New preprint! 🧵 Best #Cercozoa genome alert! For a decade, I’ve studied protist ecology through questions like who eats whom. But beyond “they eat this, they eat that,” what do #protists do to their environment, biochemically speaking? #protistsonsky @huesnaoeztoprak.bsky.social

[1/n] Our preprint-in-progress on RNA regionalization in Stentor is no longer in progress! Now @pnas.org 🥳 Turns out a single cell isn't a homogenous soup… it has molecular geography, including things like regionalized transcription factors. Think bicoid, but in a ciliate.

Genome-wide analysis of mRNA regionalization in a giant single cell | PNAS

The molecular mechanisms that produce cell structure are poorly understood. The giant ciliate Stentor coeruleus is a unicellular model organism who...

pnas.org

So cool! I watched this 10x in a row.

Katrina Velle@katrinavelle.bsky.social · 2mo ago

After a long hiatus, happy #MicroscopyMonday! Here are some amoebae squeezing themselves into narrow channels (part of a video for our preprint pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41377514/). Sound effects by Dillon (my 4 month old who may have had a little to do with the bluesky hiatus!)

Did you know that thermophilic amoeba have been isolated by researchers at Syracuse University from a steam vent at SUNY ESF? artsandsciences.syracuse.edu/biology/news... You can visit this geyser of the built environment when you come to our first fall meeting, held at SUNY ESF this year!

Attending #ASMicrobe this year and want to keep the fun going? Or, do you have FOMO from not attending? We’ve got you covered! Save the date for CNY ASM’s inaugural fall meeting! October 16 in Syracuse NY! More details to follow.

If you have 16S long reads (e.g., plasmidsaurus data), this is an amazingly accurate and fast ASV caller. Of course it's another amazing program from @jimshaw.bsky.social

bioRxiv Bioinfo@biorxiv-bioinfo.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Sensitive long-read amplicon sequence variant recovery with savont https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.26.727271v1

Excited to share a preprint from my postdoc research at @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social in the @banfieldlab.bsky.social! We surveyed soil microbiomes for autotrophy - and found it nearly everywhere, but most abundant in deep, saturated soils. Check it out below! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🧪 That sourdough starter on your counter? It's a microbial community that's been evolving the whole time you've fed it. @oliverio.bsky.social's lab just won a $2.1M NIH grant to use starters as a model system for studying how microbiomes evolve.

Sourdough Helps Syracuse Scientists Understand Evolution

A new $2.1 million grant from the NIH will support the Oliverio lab’s fermented food research over the next five years.

artsandsciences.syracuse.edu

hi #abscicon26! I’m looking forward to talking about Incendiamoeba and friends (“Microbial eukaryotic interactions in geothermal springs”) in tomorrow’s 2-3:30 Symbioses session

While BioNtech & Moderna become household names because of their Covid vaccines, those emerged from different projects: finding ways to treat the most challenging cancers. They hypothesized that we could vaccinate patients against their own tumors, & evidence is mounting that they were right! 1/n 🧪

Hey #GSB2026! Want to hear about soil protists? Want to learn more about long-read sequencing and assembling protist genomes? My talk tomorrow morning in the "Technological, Methodological, and Omics Advances - II" session will highlight some recent advancements in these realms 🦠🧬

1/ BRAKER4 hatched! The Earth BioGenome Project is on track to sequence ~1.5M eukaryotic species. Every one needs a structural annotation. No Perl monolith was going to survive that. So we rewrote BRAKER from the ground up. github.com/Gaius-August...

We tested the efficacy of semi-permeable capsules to capture protists from cultures and environmental samples using the Onyx from @atrandi.bsky.social. Tremendous effort from everyone in the lab and led by Marco Fantini and Nik Brask - check out the videos here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#ProtistsOnSky #FungiFriends in soil, it's not just fungi entrapping worms for dinner with their hyphae, it's also the protists that feast on fungal hyphae. after all, it's a jungle... thx to kenneth @dumack.bsky.social for this highly interesting 🧵

Kenneth Dumack@dumack.bsky.social · 4mo ago

We all know #fungi are the dominant microbial #eukaryotes in #forest #soils… or are they really? In our new paper, we revisited 51 forest metatranscriptomes from 4 European and North American forest regions - and found that protistan predators outshine fungi in activity!

Undergraduate researcher extraordinaire @melpaige05.bsky.social presented some of her recent findings on the role of temperature for the three life stages of a Heterolobosean protist (Fumarolamoeba sp.) today! Melanie's passion for pink posters and characterizing this amoeba is inspiring 💓🦠

I have a new review out in TiG titled, “The ecology of horizontal gene transfer”! I’ve been thinking about these ideas for years and this field is growing so fast it’s becoming impossible to review it. I hope this paper sparks discussion on different ways we can look at DNA transfer!

The ecology of horizontal gene transfer

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) generates genetic variation in populations across all domains of life; however, most studies focus on individual transf…

sciencedirect.com

journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... We have a new paper out that looks at metabolic adaptations to mildly acidic conditions in a denitrifier isolated from acidic, nitrate-contaminated groundwater. 🧵

Contrasting effects of glutamate and branched-chain amino acid metabolism on acid tolerance in a Castellaniella isolate from acidic groundwater | Applied and Environmental Microbiology

Nitrate pollution in groundwater is a major threat to both environmental and human health. This nitrate pollution can come from a variety of sources, including farm fertilizers, sewage, animal waste, ...

journals.asm.org

We are accepting applications for up to 3 Peggy Cotter Travel Awards ($1,650 each) to support early-career professionals attending ASM Microbe 2026. Apply by Feb 16, 2026 by emailing a 1-page letter to jegoff@esf.edu. ASM membership required; branch membership may be completed once that is live.

Excited to announce the re-establishment of the Central New York Branch of the American Society for Microbiology (CNY ASM)! Founded in 1921, revived in 2025 to support collaboration, inclusive programming, and microbiologists at all career stages! This is our official BlueSky account!

🚨 Surprise podcast episode alert! 🚨 This week on Tiny Living Beings, I interviewed @oliverio.bsky.social and @hbrappap.bsky.social who led the discovery of the ‘fire amoeba’, that can reproduce at the highest temperature ever recorded for a eukaryote! 🌋 #protistsonsky

Introducing the Fire Amoeba

open.spotify.com

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...

"A newly identified amoeba can survive at the temperature of a medium-well done steak" lol @scifri.bsky.social an apt comparison a hadn't previously considered... A pleasure chatting about our research led by @hbrappap.bsky.social & with a wonderful team of colleagues.

Science Friday@scifri.bsky.social · 8mo ago

A newly described amoeba came out of a somewhat boring stream. That doesn’t mean it’s not hardcore. 🔥 Plus, does this wet lava ball of an exoplanet, recently observed by #NASAWebb, have an atmosphere?

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

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...

A meta-analysis of environmental sequencing data reveals the global distribution and hidden diversity of marine anaerobic ciliates

Anaerobic protists are diverse, ecologically important members of anoxic microbial communities, acting as grazers, nutrient cyclers, and partners in multi-domain associations, yet remain understudied ...

biorxiv.org

NSF - Forced reorg - POs down ~ 40% (DRP, most rotators not renewed, retirements) - Forced move (and we have to pack and clean) to a building with no furniture, little to no conference space for panels, inadequate 🛜, …) I personally love the boxes they gave us for packing. “Details matter” 🙃

Delighted to share some coverage of our new preprint (doi.org/10.1101/2025...) from Scientific American and thank you @sciam.bsky.social @andreatweather.bsky.social for taking the time to chat with @hbrappap.bsky.social and I about why we are so excited about the geothermal 𝘐𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘦𝘣𝘢

Andrea Thompson@andreatweather.bsky.social · 8mo ago

It's been thought since the early 70s that eukaryotes (basically any life with a cell nucleus) wouldn't survive above 62C and no complex life had been shown living above 60C. Until the "fire amoeba"... 🧪 (These are some of my favorite stories to write, just weird neat stuff we're learning.)

Thanks nature news for featuring our recent preprint on 𝘐𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘦𝘣𝘢 led by @hbrappap.bsky.social (check out preprint here: doi.org/10.1101/2025...) #protistsonsky

Nature@nature.com · 8mo ago

This single-celled amoeba can thrive at temperatures that kill all other known eukaryotic life go.nature.com/4452LXP

Our attempt to give multinucleate cells the spotlight they deserve (seriously, they’re everywhere), led by the fearless @mrosjac.bsky.social and with @Markus Ganter doi.org/10.32942/X2M... We’d love your feedback while this goes through the peer review process! #MicroEvoSky #ProtistsonSky 🧪🌏

Well actually... 𝘐𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘦𝘣𝘢 just encyst 😜 they can recover from 70C fine! (but not 80C) @hbrappap.bsky.social

Space Coast Talon@brashtech.bsky.social · 8mo ago

But at 65 C, it’s adios, amoebas.

Introducing ** Incendiamoeba **, a eukaryote that can live at temperatures well beyond what we thought possible. 63C!! Read @hbrappap.bsky.social thread to see what we’ve already started to learn from this amazing organism! doi.org/10.1101/2025... #MicroSky #protistsonsky 🧪 #evobio

H. B. Beryl Rappaport@hbrappap.bsky.social · 8mo ago

So happy to announce our new preprint, “A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes.” We cultured a novel amoeba from Lassen Volcanic NP (CA, USA) that divides at 63°C (145°F) 🔥 - a new record for euk growth! #protistsonsky 🧵