Api New Year! 🎉 For anyone attending SICB next week, I will be presenting my work on marine apicomplexans in SYM-1A (Host-microbe interactions) on Sunday at 8:45 AM! 🪸🐟🪱 #SICB2026 #Protists

💾 any2fasta 0.8.1 is released! The FASTA format is now 40 years old (Pearson & Lipman) and any2fasta makes it easy for your scripts and pipelines that accept FASTA to also accept other formats, even if compressed! eg. .gbk.gz #bioinformatiocs #microbiology #genomcs github.com/tseemann/any...

🚨 POSTDOC OPENING 🚨 NIH-funded Bio-Fluid Mechanics Postdoc in my lab @univmiami.bsky.social Hofstenia miamia | cilia-driven flows | behavior & neuroscience Collab w/ Mansi Srivastava @harvard.edu 🕒 Start: Jan–Feb 2026 ⏳ 1 yr, renewable | Email me ASAP! #Postdoc #Biophysics #FluidDynamics

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...

Perkinsus marinus is an important marine pathogen yet we know little about its biology. @macleanlab.bsky.social reports here complexome work of whole parasite and mitochondria mapping the essential mitochondrial enzymes and kickstarting future functional studies. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🚨 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...

Just plain stupid, petty, and will end up harming people. Like everything else this administration does

Unbelievable. This would be a terrible blow to American science, writ large. It would decimate not only climate research, but also the kind of weather, wildfire, and disaster research that has underpinned half a century of progress in prediction, early warning, and increased resilience.

A bacterial predator, Halobacteriovorax, acts as a living "probiotic" that halts Vibrio-induced disease progression in endangered Caribbean corals. This shows microbial predators are promising new tools for coral disease therapy! #CoralReefs #MicrobialEcology #ISMEJ academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

New preprint led by @annaschreck.bsky.social that capitalized on the wealth of publicly available 18S rRNA datasets to explore the oceanic distribution and diversity of understudied anaerobic ciliates. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New preprint out! Using ~75k environmental OTUs + 77 fossil calibrations, we reconstructed a Proterozoic timeline of eukaryote evolution. Our results show crown eukaryotes were already diversifying >1.6 Ga, long before the first undisputed fossils (~1.05 Ga). 🔗 DOI: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Mapping the metagenomic diversity of the multi-kingdom glacier-fed stream microbiome #microbiology #microbiome #glacier #MicroSky @natmicrobiol.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Respiratory endosymbionts, that allow their ciliate hosts to breathe nitrate instead of (or in addition to) oxygen are frequent members of the wastewater microbiome. 🦠 🖥️🧬 Great to see this work by @louison-nicolas.bsky.social published in ISME coummuncations! doi.org/10.1093/isme...

Loved this opportunity to extend the data we first used to describe the Ichthyocolids! 🩸🐟 Thanks @ikeririsarri.bsky.social and team for spearheading this 🙌🏻

Thanks @ikeririsarri.bsky.social 🙌 It was a pleasure contributing to this. I am a big fan of data recycling ♻️😊

A new combtooth blenny genome just dropped! Assembled from recycled ONT data + HiC + RNAseq. Thanks, Nikita Kulikov, Kim Joffroy, @ambonacolta.bsky.social @delcampolab.bsky.social for your hard work

I am still actively looking for postdoc positions — please lmk if you (or your friends and colleagues) need a hardworking postdoc with field, lab, and bioinformatic skills! I am broadly interested in evolution in the ocean, conservation and population genetics, and rapid evolution.

Glad I got to contribute a little bit to this study on the microbiomes of deep sea annelids! 🪱 🦠 🌊 Check out Grimes et al here: authors.elsevier.com/c/1mEmNI7ED3... #Microbiomes #WormWednesday

🪸 Wei et al recently published a beautiful hologenome study of a deep-sea black coral, revealing the intricate metabolic interactions that underpin the intertwined lives of these animals and their microbial symbionts. Here the study published in Cell Host & Microbe 👇🏻 www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

Interesting new research on the transcriptomics of Symbiodinid thermal tolerance from Xiang et al

Deep sea mining is very bad for deep sea ecosystems.

Absolutely buzzing over this new video of a rarely seen giant squid

One more week to apply to this PhD position on working out an endosymbiosis relationship in a protist. Please share widely to prospective PhD student #protistsonsky

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...

10 weeks of #MarineSymbiosis paper discussions & the verdict on their favorites is in! I had a blast piloting an upper-level course this semester & had them vote on superlatives to celebrate their hard work. #newPI #SymbiosisSky Mini blog here: phycosymbiosis.weebly.com/updates/mari...

Had a great time interviewing Dr. Lilach Sheiner (@sheinerlab.bsky.social) for the latest edition of ISOP’s Protistology Newsletter. Check it out here! #ProtistsOnSky #Toxoplasma #Science

We just released IRIS (7+yrs project), a tech we believe will transform cell biology by pairing high-resolution cell images with matched #scRNAseq, letting us interpret cellular form by its molecular ground truth. Huge tx to @JohannesBues, @JoernPezoldt, @CamilleLambert et al. shorturl.at/zgY8Z

Excited to present on the growing role of Apicomplexans on marine host health in this symposium! 🪸🐟🐚 Thanks Ryan and Shayle for organizing!

CryoET of microbes inside an animal organ? Yes it’s possible! Check out our new preprint showing how we did it! What an amazing collaboration with amazing scientists who made this possible!

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 🧵

🎉 There are currently 4 opportunities to join the Holt lab in beautiful Bath! 🎉 If you're interested in protists, parasites, and/or biodiversity then please check out our website: theholtlab.com/posts/ln5-21... 🚨 Deadlines vary between project. ✉️ Please reach out if you have any questions!

📢 rphylopic 📦 1.6.0 is now on #CRAN! - resolve_phylopic() retries failing API calls 🔄 - geom_phylopic()/add_phylopic() work with ggplot2 4.0.0 🪛 - add_phylopic_tree() wraps add_phylopic() for base R trees 🪾 - get_phylopic() can get og source files from #PhyloPic 👤 rphylopic.palaeoverse.org #Rstats

My first #PhD dissertation chapter was just published in Ecology and Evolution! We characterized the gene expression patterns of staghorn and knobby brain corals in response to thermal preconditioning. read our #openaccess paper here! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

The Lariviere lab at UMiami is recruiting PhD students! Incoming students will join us in studying host-microbe interactions in the honey bee gut, using molecular and genetic approaches. Please see the attached flyer for more details. #Symbiosis #SymbioSky #MicroSky #PhDOpportunity #AcademicJobs

NEW pub in @science.org 🥳 Is it sponges (panels A & B) or comb jellies (C & D) that root the animal tree of life? For over 15 years, #phylogenomic studies have been divided. We provide new evidence suggesting that... 🔗: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Here, we show that deep below, corals and feather stars don’t just share space – they share microbes. Endozoicomonadaceae + Nitrosopumilaceae inhabit both hosts in a “promiscuous” symbiosis that may fuel nitrogen cycling in the deep sea. doi.org/10.1186/s401... 🌊🪸🧪 #Bioinformatics 🧬💻 #SymbioSky

Our paper on the #genome of the Trebouxia #photobiont from Xanthoria is now out in @newphyt.bsky.social! Check below for a near-chromosome level assembly, secretome analysis, evidence of ancient HGT, and transcriptomic comparison of the alga in symbiosis and in pure culture doi.org/10.1111/nph.70728

We are looking for a PhD student to work on an exciting plastid endosymbiosis in microbial eukaryotes. This position involves sampling, exciting microscopy such as CARDFISH, ExM and FIBSEM, single-cell transcriptomics and more. #protistsonsky 1/2

Excited to share our new paper introducing BEREN, a tool for identifying giant and other dsDNA viruses from metagenomic data — now online! Beren improves viral genome recovery and expands our view of the virosphere. academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

Oligonucleotide design meets big data: We present oligoN-design, a simple, reproducible and versatile open-source tool to design specific primers and probes directly from large environmental DNA datasets. 🔗 DOI: doi.org/10.1101/2025... 👉 github.com/MiguelMSandi...

🥶Our GW4+ PhD project exploring polar protist diversity is accepting applications!🥶 With @tweethinking.bsky.social (@uniofbath.bsky.social) and Melody Clark (@bas.ac.uk), you will uncover the ecological roles, evolutionary histories, and environmental adaptions of polar protists! Interested? 👀

We have a great PhD project supported by SWBio Doctoral Training Partnership at @uniofbath.bsky.social for 2026! Come and apply cutting-edge sequencing approaches to tackle animal health in aquaculture! We'll be characterising protist parasites to learn more about their interactions and evolution 🐟

annoSnake: a Snakemake workflow for taxonomic and functional annotation of metagenomes and metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #jcampubs

Please join us next week for the second iteration of the DinoSphere Seminars! This time our two speakers will talk about host-associated dinoflagellates and any challenges they might have encountered when working with them. All current and future friends of dinoflagellates welcome! #ProtistsOnSky

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.

😢 Heat-driven functional extinction of Caribbean Acropora corals from Florida’s Coral Reef | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#Microsporidia are #parasites of growing importance. @amjadkhalaf.bsky.social @mblaxter.bsky.social @marakat.bsky.social &co present 40 new genomes from #DarwinTreeofLife sequencing of their arthropod hosts, revealing insights into #tetraploidy & #reproduction @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/48HsAQJ