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

Want to ride the front of the wave of all-things-microbiology; field work, cultivation, microscopy, molecular, bioinformatics and AI tools? Me too! Please join us @mblscience.bsky.social for the 2026 Summer Microbial Diversity Course! Applications due soon. www.mbl.edu/education/ad...

Happy to share my solo-authored Perspective "An Interpretation, Survey, and Outlook of Microbial Macroecology"! Making time these last few months to take stock of the patterns us microbial ecologists examine + models we invoke has been invaluable. Feedback welcome! ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Join our first Social Transfer Network General Assembly on Wednesday, February 4th! 15h UK / UTC+0; 16h Europe / UTC+1; 7h US West coast / UTC-8 This is your chance to connect, catch up, and have your voice heard as we reflect on the past year and look ahead to what's next for our community.

Calling all OrthoFinder users! We’ve just released GLADE, a tool to infer gene gains, losses, duplications, and ancestral genomes across a phylogeny. GLADE runs directly on OrthoFinder results. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... github.com/lauriebelch/... (1/10)

Registration is open for the inaugural GRC conference in the Function of Evolving Systems. Aug 9-14, 2026, Waterville Valley. Truly stellar speaker lineup. Student/postdoc fellowships are available! Please come join us! www.grc.org/function-of-... @joybergelson.bsky.social

How and when can internal conflicts tear an individual organism apart? That’s the question at the heart of this new paper. Great thread by lead author @martijnschenkel.bsky.social below.

New paper by Saskia Wilmsen and me just came out BioEssays: A new classification framework to understand evolutionary transitions in individuality Please find the OA paper here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Another product from Dr. Ying-Chih 'Ella' Chuang's time in my lab - bacteria that excrete purines are better equipped to tolerate inhibitory effects of purines, suggesting a physiological basis behind some cross-feeding interactions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🥁 NEW Our study on infant gut microbiome and #straintransmission is now published in @nature.com: doi.org/10.1038/s415... 1/10

✨ Latest exciting story of the group in @nature.com. Here, we go beyond SNPs and built a species-wide atlas of genetic variants in yeast. With >1,000 near T2T genomes, we show how large genomic variations affect trait diversity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Join #MVIF 45 cassyni.com/s/mvif-45 and #MeetTheSpeakers 🇺🇸 Lilian Caesar (@liliancaesar.bsky.social) will discuss how space and species sculpt stingless bee microbiomes!

#MVIF 45 starts tomorrow, with 🇳🇵 Bishwash Thapa 🇮🇷 Zahra Nezamivand Chegini 🇨🇭 Sara Mitri (@saramitri.bsky.social‬) 🇺🇸 Lilian Caesar (@liliancaesar.bsky.social) 🇮🇹 Haseeb Manzoor 🇦🇹 Laurenz Holcik (@laurenz0908.bsky.social) Free registration: cassyni.com/s/mvif-45 See you 👋

Breast milk isn't just nutrition – it delivers live bacterial strains that colonize the infant gut and persist for months. Happy to share our new paper, where we used metagenomics to track bacterial strains between 195 mother-infant pairs over the first 6 months of life: doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Community conservatism is widespread across microbial phyla and environments www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

Are you a graduate student or postdoc who wants to apply your science to policy? The Gulf Research Program’s Science Policy Fellowship provides experience for one year on the staff of federal, state, local, NGO in the Gulf region and impt networking. www.nationalacademies.org/programs/GUL...

Phold's manuscript is now available @narjournal.bsky.social thanks to @susiegriggo.bsky.social @npbhavya.bsky.social @vijinim.bsky.social @linsalrob.bsky.social @martinsteinegger.bsky.social @milot.bsky.social @eunbelivable.bsky.social & others not on bsky #phagesky academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

New preprint out! How do host regulate ancient symbioses to optimise benefits across environments? Using 🐜, we show hosts actively regulate symbionts, flexibly switching between symbiont-derived and environmental nutrients to thrive under changing diets. 👏 Well done Phoebe and team!

Last days to submit your cool symbiosis abstracts to our cool symbiosis-astrobiology session at #AbSciCon26!!!

🚨vConTACT3 now in Nature Biotechnology: - >95% agreement with ICTV for known viruses - Classifies both prokaryotic and eukaryotic viruses - Extends beyond genus → subfamily, family & order - Systematically assigns taxonomy to tens of thousands of previously unclassified viruses

We’re looking for a postdoc to join the Hendrickson lab! The project will involve dissecting the molecular mechanisms of a fascinating mobile element in our honeybee biocontrol phages. Sound like something you would be interested in? Get in touch! Details: jobs.canterbury.ac.nz/jobdetails/a...

New preprint out: Revealing the pervasive landscape of MGE-host interactions in situ with single-cell genomics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @mingyan-igi.bsky.social