New preprint about closely-related #methanogens living inside ciliates and animal guts!! We found that ciliate symbionts are functionally indistinct from free-living spp, while gut symbionts have streamlined genomes encoded for scavenging. read on if you're curious why 🤔 #ProtistsOnSky #SymbioSky

We stumbled upon an unusual gene called 'rqua' in the genome of some freshwater sponges. In microbes, this gene confers the ability to make a ubiquinone analog - rhodoquinone - which can help the respiratory chain run without oxygen.

How common is multicellularity in bacteria? And archaea? And how does it evolve? We wrote a short review "On the architecture and evolution of prokaryotic multicellularity". Preprint link: bit.ly/4ta06Gq Sharing and comments are much appreciated. 1/4

New paper alert!

Our new article on #protist global distributions combining the #Mixoplankton and #metaPR2 databases with newly revised functional annotations. rdcu.be/fanlx

receiving the onion in print each month brings me a lot of joy, this is a true steal

love when there's an article about how life is sustainable in the superheated waters surrounding a hydrothermal volcanic fissure on the ocean floor and then like six paragraphs in you find out the author's parents are chemosynthetic bacteria 🙄

Check out our latest pre-print of our favourite pets - the breviates. This work was led by Zhezhen Yi in collaboration with @andrewjroger.bsky.social and many others! By studying diverse breviates we were able to see how different metabolic pathways can evolved in response to low-oxygen.

glad so many of you *like* the 𝘝𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘺𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘢 having lunch 🙂 but don't miss the recent work of beryl rapaport et al. on another amoeba, 🔥 𝘐𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘦𝘣𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘴 🔥dancing at 63°C on STC 👉 smallthingsconsidered.blog/schaechter/2...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #protistsonsky

Excited to share that @michelle-hauer.bsky.social's paper with @katiekliermicrobe.bsky.social @maggielangwig.bsky.social @karthik-a.bsky.social on phage interactions with chemosynthetic symbionts was published today. #NSF and @schmidtocean.bsky.social supported. academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a...

The day is finally here!! On behalf of all the co-organizers the Comparative Genomics of Unicellular Eukaryotes website is open. comparativegenomics2026.com Invited speakers will be added to the website in the coming weeks. Watch this (well, that^) space!

The villains in this story are us...complicity is shared, whether we voted for the US administration that is responsible for this wave of violence or [not] ... its up to us to stop it & spend the rest of our lives making amends to the rest of the world. 500womenscientists.org/updates/2026...

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...

“A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known" - Bertrand Russell, 1976. Time-lapse video of Vampyrella lateritia eating Spirogyra algae from Science Source/Oliver Skibbe. 🦠

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...

Announcing our next #NSFfunded workshop on "Telling Stories Through Data", co-lead by myself + @vgwschutte.bsky.social! It’s half bioinformatics data viz & half #SciComm - this year’s focus is host-associated microbiome datasets. Apply here to join us (form closes 1/10) bit.ly/TSTD2026 #symbiosky

So excited to see this preprint out!! There is so much gold hiding in public eDNA studies, just waiting for taxon-focused investigations to pull out stories like this. Congrats on a great analysis @annaschreck.bsky.social @symbiosisrox.bsky.social

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...

Check out our preprint!! So many cool analyses you can do with public rDNA datasets. Especially if you work with understudied groups or habitats! #ProtistsOnSky

Microbes can store “memories” by collectively altering their environment. These externalized “memories” impact how microbial communities assemble. isme-microbes.org/bacterial-me... #MicrobeMemory #MicrobialEcology

Wisconsin Evolution is accepting applications for our Seminar Series' Early Career Scientist Award. Come share your evolution research and visit UW-Madison's evolution community. Open to grad students and postdocs (<5 yrs post PhD) from outside UW-Madison. Apply by Dec 15th here: shorturl.at/4a4O6

How do cells adapt morphology to function? In a 🔥 preprint by @zjmaggiexu.bsky.social , with @dudinlab.bsky.social and @amyweeks.bsky.social , we identify a self-organizing single-cell morphology circuit that optimizes the feeding trap structure of the suctorian P. collini. 🧵 tinyurl.com/4k8nv926

And vice versa, sulfur-oxidizing bacteria are masters of colonizing marine hosts! This was a wonderful collaboration with Sam Vohsen, Eslam Osman, Mandy Joye, Matt Saxton, grubervodicka.bsky.social, @ibaums.bsky.social

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

Job Opening **ASSISTANT PROFESSOR MARINE ECOLOGY**, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Rhode Island. jobs.uri.edu/postings/15960

This past Thursday I successfully defended my dissertation! Thank you @symbiosisrox.bsky.social and the rest of the lab for making it a super fun celebration! I dressed up my son as a #ciliate for the occasion and we jumped into Narragansett Bay at @urigso.bsky.social beach afterwards #ProtistsOnSky

This is a long shot but does anyone know how to pronounce Epalxellidae?? 😂 #ProtistsOnSky

Happening tomorrow!

🎃 👻 Happy Halloween! Last-minute costume idea: giant tubeworm. 🦑 🌊

New paper out! 💌🔬Spirorhynchus verrucosus is a Muranotrichean and its sister has been livin' in the deep sea Santa Barbara Basin since the 90's! See them TUFTS!! Wonderful work of B Bourland & Cepicka Lab, R Beinart, & J Bernhard enabling deep sea sampling. Read h1.nu/spiror #ProtistsOnSky #MicroSky

✨🌊 The ones who get it, get it. ⬇️ 💭 What are we missing? #URIGSO

Database Release: PPSDB, a Linked Open Data Knowledge Base for Protist–Prokaryote Symbioses onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #jcampubs

I am defending my dissertation titled "Ecology and evolution of anaerobic ciliate methanogen symbioses in marine oxygen depleted environments" on Nov 6 at 9:30 am EST! Message me for the zoom link if you are interested in joining! (Or join in person at beautiful URI GSO) #ProtistsOnSky #SymbioSky

#SymbioSky #MicroSky #ProtistsOnSky the plot thickens 👇 as we all suspected and feared(?), organellogenesis is not straightforward, but rather, well,... a thicket ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Love #protists? Then you'd love this! Beautiful collection of hand-drawn critters represented here at the Oxford-Japan symposium on ethological dynamics in diorama environments sites.google.com/view/oxford-... #ciliates #testateamoeba #diatoms

From MBoC: Wallace F. Marshall (UCSF) and team profile the giant ciliate Stentor pyriformis—symbiotic algae in microtubule baskets, symbiont-dependent phototaxis, and a standard genetic code. Paper: www.molbiolcell.org/doi/10.1091/... #CellBiology

What a lovely find! I adore that I’m always seeing new things, even after 3 years of looking at plankton. This is a ciliate from the family Folliculinidae (thanks for the ID @microbe_guru !). I adore its colour! #marineplankton 🦑

We're hiring for several positions (a post-bac researcher in #transcriptomics, a #phage #postdoc, a senior researcher (broad topics) and a graduate student to work on #ciliates) - find info here: www.marine.usf.edu/genomics/app...

New publication out!

I had such a great time doing this podcast! Thanks @markowenmartin.bsky.social for the chance to talk about snails and their microbial friends.

How bad will it be? Catastrophic. Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come. But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget. Speak up now before it is too late. (inflation adjusted $-s below)

Propaganda we're not falling for: 🦈Sharks are scary (amazing creatures, important for the ecosystem) 🌊Benthic invertebrates aren’t cute (they are precious) 🪨Geology is boring (rocks ROCK) 📈Long-term data sets aren't important (they are SO important!) 🔬Science isn’t cool (science rules, obviously)

RFK Jr. says the top scientific journals are “corrupt”. Yet his MAHA disinformation report includes fake references and grossly false statements. Reviewers and editors at any of these journals would have caught these, resulting in its wholesale rejection. Don’t give an inch to this charlatan.

🎺🚨👀 WATCH TODAY: over 200 climate scientists and meteorologists (including NOAA and NASA veterans) are hosting a 100-hour livestream starting **today at 1 PM ET**, exploring how DOGE is impacting weather & climate science. Trailer: youtu.be/-Go-RCg3AjI Watch: wclivestream.com/watch

An open letter highlighting the co-optation of open science language in the latest Executive Order to justify policies that are, in fact, antithetical to open science principles. Read and consider signing with your support. www.standupforscience.net/open-letter-...

Question for #protistsonsky #SymbioSky: what are examples of prokaryotic genera which form mutualistic symbioses with both animals and free-living protists? i know about methanogenic endosymbionts of protists/animals, and examples of pathogenic microbes e.g. with amoeba, looking for more examples!

🎓🌊 A weekend full of celebration, tradition, & new beginnings. Congrats to the Class of 2025! We were proud to honor our graduates at the GSO Shirting Ceremony on Friday & commencement ceremony on Saturday. Here’s to the next chapter for this incredible group of ocean scientists. ➡️ buff.ly/2dXsHqX

Abolish ICE is the compromise position. We need to abolish the entire Department of Homeland Security, which was created after 9-11 with the express purpose of terrorizing immigrant communities, activists, and ordinary people in a sickening display of security theater that does not make anyone safer

Organic food doesn't cause autism. Neither do vaccines. Help stop the madness, spread the word with the new Stand Up For Science microflyer! #StopRFK #SaveScience www.standupforscience.net/microflyer1