Tiny unicellular #eukaryotes, big #biomaterial inspiration. Excited to share our Nature Communications study showing that tintinnid ciliates build their chemical- and heat-resistant shells from self-assembling proteins we call Tintinnidorins. doi.org/10.1038/s414... #protistsonsky 1/3

New #ISEPpapers #preprint! A billion-year-old bacterial machinery replicates plastid DNA and supports kleptoplastidy www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #Protists #Algae #Microbes #Bacteria #Evolution #Symbiosis #Plastids

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

Dr. Roxanne Beinart@symbiosisrox.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Happy to share our new preprint led by @annaschreck.bsky.social with @micrott.bsky.social and Ivan Cepicka which capitalized on the rare opportunity to compare the genomes of closely related symbionts associated with animals vs. protists. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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!

Trends in Genetics@cp-trendsgenetics.bsky.social · 5mo ago

"The ecology of horizontal gene transfer" by Julia Van Etten and Matthew D. Johnson Free till May 3rd at authors.elsevier.com/a/1mmBPcQbJI...

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

Ben Collins@bencollins.bsky.social · 4mo ago

As the Adult Substack Babies rot on Twitter, please subscribe to a real newspaper. It is very on sale this week. $75 for a year delivered to your home. I will continue to dunk on them until they die.

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...

STCmicrobeblog@stcmicrobeblog.bsky.social · 6mo ago

#ProtistsOnSky no 'swimming' by 𝘝𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘺𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘢, definitively no 'staying still'. just a relaxed walk towards the lunch...

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

A Practical Approach to Study Uncultivated Protists Using Single‐Cell Techniques for Electron Microscopy

Protists represent a significant portion of eukaryotic diversity with a wide range of ecological roles, lifestyles, and diverse morphological traits. Despite their widespread importance in ecological....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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...

Phage-microbe interactions may contribute to the population structure and dynamics of hydrothermal vent symbionts

Abstract. Deep-sea hydrothermal vent ecosystems are sustained by chemoautotrophic bacteria that symbiotically provide organic matter to their animal hosts

academic.oup.com

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...

What we owe to ourselves and each other — 500 Women Scientists

Photo by Victor G on Unsplash In the 1st two weeks of 2026, we have seen the US government kidnap and kill people on US soil and abroad. Even in the US's sorted and dark history of imperialism an...

500womenscientists.org

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

Dr. Roxanne Beinart@symbiosisrox.bsky.social · 8mo ago

New preprint led by @annaschreck.bsky.social that capitalized on the wealth of publicly available 18S rRNA datasets to explore the oceanic distribution and diversity of understudied anaerobic ciliates. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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

Dr. Roxanne Beinart@symbiosisrox.bsky.social · 8mo ago

New preprint led by @annaschreck.bsky.social that capitalized on the wealth of publicly available 18S rRNA datasets to explore the oceanic distribution and diversity of understudied anaerobic ciliates. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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

Early Career Scientist Awards 2026

Application to the UW-Madison Evolution Seminar Series - Early Career Scientist Awards.

urldefense.com

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

Iliana Baums@ibaums.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Corals are masters of obtaining nutrition via symbioses, in the light and in the dark: deep sea corals can associate with sulfur-oxidizing chemoautotrophs, expressing pathways that oxidize sulfur and fix C. Corals hosting them derive some carbon from chemosynthesis. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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