;DR: "I use AI myself to do things that would have required expertise and training I didn't have, such as making sense of my blood work or writing faster & better, but do not like to see that it is being used for things for which I have expertise and training". theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_ar...

🪸🧪 We’re hiring! Join our ERC-funded group at the @hifmb.de in Oldenburg, Germany to explore the cellular origins of photosymbiosis:⁣ ⁣ 𝟏 𝐏𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐝𝐨𝐜 + 𝟐 𝐏𝐡𝐃𝐬 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬.⁣ Deadlines: Oct 29 & Nov 5. Links below. ⁣ Questions: [email protected]⁣ #Photosymbiosis #HIFMB #ERC #AcademicJobs

💫 #MVIF Season 5 💫 Feel free to join the keynotes by presenting your work–abstract submission is open: www.microbiome-vif.org/en-US/how-to... #MVIF is proudly supported by #illumina @corundumsb.bsky.social and our non-commercial co-organizing partners Seerave Foundation @cunysph.bsky.social

You like phages ? In this publication, we use metaHiC and our new version of the MetaTOR pipeline to challenge the traditional view of phages with a narrow host range. @rkoszul.bsky.social @natmicrobiol.nature.com @cnrs.fr @institutpasteur.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Have you ever looked at some differentially occurring gene clusters in a microbial #pangenome and thought to yourself "I wonder if they contribute to any metabolic modules"? With the most recent changes, the answer is a few clicks away in #anvio 😇

How do you long-read sequence metagenomes? I would argue it starts with the right sample storage & DNA extraction, to enable efficient @nanoporetech.com /@pacbio.bsky.social sequencing, which we investigated in our new paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Massive thanks to Klara for driving this

Congratulations to HIFMB colleague Kim de Luca, who was selected by MIT Technology Review as one of the 35 Innovators Under 35. www.technologyreview.com/innovator/ki...

A blog post that covers my visit to Barhal, the village where my family comes from: merenlab.org/2025/09/01/b... No science this time, just life and personal reflections.

PSA: This is what the real male loneliness syndrome looks like.

I was a PhD student when this paper came out. I printed it out with excitement and brought it to the lab next morning. My advisor Michael Ferris skimmed through the supplementary material and said "this is cryptic growth with As resistance". I was shocked and learned something essential that day.

Here's our new broad review on the extended mobility of plasmids, about all mechanisms driving and limiting their transfer. From conjugation to conduction, phage-plasmids to hitchers, molecular to evolutionary dynamics, ecology to biotech. The state of affairs. 1/9 academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

A comment I wrote for you is now online at @natcomms.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Oh, oh, it says "time travel will likely remain forever off the table in our universe" with a citation, so read it maybe? (am I doing the click-bait thing right? 🥲).

The mantra “location, location, location” isn’t just about real estate. For life scientists, more than 50% of their productivity can be attributed to the institution where they work, according to a new study. scim.ag/4kKs1YO

POV: When you're a middle author of a study, and everything is a matter of life and death 💀 I AM BECOME REVIEWER #2, DESTROYER OF RELATIONSHIPS BEFORE THE STUDY WENT OUT TO REVIEW.

New blog post I wrote on 'how we do not choose our families but we can choose people who push us', and ONLY for my scientist colleagues who are looking for things to procrastinate with style (by requiring them to be longer than a post on BlueSky) :p merenlab.org/2025/07/16/s...

Our paper demonstrating that within-species warfare interactions are ecologically important on human skin is now published in Nature Micro! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Join our team! MARUM and partner institutes within the #ExcellenceCluster Ocean Floor are offering ➡️ 15 doctoral researcher positions. Please find out more about it here: www.marum.de/en/career/op... @icbm-uol.bsky.social @hifmb.de @awi.de

A short preprint describing the GlobDB is now on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2506.11896 If you find the resource useful, please also check globdb.org for info on how to cite the underlying resources and tools.

I'm so extremely thankful for the National Radio and Television Administration of China for supporting the production of Three-Body (三体). Seeing a product that is so faithful to its inspiration, and taking its time with delivery in the era of shallow entertainment was such a great experience.

I'm happy to announce the latest release of the GlobDB, available at globdb.org. The GlobDB is a database of "species dereplicated" microbial genomes, and as of release 226 contains twice the number of species-representative genomes (306,260) than the latest GTDB release.

🌊🦠#FieldworkFriday! Last March, C-CoMP set out on the RV Atlantic Explorer to compare diel surface ocean microbial dynamics between oligotrophic and productive regions. Time to batten down the hatches! Photo by McKenzie Powers.

We have a new 3-year postdoc position in our group at the @hifmb.de to study plasmids and plasmids systems of the marine environment to survey their utility in microbial responses to environmental change. Please see the official job ad here, and spread the word: jobs.awi.de/Vacancies/20...

Not that you care, but I still wanted to let you know that if I see a paper full of bogus citations with your name on it, I'm not talking to you anymore. I was so triggered by a paper I was reading this morning, I am drinking my second coffee.

Ribbon diagrams are the ubiquitous face of proteins across science, known for their particular combination of clarity and beauty. “It’s hard to imagine a scientific representation of data that is more meaningful.” — Philip Bourne, University of Virginia

Out in Science! Zakem et al. mechanistically modeled global marine prokaryotic functional diversity, grounded with field data. Shifts in community composition drive respiration and thus biological C storage. This facilitates C cycle projections in a warming ocean www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very excited to present the Great Barrier Reef Microbial Genomes Database (GBR-MGD), a comprehensive DB of 1000s of high-quality prokaryote, virus, plasmid, and chromosome-level eukaryote MAGs using Nanopore long reads. Subthreads incoming. Please share widely. 🙂 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hey, new paper by @cleggtom.bsky.social and me is just out in @pnas.org. This combines a lot of things that start with B: Biodiversity, Bipartite Networks, Bifurcations, Bacteria, ... www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... And yes, I know, Fig 1 looks like one of 'those' papers but please read on ...

Deep origin of eukaryotes outside Heimdallarchaeia within Asgardarchaeota www.nature.com/articles/s41... This paper is interesting, and provides evidence that several Njordarchaeales genomes were contaminated by TACK genomes. But from the peer review file, don't do this. Ignorance is not a virtue:

Just 2 days to go until we can welcome the participants of the EuroC1 Meeting 2025 here in #Bremen. Young and established researchers will present findings & engage in insightful discussions on #C1 #metabolism and volatile #organic compound-related topics. mpi-bremen.de/EuroC1-Sympo...

I really enjoyed reading this paper.(1/3) Adaptive adjustment of profile HMM significance thresholds improves functional and metabolic insights into microbial genomes doi.org/10.1093/bioa... #MicroSky

This is a fantastic fellowship program for both early and more senior career researchers. Come visit @mpimarinemicrobio.bsky.social @marumunibremen.bsky.social @unibremen.bsky.social @hifmb.de @awi.de www.linkedin.com/posts/hansei... @hanse-ias.bsky.social

Small update from AllTheBacteria (allthebacteria.org). Assemblies can be bulk downloaded from OSF as before, or you can now get individual assemblies from AWS. We now also have a LexicMap index on AWS, so you can align your favourite gene against 2.4million bacteria (next post for price estimates)

Banfield lab has landed on bsky: 😎👋

Genomes from long-read metagenomic assemblies contain rampant errors, highlighting the pressing need for stricter evaluation methods in long-read assembly algorithms. Read more in our paper with the Eren group. @floriantrigodet.bsky.social @merenbey.bsky.social

Important 🧵 if your research depends on genome assemblies from long (PacBio / ONT) reads. As @merenbey.bsky.social says, these may not be the genomes you are looking for. TLDR: the assemblers are wrong and predict too many small circular contigs.

Attention long read metagenomists! This feels like an important read. Misassemblies stitching together bacteria, archaea, and euks all into the same contigs, yikes! Reports of circularisation isn’t robust. There’s a lot in here to ponder.

I am very happy (and anxious) to share with you our most recent work in which we evaluated four of the most popular long-read assemblers, www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... and tell you just a little bit about it in the following 🧵

📣#MTTM Dr. Iva Veseli is a postdoc working with @merenbey.bsky.social within the Ecosystem Data Science group @hifmb.de. Within C-CoMP, Iva writes software to help answer core and fundamental questions about microbial ecology 🦠 using big sequencing datasets from the ocean 🌊.

5th HIFMB symposium: Your ticket to talks, discussions, early career program, art and more. Registration is free of charge. ➡️ www.hifmb.de/symp25 #marinebiodiversity @hillebr1.bsky.social @ibaums.bsky.social @thilogross.bsky.social @merenbey.bsky.social

🔍 "Adaptive adjustment of profile HMM significance thresholds improves functional and metabolic insights into microbial genomes"  is in Bioinformatics Advances: https://doi.org/10.1093/bioadv/vbaf039 Authors include: @merenbey.bsky.social  @bradleyph.bsky.social

If you are interested in a postdoc opportunity in Europe, I'd suggest you to consider the EU Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship: ec.europa.eu/info/funding... If you are into marine microbial ecology and evolution, I'd love to support your application (see more at merenlab.org). E-MAIL ME NOW! :)