How do cells assess mtDNA quality? Local ATP and membrane-potential gradients reflect mtDNA integrity and drive intracellular purifying selection. We introduce FAST, a scalable mtDNA QC assay in S. cerevisiae. Great collaboration with the Schmoller Lab. journals.plos.org/plosgenetics... 🧬⚡

Looking for a new 📕 to read about plants?? I highly recommend the brilliant book ‘Ferns, Lessons in survival from Earth’s most adaptable plants’ Written by @fernway.bsky.social and Jacob Suissa with amazing illustrations by Laura Silburn 🌿 #FernFriday 🌿

1. Apply for one of the positions below (lab or theory) by Jan 18th 2. Learn interdisc skills and discover cool new things about how mitochondria move and socialise 3. Explore some of Norway's beautiful nature (both the below, Rundemanen and Gullfjellet, <10km from work)

2026 ❤️ 🇳🇴

‼️Two new PhD positions open! One experimental, one modelling, exploring these beautiful collective dynamics in mitochondria across species. 🇳🇴, good pay, full staff benefits. [Shares much appreciated] Lab: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available... Modelling: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Thrilled to see our review article "The evolutionary origins of synaptic proteins" highlighted on the cover of Nature Reviews Neuroscience 🤩. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @msarscentre.bsky.social 🧠✨🧬🌊🪼🧽

Mitochondria, hypercubes, and a blackboard -- what a lot of favourite things for J Evol Biol this month! Thanks to all involved for a smooth and pleasant review editorial process; academic.oup.com/jeb/article/...

Ski season!

Paradise up on the mountain trails

We have wondered what a complex archaeal cell might look like ever since 2014. It’s been a long road (and the journey is far from over), but it’s a good time to pause for breath and look. These Asgard archaeal cells are a surprise! And that is the joy of being a cell biologist.

In some species, #mitochondria have lost functions: from specific complexes to the ability to produce #ATP (and more!). We examine the evolutionary pathways of this reduction, from yeast and mistletoe to parasite "MROs": doi.org/10.1093/jeb/... @mitomaths.bsky.social et al. 2025

Great to see this out there! We infer the evolutionary pathways behind patterns of AMR in Klebsiella across 102 states, finding globally consistent principles, state-specific deviations (and covariates), and validating evol predictions with new genomes. biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/

Celebrating grant award with a mountain run! MitoPhyto, a FRIPRO project, will combine modelling and microscopy to explore mitochondrial and mtDNA maintenance across non-bilaterian multicellular eukaryotes. Opportunities to come to Norway: please see next post

Gratulerer med dagen alle sammen! (non-Norway-based folks, happy Norwegian Constitution Day!)

Glad to share this review, which takes a narrative approach to explore mechanisms governing cytoplasmic inheritance. It highlights exciting advances in the field, while also pointing to the many open questions that remain. Have a read here: doi.org/10.1093/plph...

Had a brilliant time at the 54th Jírovec’s Protozoological Days in Frymburk. Amazing organisms, amazing science, lots of exciting organelle work. Beautiful setting too! Thanks to all www.chromera.org/konference/5...

May trails on the way to the final Applied Statistics lecture of the semester!

View from the office as summer approaches

Exciting permanent(!) #JobAlert for a #botanist to work in Bergen, Norway 🧪 PhD required, language proficiency required within two years. Apply by 25 April. #Ecology #Restoration #Botany

Out today: Exciting intermediate between endosymbiont and organelle identified! Endosymbionts in Angomonas deanei lost nearly all bacterial cell division genes. Instead, we identified a host-encoded protein, ETP9, that became specialized for endosymbiont division. 1/2 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Projector broke today, so a good old-school blackboard lecture on an intro to GLMs!

Watching the US take a wrecking ball to science 💔 🤯 Reminder of the importance of doing science in the open. Put data, software, resources in public domain, where no single govt can erase them. This is our collective knowledge. Distributed data systems are essential. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Great to see this out in final form! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Continuous buildup of single-cell-specific mtDNA mutations throughout ageing, and their links with health. Mitos, scRNA, scATAC, models, ER, neuro... a smorgasbord of science! Congrats all! @syssig.bsky.social

Started likelihood-based approaches for model selection in STAT200 today, one of my favourite things (and behind many of our research projects)! Combined with likelihood-free methods, my claim is that this is how we turn modelling (not really falsifiable) into science (testing hypotheses with data)

A classic to celebrate this evening's proposal submission. If you haven't heard this before, I recommend sticking with it, it's somewhat unlikely you've heard a song like this before! www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxjE... Lyrics www.metalkingdom.net/lyrics-song/...

Some shots from wintery commutes in 2025!

Nice group meeting today, celebrating exciting new positions and discussing the diverse ways we do science with data! Thanks all

We've been thinking a lot about "accumulation models" lately -- inferring how systems accumulate features over time. May be mutations in a tumor, characters in evol bio, gene losses in oDNA. Here's an instance of the well-known Mk model that captures this picture academic.oup.com/bioinformati... 1/

This year’s Mørketidens Mattemøte once again brought mathematicians from across Norway and the Nordic countries to @uitnorgesarktiske.bsky.social for two inspiring days of idea exchange and new connections. Thanks to Tromsø Forskningsstiftelse and Trond Mohn forskningsstiftelse for the support !

Getting back on the reading after a busy semester start. These look exciting in the world of organelle genomes! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (congrats @sloanevolab.bsky.social et al.!) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (congrats @wallaceucsf.bsky.social et al.!)

Advanced machine learning methods are cool, but here's why I'm excited to be teaching classic STAT200 (applied statistics) this spring! Featuring some of Bergen's mountains youtu.be/IdC7SzPV6EU

First skitur of 2025, chasing the sunrise

Happy new year! Write down 1 once, 2 twice, 3 three times, etc. 122333444455555.... Once you get to forty-five 45s, sum up all the digits you've written down. It's 2025 (45×45). 2025 is the only number except 1 for which this happens. Here's more 2025 fun www.numbersaplenty.com/2025

A new biosensor is born 👼 The NAPstar family of genetically-encoded sensors for live NADP redox monitoring🔋🪫 Jointly with the Morgan lab & @riemerlab.bsky.social we looked in vitro, in yeast, plants & mammalian cells 🧪🦠🧫🌱 Where to go next? @naturecomms.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s414...

We're excited to announce a generous $3.3M grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This support reinforces our mission to inspire new transformative open science models and pioneer a shift away from traditional publishing models and APCs. Read more on The Official PLOS Blog. plos.io/4iynqsD

Happy to share our collaborative review on the expansion of the MutS gene family in plants and all the cool (and in some cases still unknown) roles of these genes. Now published in @theplantcell.bsky.social! doi.org/10.1093/plce...

Second paper from the lab out today (woohoo!). This one led by Rachael DeTar. Check out what happens to mito+plastid translation machinery in plants that have lost photosynthesis! Published in @pnas.org: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Also available on bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Amazing news - the exhibition 'Jellyfish unveiled' is extended until January 26 at the University Museum of Bergen! Discover the secrets of jellyfish and their kin through the eyes of @joanjsoto.bsky.social, @alexandrejan.bsky.social & Anne Aasjord 📸🌊🧪 Find out more: tinyurl.com/3c2yjj2f

This looks very exciting! (sadly I'm not at the conf)

Mitochondrial DNA mutations in human oocytes undergo frequency-dependent selection but do not increase with age https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.09.627454v1

Inhibition of the PI3K-AKT-MTORC1 axis reduces the burden of the m.3243A>G mtDNA mutation by promoting mitophagy and improving mitochondrial function www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

What would be lost to the world if we all just stopped giving a shit what Web of Science chooses to index?

"We describe a #mtDNA variant that confers protection against variety of pathogens in #Drosophila. This protection was at least partially caused by enhanced cell-mediated innate #immunity, including higher numbers of immune cells prior to and during infection." journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...

More beautiful commuting on the trails, featuring dramatic mist and Norway's biggest tree, celebrated in typical understated style 🇳🇴🌲

Here's a mitochondrial "social network" (tracking encounters) emerging over time from their collective dynamics in a plant cell. This picture helps us understand their capacity to share and exchange biomolecules 🔬🌱🫂 Read more www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...; pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34015261/

First commute run for a while, following some illness, travel, and language exams. Beautiful wintery vibes throughout over the Bergen mountains!

Have had some good chats recently about pivoting to non-profit and society journals. A point to share/underline is that such options exist across the "prestige" spectrum. Some examples in the image. All heavily subjective of course; would love to hear thoughts from others!

What's the biggest sofa you can move round a right-angled corridor one metre wide? One of my favourite "easy to ask, hard to answer" maths problems has a [claimed] solution after many, many decades (!) of work arxiv.org/abs/2411.19826 (GIF from blogs.ams.org/visualinsigh...)