Our work is out now! (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...). We discover a selective autophagy pathway that protects plants from the mess caused by RNA viruses. Intrigued? Follow the spaghetti trail for a summary of our findings🧵-->

The deadline for this project has been extended to June 9th as overseas applicants are now eligible! Looking for a fully funded studentship and a healthy mix of bioinformatics, imaging, and fieldwork? Get in touch!

I'm looking for an enthusiastic student to join my team as a PhD candidate on archaeal genome evolution 🦠💻 Work in beautiful Utrecht, at @binfutrecht.bsky.social, an international group full of caring, amazing scientists, and with frequent cake breaks! www.uu.nl/en/organisat... Please share! 🙏

How do sperm and egg fuse? Surprisingly, we still don’t fully know… Our field has uncovered many pieces of the fertilization puzzle, but not how they fit together. We identify ✨ SPARK ✨ - a conserved sperm complex that couples sperm-egg binding to fusion. tinyurl.com/34cm4xat Read on! 🧵👇

Excited to share my review in Nature Reviews Microbiology on soil fungal ecology. Fungal diversity, ecology and functions in soil ecosystems Hope people will find it useful! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Euplotes on the cover of PNAS made my day 😍 congrats @blarson.bsky.social!

Protists are everywhere, including the depths of the ocean abyss... #microbiology #protists #eukaryotes #MicroSky @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Latent endogenous giant viruses drive active infection and inheritance in a multicellular algal host www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Five days left to apply! 🌊 Exciting #PhDPosition in #PlanktonEcology at the University of Koblenz, Germany! Work on #marine #protists with a mix of 🔬 wet lab and 💻 bioinformatics in a 3-year, 60% position. 📅 Apply by 20 May 2026 Please repost/share 🙌 Link: tinyurl.com/yu27knau #ProtistsOnSky

Follow @delaconcepcionjc.bsky.social , a new group in Tuebingen, with lots of very very cool science coming! #cryoET #fungi #Plants

Have you registered for CGUE yet? Head on over to comparativegenomics2026.com Registration includes all meals and hotel nights.

Excited to share our first story led by @martinacapriati.bsky.social! How do cells control the expression of viability genes? We find that single transcription factors can drive both chromatin opening and gene activation from densely co-bound CpG island promoters, including at essential genes

Don’t reach for ChatGPT Images or Nano Banana as your first option when creating scientific images There are multiple free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations. #plantscience @stephenturner.us blog.stephenturner.us/p/free-open-...

#RequestForProposals We’re inviting teams of two researchers to pursue projects advancing #AquaticSymbiosis (marine + freshwater). Areas of interest include how aquatic environments influence symbiosis, evolutionary ecology & new methods/tech. Details + how to apply:  moore.org/SymbiosisRFP

MissAlignment is out!!! Our new software that improves reference-free tilt series alignment by mimicking human intuition. Check out Dimitry's beautiful thread for a quick summary! And the preprint for more details: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... The program: github.com/warpem/miss-...

Interested in working on the evolution of photosynthetic endosymbioses? Come join us! I have 2 open positions in my new group @cemess.bsky.social in Vienna 3yr postdoc info: tinyurl.com/4emkjpn4 4yr PhD info: tinyurl.com/mtxmsjpy Apply by 1st June! Please share/repost #Protists #Symbiosis #PhD

Geneticist J. Craig Venter, best known for his role in sequencing the human genome, has died aged 79. He spoke to Nature in 2023 about AI, sequencing the ocean – and why he had no plans to stop working. go.nature.com/4d4h1ns

Post 1/2 Our new preprint is out! 🧬 We’ve extended #Tiberius for accurate ab initio gene prediction across the eukaryotic tree, including Plants, Fungi, Insects, and Diatoms. doi.org/10.64898/202...

Brilliant new paper by @tylerjcarrier.bsky.social on how plastid-derived structures help sea urchin development and dispersal. 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003705 @plosbiology.org @geomarkiel.bsky.social @moorefound.bsky.social

Link to paper in @CurrentBiology. Thank you to co-authors @aralbright.bsky.social @gautamdey.bsky.social and more. @ucsfhealth.bsky.social @ucsfmedicine.bsky.social @uofcalifornia.bsky.social www.cell.com/current-biol...

How can a single cell learn without a brain? We explore this in my paper with @wallaceucsf.bsky.social! We discovered that single cells may learn using molecules similar to those that animal brains use to learn, like CaMKII. Cells can also propagate memory states to their progeny!

🚨New PrePrint🚨 I am excited to share this comparative analysis of transposable elements in medusozoa genomes led by graduate student Ayanna Mays 🧬🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our ExM Atlas of eukaryotes is moving along with more and more images coming in - some featured in nature last month! Culture we’re provided by @ccapoban.bsky.social & Julius Lukeš during visits last year www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

"We find that while TAD boundaries pair more frequently than non-boundary regions, these interactions are infrequent and are uncorrelated with transcriptional activity of genes within the TAD" elifesciences.org/articles/110...

Coexistence of Photosynthetic Marine Microorganisms, Viruses and Grazers: Towards Integration in Ocean Ecosystem Models enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

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...

Somehow this paper has been largely ignored, but the basic idea has been presented by others as novel, or the idea gets misattributed to someone else. If you're interested in #diatom sex and its evolutionary importance, read and cite this paper. www.jstor.org/stable/2460887

"men continued to publish the same number of papers after becoming fathers, women experienced a significant drop in research output (mothers had 31% fewer publications than did fathers 8 years after the birth of their first child)"

Chromatin plays a central role in gene regulation, but chromatin systems are only known for a few model species. This study analyses chromatin regulatory landscapes in brown algal lineages to elucidate their structural organization and evolution 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Spatial Proteomics Workshop for Protists (see more in thread below) Registration Early Bird Monday 22nd June 2026. Regular Monday 10th August 2026. There will be a conference dinner on day 1. To register visit protistology.org.uk/autumn-meeti...

In our new pre-print, we established massive single-cell RNA-sequencing for diatoms to investigate key cell fate transitions. Notably, we discovered that the diploid-to-haploid transition is regulated by Myb TFs, a process that is actively ongoing across the Global Ocean! 🌊

Very excited to present our new project #BYGENEX, an @ERC_Research Advanced Grant! During the next five years we will be studying the genetic mechanisms that govern the phagocytosis of bacteria by protists @icmcsic.bsky.social

Excited to share our lab's new paper in Current Biology featuring MS student Sydney Schultz's work. We show that a polar alga carries large amount of giant viral DNA in its genome, and many of the viral genes respond to stress - with implications for host adaptation. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Hi all. I am very excited that after 6 years I finally got my phylogenetic comparative methods book and online exercises online. Feel free to use and share. The book is here: nhcooper123.github.io/pcm-primer/. Note that it is not finished, we had to abandon it before the sunk costs fallacy broke us

Aerobic sister lineage of breviates has gene-rich mitochondrial genomes #microbiology #eukaryotes #mitochondria #protists #MicroSky #ProtistsOnSky @cellpress.bsky.social www.cell.com/current-biol...

So you are using IQ-TREE to estimate a tree for "deep time" phylogenetics using amino acid alignments. There is a lot of confusion about how to test model fit. Here are some suggestions.

Our SPECIAL ISSUE on MOLECULAR EVOLUTION & ECOLOGY is out! Editorial: @yehumoran.bsky.social, @berndpulverer.bsky.social et al Reviews on Asgard archaea, epimutations, giant-virus/host dynamics, smartphone analogy for animal origins… …& many related primary articles link.springer.com/journal/4431...

Happy to open a new BlueSky account to discuss the #diversity and #evolution of #protists. 🧬🔬 Stay tuned!

Our phylogenetic classification of >400 diatom genera is now published in Journal of Phycology. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🧵 1/10 New paper out in @natmicrobiol.nature.com from my postdoc at @mib-wur.bsky.social! 🎉 How eukaryote-like was the archaeal ancestor of eukaryotes? Sequence searches alone can't tell us — so we used protein structure prediction to look deeper. 🧬 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Read our review about the "Diversity, ecology, cell biology and evolution of the Asgard archaea" in @natrevmicro.nature.com here: www.nature.com/articles/s41... By @kassipan.bsky.social @stephkoe.bsky.social @micropat.bsky.social & @gerbenz.bsky.social

We are very excited to share a new resource from our team: spatial subcellular proteome maps in plants! We developed an MS-based method that registers localizations of about 8000 proteins in Arabidopsis roots in a single experiment. (1/9) www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

We’ve extended the deadline!

Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating). A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)

Huge news 🌍🧬 The Protist 10,000 Genomes Project is joining the Earth BioGenome Project. Protists may represent the majority of eukaryotic diversity — yet only a tiny fraction have reference genomes. Time to change that. 🚀✨ Learn more 👉 ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/p10k/ #EBP #Protists #Genomics #TreeOfLife

Spectacular study revealing multiple ways by which Choanoeca flexa forms monolayers! Congratulations to @thibautbrunet.bsky.social Núria Ros-Rocher @pasteur.fr and all partners involved 👏👏👏

This looks so cool! 😍

Protist lovers: Please apply for a week of rhapsody! Learn by doing: MicroSEA (Microbial Sea Eukaryotes) course is a one-week, field-based summer school to train early-career researchers in the diversity, ecology, and single-cell biology of marine protists. opbc.sciencesconf.org #protistsonsky

Great to see this paper in all its glory online: link.springer.com/article/10.1... A huge effort from Gordon and the team at @pjkeelinglab.bsky.social! Phylogenomic tree of Cercozoa based on single-cell transcriptomes from 100 uncultured cells @ubcbotany.bsky.social @science.ubc.ca

Have a novel protist's genome or transcriptome and want to predict it's mitochondrial proteome? Look no further than CoMR, this handy bioinformatic workflow to help you: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #phylogenetics