Deadline to apply: 1 July 2026 www.antcourse.org

Hey all! Check out our new preprint exploring a surprising finding: that there is elemental consistency across life and across billions of years of protein evolution, despite their enormous functional and ecological diversity: arxiv.org/abs/2605.193... #proteinevolution #astrobiology #elementsoflife

Can’t resist... checking for potential VOCs in microbiome interactions, just one more experiment before moving to Oklahoma. Next ones will be at the Caesar Lab at OU :)

New research finds that nursing carpenter ants apply their venom to their brood to prevent fungal infections, highlighting peptides’ role in colony hygiene and social immunity. Learn more in this week’s issue of #ScienceAdvances: https://scim.ag/3PfGh24

Very excited to share our new paper out in Nature. Congrats to Xiaoqian (Annie) Yu and all the coauthors. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our new paper is out in @nature.com! By exploring the rich genetic diversity of Indigenous peoples across America, we show how large-scale genomic data reveal far more complex evolutionary history, shaped by multiple dispersals, long-term regional continuity, and adaptation to diverse environments.

The Bisson Lab at IU (bissonlab.com) is hiring makers/builders/engineers across all career stages to join our team in one of the most exciting and crazy projects I've set to work on. Candidates can email us: [email protected] More info in the thread [1/3]

Fantastic opportunity! Simons Graduate Fellowships (Ecology & Evolution) are open. Interested in joining the Caesar Lab at OU? Reach out, I’m happy to help with your application!

"Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are." It turns out, microbes follow the same rule! Very proud to share our lab's new paper in @natmicrobiol.nature.com showing that bacteria don't just respond to their environment, they respond to each other. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Applications now open for the UNIL Summer School on Modelling for Evolutionary Biology (31 Aug–5 Sep 2026, Lausanne)! For PhD & postdocs interested in formal approaches to evolutionary ecology (incl. social evo, life-history, species interactions). Scholarships available, Pls RP! shorturl.at/fo1GA

It was a great meeting where I was able to show new work on proteins built with extraterrestrial amino acids! Looking forward for next! "The symposium brought together researchers focused on diverse and varied ecosystems but united by their goal to discover and characterize microbial dark matter."

I am thrilled to share that this fall I’ll be joining the University of Oklahoma School of Biological Sciences (@ou.edu) as an Assistant Professor! The Caesar Lab will study the ecology and evolution of host-microbiome interactions in social bees (honey bees, stingless bees and more) 🦠🐝

Preprint: What good is modeling? Introducing biology students to theory - arxiv.org/abs/2604.13344 - how to teach and think about what modeling contributes to science. How does it fit into the scientific method? This is often misunderstood.

We (with @dornhaus.bsky.social) finally wrote up our class on how to teach modeling to biologists, which ends up being a non-trivial exercise in understanding the roles that theory plays in the scientific method. We hope others will use our class, or simply enjoy the manuscript!

How to measure microbiome health? Commentary proposes adaptive coherence: capacity of host-microbiome systems to sustain integrated function via reorganization. Reframes health as emergent & relational, w/measurements of adaptability/functional integrity www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

Microbial communities can harbor many species that do not coexist in pairs, yet can coexist in the full community. Here we provide the mathematical foundations of emergent coexistence, and explain why it can't be predicted from pairwise tests journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Anthropogenic stressors drive microbiome assembly: a global meta-analysis of #bumblebees. Exciting research, led by Christine Macpherson @uofguelph.bsky.social, reveals the impacts of human-altered environments in shaping the communities of microorganisms in #bee guts: doi.org/10.1016/j.sc...

Out Now! Unbinned contigs expand known diversity in the global microbiome #MicroSky

experimental symbiont replacement/displacement #SymbioSky

Honeybee swarms do not come together and fall apart in the same way 🐝 In this new preprint led by Danielle Chase, we report how to trick swarms to repeatedly assemble and disassemble in front of our cameras, while tracking individual bees in 3D! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I am excited to share our latest paper, Uniform bacterial genetic diversity along the gut, now out in Nature Communications! www.nature.com/articles/s41.... (1/n)

Ants are experts at telling nestmates from foreigners via subtle differences in odor profiles. In this new paper, we explore the conditions under which ants develop and maintain tolerance to foreigners. Turns out the ant recognition system is surprisingly plastic. www.cell.com/current-biol...

While writing my PhD thesis (2020), I was told not to worry - no one besides the committee would read it. Today I learned it’s widely shared by beekeepers in WhatsApp groups in Brazil. I knew about the manual I wrote for this purpose, but not the thesis. Happy to see it being useful beyond academia!

What do milk, seminal fluid, eggs, and regurgitates have in common? Find out during our Focus Session at NWO Life 2026 “Socially Transferred Materials: Connecting Physiology, Ecology & Evolution” (28-29 May 2026, Egmond aan Zee, NL) 🐜 🐸 🐌 🐄🥚 @socialtransfernet.bsky.social

Announcing StrainVis! 🦠🧫🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... This nifty web-based tool allows you to visualize your strain level analyses. You can combine ANI and synteny based analyses and it will make all kinds of cool publication ready plots for you - examples follow. By Hagay Enav and Inbal Paz:

A new preprint with Matthew Schmitt, @kiseokmicro.bsky.social and Vincenzo Vitelli makes a huge step forward in learning functional groups of components in complex biological systems. It's dimension reduction that speaks to biological function. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Long-term efficacy and safety of the single-dose tetravalent Butantan dengue vaccine www.nature.com/articles/s41... @naturemedicine.bsky.social

SSE is pleased to offer free virtual #Evol2026 registration to all SSE members residing in 152 countries and territories around the world including India, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Request your free registration code today! www.evolutionsociety.org/index.php?mo...

Nature research paper: Limited thermal tolerance in tropical insects and its genomic signature go.nature.com/4ua5R82

Protein–protein interactions (PPIs) are key to discovering and interpreting new biological functions. We’re excited to introduce 𝑭𝒍𝒂𝒔𝒉𝑷𝑷𝑰: a new application of gLM2 that uses genomic language modeling to predict proteome-wide PPIs in microbial genomes in minutes.

Stay tuned for the release of this new documentary at the end of the month! I think our buzz pollination clip might have just made the cut!

MicrobeAtlas is now published in Cell. 🌐🌎🦠 Explore the paper and resource to see what large-scale microbiome data reveal about global ecological patterns: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... For a concrete application, see our recent work on “Community conservatism”: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In case you missed it: our review titled "Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities" is out! 🚨 Let me hit you with some highlights on why spatial structure matters. (and why you should care!) Sharing is appreciated 🙏 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1093/fems...

New paper alert! "Estimating global bee species richness and taxonomic gaps" suggests that we have thousands of bee species left to describe and decades of taxonomic work ahead of us. We also provide the methods needed to apply more broadly :) doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Now online! Symbiotic entrenchment through ecological Catch-22

Last year, we proposed a model of plasmid evolution via fusion and fragmentation (via mge mediated recombination) generating mosaics, by studying historical isolates. Excited to see a MASSIVE paper from @jrpenades.bsky.social , @epcrocha.bsky.social expanding on this www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Deadline approaching - 23rd of Feb!

This Friday, February 13th, we'll have our first ☕️ Coffee Hours ☕️ event of the year at 12-1 PM (EST)! Check your emails for the Zoom link. If you're not yet signed up for our newsletter, you can do so at prideinmicrobiology.github.io! 🏳️‍🌈 #PrideInSTEM #Microbiology #PrideinMicrobiology

Please share! PhD position at the University of Copenhagen. Start date: 1st of June!   The project integrates field work, RNAseq, MALDI-MSI & FISH to explore composition, regulation, and resilience of termite host-gut symbiont metabolism.   👉 employment.ku.dk/phd?show=156...   ⏳ Deadline 23/2/26

Meet the Dracula ant Myopopone castanea, the only extant species in its genus. Like other ants in the subfamily Amblyoponinae, the workers pierce the larvae with their mandibles and drink the oozing hemolymph. Hence the name “Dracula ant”. Danum Valley, Sabah.

Spatial structure: Shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities @femsjournals.bsky.social Microbiology Review by @marcelbaecker.bsky.social et al from @bedutilh.bsky.social @bramvandijk.bsky.social academic.oup.com/femsre/advan...

www.growkudos.com/publications... New work with @ckarakoc.bsky.social and @shoestrapped.bsky.social in @pnas.org

Happy to share a preprint—the last chapter of my dissertation with @mcsymbiont.bsky.social and Co—on what happens when bacterial endosymbionts accumulate huge numbers of pseudogenes during early genome reduction. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

NEW: Registration is now FREE for graduate students and postdocs for the 14th Annual Yosemite Symbiosis workshop. THANKS to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation! Space is limited. Learn more and REGISTER here: snri.ucmerced.edu/form/symbios...

Applications close for this 4-year postdoc on Feb 9th (2 days!). The associated post for a technician should be online next week 👀

Review in #ProcB - Flower constancy in #pollinators: a bouquet of agendas shapes interactions among mutualistic partners #OpenAccess @chrisleduck.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Accurate plasmid reconstruction from metagenomics data using assembly–alignment graphs and contrastive learning www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs