A sea anemone looks very different from a coral, despite belonging to the same broad biological group. A new study from EMBL researchers and their colleagues sheds new light on how diversity arises in body shapes in the animal world. www.embl.org/news/science...

To increase the use of gene editing in corals, we have made a comprehensive methods paper describing the protocol. We hope this helps the field of functional genetics in corals. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dear all, registration for the upcoming EMBO/EMBL Symposium on "the cellular mechanics of symbiosis" is now OPEN 🤩 ! Feel free to register ! www.embl.org/about/info/c... #EESSymbiosis #ProtistsOnSky #SymbioSky @hassansalem.bsky.social @berasymbionts.bsky.social @embl.org

📢#TMHMS25 is just around the corner! 🦠🌊 Join us to dive into the latest discoveries in #marinehostmicrobesymbioses and explore how microbial superpowers can contribute to restoring ocean health! Please share with fellow marine science and microbiology enthusiasts!

@mingpapilio.bsky.social shaking up evolutionary theory at #eseb2025 Models linking species diversity with ecological stability may not be as straightforward as we thought! Amazing talk

Check out our new preprint all about Pirsonia, a tiny killer of bloom-forming Coscinodiscus diatoms! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #protistsonsky #marinemicrobes 🌊🔬

Spent the week in Cambridge with @benkinsjenkins.bsky.social testing this custom made microscope to live image Aiptasia larvae. Got some cool videos that we hope to share very soon! Thanks for hosting me Ben!

Very exciting! Had a great time messing with microscopes and sea anemones with @micro-megs.bsky.social this week

🪸🌊 Hidden coral cities! Scientists just found ancient “super reefs” in the Maldives’ twilight zone, thriving reefs that may help restore shallow corals threatened by climate change. Source: www.mapthegiants.com #Morivationmonday

📢 Deadline extended to May 5! Join our #ESEB2025 symposium on symbioses in microbial eukaryotes - from the origin of organelles to their roles in ecosystem functioning. Share your work and meet our great speakers @cstairs.bsky.social & @benkinsjenkins.bsky.social #ESEB25 #Symbiosis #ProtistOnSky

First study from the lab is out! We describe ApuRs, a new family of microbial rhodopsins unique from apusomonads. ApuRs represent the first anion-conducting rhodopsin channels that can be controlled by UV light, offering potential as new optogenetic tools. #protistsonsky doi.org/10.1101/2025... 👇

Corals maintain stable populations of essential photosynthetic symbionts by controlling their cell cycle, not by eating them! Our new #PNAS paper monitored and modelled #aiptasia cell cycle, autophagy, and expulsion for over a year. #symbiosis #microbiology www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I am obviously biased, but this should be a great conference (as long as you don't mind hearing me go on about Paramecium and corals) ! 🦠🪸

I've been busy the last couple years developing Aiptasia as a genetically tractable model organism to study corals. Here you can see me injecting CRISPR-Cas9 into these fragile little Aiptasia zygotes. Hopefully soon we will have our very first mutant lines!

Absolutely phenomenal week for the #EESWildModels. A pure celebration of biological wonders, and incredibly engaged participants. Thanks to all the co-organizers and @events.embl.org for making this possible ! See you in 2027 ? (please fill the feedback form)

Very excited for this first of its kind EMBO/EMBL Symposium on the Wild Frontiers of Model Organisms. So far Session 1 is a blast, from aiptasia symbiosis, oyster vibrio phage interactions, !! #EESWildModels @embldbunit.bsky.social @embl.org

I had a wild time presenting my coral work for the first time at EMBO/EMBL #EESWildModels. Massive thanks to @embl.org @events.embl.org and the organisers for putting this together. It was a real pleasure to interact with so many weird and wonderful creatures... ...and their model organisms (!!)

Very excited and proud to finally share this story! 🐙 We discovered surprising roles for dopamine and acetylcholine in the Octopus visual system… doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Culturing of two Asgard archaea in the Hodarchaeales order - the closest relatives to eukaryotes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I'm pleased to introduce our new paper rooting the eukaryote Tree of Life (eToL) that resulted from a collaboration led by PhD student Kelsey Williamson and a large group of collaborators doi.org/10.1038/s415...htt

🚨 New paper alert! 🚨 A robustly rooted tree of eukaryotes sheds light on their deep evolutionary ancestry—suggesting that the Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor (LECA) may have had an excavate-like cell architecture. 🧵🔬 (1/) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Check out our dispatch on apicomplexans that infect corals! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... These parasite-like partners have lost photosynthesis but retained chlorophyll... are they friend or foe? @currentbiology.bsky.social #protistsonsky #symbiosky #microsky #coralreefs

In our new paper we discuss how modern coexistence theory can help microbial ecologists tackle fundamental & applied questions, and how microbial systems can help to push coexistence theory forward! With Andrew Letten and Dave Armitage (@darmitage.bsky.social). doi.org/10.1111/1462...

PhD position available in Ceske Budejovice (Czechia), funded by ERC KLEPTOS, to study plastid endosymbiosis in kleptoplastidic protists. Are you curious about this process and do you like sampling/cultivation of protists? Join our team by applying here: jobs.bc.cas.cz/en/detail/243 #protistsonsky

New corallicolid pub in @currentbiology.bsky.social!🪸🧬 Highlights: 🌳 Phylogenomic support for Corallicolids as sister to the Ichthyocolids ☀️Corallicolids express nuclear & plastid encoded Chl biosynthesis genes ❌Multiple, parallel losses of CBP in Apicomplexa #ProtistsOnSky #CoralReefs #MicroSky

Is it this one? Congrats everyone #protistsonsky www.cell.com/current-biol...

Paper came out today that represents a long trip for many members of my lab. It took years to get these methods to work and gather the data so everyone involved should be very proud of the interesting outcome. Thanks to the whole gang for their perseverance on this one!

Have you used #network_analyses in the past to analyse your #ecology data? Have you wondered how many of those correlations actually represent interactions between #microorganisms? Here I present a paper how we leveraged #protistsonsky to evaluate the validity of the method. A thread:

NEW preprint!🥳 Orthogroups are a prerequisite for comparative genomics and Tree of Life inquiries Introducing #OrthoHMM, software that improves the inference of orthogroups (blue in fig) OrthoHMM may refine our understanding of genome evolution and the Tree of Life 🔗 tinyurl.com/4s9mwxz6 🧵 1/8

@stevestuwill.bsky.social you posted on 𝕏 on Dec 5, 2020 this stunning video - why not repeat on 🔵bsky ? (sorry, I did)... "Time-lapse footage of a vampire amoeba: a microscopic organism that feeds on algal cells by breaking through their cell walls and sucking out their insides." #ProtistsOnSky

☎️ Calling #MEvoSky ☎️ 2x 5-year research associate / research assistant positions in experimental evolution ERC-funded project: How do mobile genetic elements and defence systems shape bacterial genome evolution? Join the friendly and exciting @mermanchester.bsky.social community in Manchester!

How does a 🍄 genome change in evolutionary transition to life on another 🍄 ? Congrats @ccgallen.bsky.social on first results on this strange Sporothrix we started studying during the pandemic. TLDR: +-1/3 of genome lost in switch to life in matrix of another fungus, but intriguing CAZymes gained

New paper that may be of interest to ecologists studying global change, disturbances, biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, or response diversity: doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Neat paper describing the role of integrin receptors in coral symbiosis by @mela-doerr.bsky.social , @micro-megs.bsky.social and the Guse lab. Disrupting integrin binding stalls symbiosis establishment, and expressing these receptors in human cells allowed them to take up symbionts too! Very cool

🚨New Preprint🚨: A Single-cell Atlas of Coral Bleaching! 🪸🦠🔥. We show the microbial ecology of coral bleaching from the gene expression of host and symbiont cells to the shifts in the bacterial and protist communities within the holobiont! #ProtistsOnSky #SymbioSky #MicroSky 🧪