Human design or AI-generated? 🤖🎨 With AI-generated images everywhere, we get this question a lot! The figures in our publications are designed by a talented human: Marie. 🌱✨✏️🧠🌿 👉 See her work: www.izmb.uni-bonn.de/en/pbb/mh 📖 Example: doi.org/10.1111/tpj.... #SciArt #SciComm @puckerlab.bsky.social

🌱 Systems Ecology is now live! A new independent, researcher-run, diamond OA journal for ecological research through systems science. Free to read. Free to publish. No APCs. We are now open for submissions: systems-ecology.org Please help spread the word!

We have quite a nice event lined up for the KNVM Fall Meeting - Fundamental Microbiology It's a small event, but we'll have a bit of everything, with archaea, viruses, bacteria and even fish microbiome 🐟😅 📍Leiden, The Netherlands 🗓️ November 6, 2026 📝 Registration: www.formdesk.com/universiteit...

A genome language model reveals the interactions hidden in non-coding DNA, pointing to new putative RNAs and repetitive elements in bacterial genomes. @garykbrixi.bsky.social @maxewilkinson.bsky.social @mfgrp.bsky.social @brianhie.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Amazing opportunity for post-doctoral researchers to move to the UK 'MOBILITY offers 6 outstanding postdoctoral researchers a 5-year opportunity to develop their own ambitious research programme at University of Birmingham' www.birmingham.ac.uk/about/colleg...

MOBILITY - University of Birmingham

Retaining Europe's brightest researchers to drive the next generation of life science breakthroughs.

birmingham.ac.uk

2023: 8,039 proposals 2024: 10,360 proposals 2025: 17,066 proposals 2026: 21,627 proposals Something's gotta give

Iva Vukušić@vukusiciva.bsky.social · 7d ago

This ridiculous number of applications is, in my view, the result of 2 nightmare developments happening concurrently 1.the precariousness of the job market for young PhD graduates which then fuels further: 2.the AI tools enabling overproduction of proposals. #Research #ERC #ResearchFunding #Academia

🚨We're hiring a new Curator of Mammals!!🚨 🦍🐕🦝🐅🦓🦌🐃🐖🐏🐫🐘🦏🦛🐿️🦔🦇🦥🦦🦨🦘🦡🐋🦭🦒🧸 Come join the Vertebrate Unit at @nhmdk.bsky.social—a fantastic team in the heart of Denmark's beautiful capital! Amazing collections, incredible history. Please share widely! 🧪🏛️ candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

Tenure Track Assistant Professor or Associate Professor and Curator of Mammals

Tenure Track Assistant Professor / Associate Professor, and Curator of Mammals at Natural History Museum Denmark The Natural History Museum Denmark wishes to ap

candidate.hr-manager.net

🎉Hooray – our new directors @tatianailyina.bsky.social and JB Raina have been officially welcomed yesterday!🎉 It was a wonderful event with lovely people, great music & lots to celebrate. We are all joyfully excited & look forward to what lies ahead. mpi-bremen.de/en/Page6809.... Pics: K. Rolfes

Some of the smallest 😎 viruses on Earth are all around us. Three or four genes 😍 each, in nearly every environment. We keep finding thousands by sequencing, yet don't know who they infect, can't easily isolate them, or even how the few we have infect a cell. Our new preprint takes this on 🧵👇

Meet the first of our creative postdocs: “I'm Daniela Ramirez, a postdoc studying plant-bacteria interactions and fascinated by microbes living within plants. My research uses bGWAS to uncover how Pseudomonas infects and colonizes Arabidopsis thaliana.” #PAWGermany #PAW2026 #PostdocAppreciationWeek

The colorless dictyochophyte Ciliophrys sp. Baltic has lost a plastid but hosts a bacterial endosymbiont #microbiology #endosymbionts #plastids #MicroSky #ProtistsOnSky @commsbio.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Check out @sulheim.bsky.social's paper! The latest from our lab showing that some species do actually coexist robustly, no matter what or how much you feed them, whether the environment around them is constant, and whether or not they depend on each other metabolically for amino acids and vitamins.

Snorre Sulheim@sulheim.bsky.social · last wk.

Finally online! Cross-feeding enables robust coexistence between four bacterial species | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #microsky

Nihar Shah did a heroic experiment for TMLR: he spent 20-25 hours over two weeks interviewing authors of seemingly low-quality submissions about their own papers. He confirmed what we all suspected: people submitting these papers have *no idea* what is going on in them.

Transactions on Machine Learning Research@tmlrorg.bsky.social · 2w ago

TMLR has faced a deluge of submissions, necessitating stricter desk rejection policies due to limited reviewer capacity Co-EiC Nihar Shah reached out to authors of 10 papers slated for desk reject. Could they answer questions about their *own* submission? medium.com/@TmlrOrg/ask...

Happy to share our latest work digging a bit more into what makes the the core microbiota of photosynthetic organisms convergent (or not!). Work performed @lipme-toulouse.bsky.social @cnrs.fr, in collaboration with @guan06rui.bsky.social @quadraminstitute.bsky.social tinyurl.com/3e958dt6 (1/10)

Environmental factors and microbe-microbe interactions drive the structure of the core microbiota of terrestrial microalgae

Plants and other photosynthetic organisms interact with their environment and surrounding microbiota through specialized associations. A global core microbiota has been proposed at high taxonomic levels, such as the order level. However, it remains unclear which environmental factors and how microbe-microbe interactions drive variation of this core microbiota at lower taxonomic resolution. Here, we leveraged the environmental diversity of 141 sites across the southwest of France to characterize algal populations, and their associated bacterial and fungal microbiota. We then performed a meta-analysis, combining these data with published datasets to formally identify the global core microbiota of terrestrial photosynthetic organisms, which comprises seven bacterial and five fungal orders. We next investigated diversity within this core microbiota and the environmental drivers shaping site-specific community composition. While environmental factors have a low impact on the total relative abundance of core orders, the core microbiota at the ASV-level is impacted by climatic factors, edaphic factors, and plant community descriptors. Using interaction network analysis, we finally explored how microbe-microbe interactions contribute to the assembly of stable core communities. Our results show that core ASVs occupy central positions in algal-associated microbial networks and that distinct core orders drive site-specific variation in core microbiota structure. Together, these findings highlight the importance of both environmental context and microbial interactions in shaping the composition and stability of the core microbiota associated with photosynthetic organisms. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, 951444 – PATHOCOM, erc-stg-948219, EPYC Agence Nationale de la Recherche, ANR-10-LABX-41 Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, https://ror.org/00cwqg982, BB/ X011054/1, BBS/E/F/000PR13631

tinyurl.com

Ten years ago Tami, Roy, and I released a movie we made of antibiotic resistance evolving in real time. I thought maybe a couple thousand people tops would see it. I couldn't have imagined it would be seen millions of times, and be taught from middle school through the graduate level worldwide

You'll never dry alone: cross-kingdom metabolic coupling supports the desiccation resilience in a macroalgal holobiont nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #Commentary by Flores-Uribe highlighting the recent work by Wang et al. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/VCAUHX... @ppflrs.bsky.social

A short thread on differences in KEGG annotations using different tools, also relevant when using tools like METABOLIC, DRAM, and KEGGdecoder that use KEGG annotations 🧬🖥️🦠

You'll never dry alone: cross‐kingdom metabolic coupling supports the desiccation resilience in a macroalgal holobiont - nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

You'll never dry alone: cross‐kingdom metabolic coupling supports the desiccation resilience in a macroalgal holobiont

Click on the article title to read more.

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

📣...and now for something completely different: no plant pathogens, no Verticillium, but lichens! Driven by our lichen king🤴@ciarankelly.bsky.social with help of a.o. @hroevenich.bsky.social @usadellab.bsky.social @vivienrosenthal.bsky.social Watch for more in future! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Decoupled evolution of antimicrobial repertoires in lichen-forming fungi

Lichens are stable multipartite symbioses in which a fungal mycobiont associates with one or more photosynthetic partners while hosting complex microbiomes. Secreted antimicrobial proteins (AMPs) have...

biorxiv.org

Ciaran Kelly@ciarankelly.bsky.social · 3w ago

Our new preprint is out! 🍄 Decoupled evolution of antimicrobial repertoires in lichen-forming fungi We compared many lichen-forming fungal genomes to ask how different photobiont associations relate to their antimicrobial repertoires.

New Letter: "An LRR co-receptor kinase essential for systemic nitrogen-demand signalling" rdcu.be/bePgscq8DY4a It is co-receptor for CEPR1, assigning a function to the last unknown clade of this receptor family. Key regulator of systemic N-demand signalling in plants. #PlantScience

Bunsen burners’ reputation for sterilizing workplaces flames out www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Bunsen burners’ reputation for sterilizing workplaces flames out

Study shows that the venerable device does not waft bacteria away from workbenches, as is often assumed.

nature.com

For anyone not following the drama, there's been apparently a big development in ai math, along with some accusations of very bad behavior by OpenAI. But we don't have details yet. If I understand it, Buckmaster and Levent Alpoge made a big discovery on Navier-Stokes. Events go something like this:

Michael Barany@mbarany.com · 3w ago

copying here so it's in-thread too bsky.app/profile/mbar...

De novo coassembly of functional chlorophyll- and carotenoid-protein complexes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

De novo coassembly of functional chlorophyll- and carotenoid-protein complexes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Chlorophylls are essential for photosynthesis, yet their heterologous production is a major challenge in synthetic biology due to pathway complexity and the diversion of resources away from essential ...

science.org

Happy to share the third chapter of my postdoctoral adventure at @mpipz.bsky.social ➡️doi.org/10.64898/2026.04.20.719616 We used C. chenopodiifolia's ability to produce explosive aerial fruit and non-explosive underground fruit to identify REVOLUTA's role in cell fate and wall patterning🌿💥 ⬇️🧵

First paper from the Ma Lab@ IPMB published in ISMEJ. We identified a microbial imbalance mutant mimb-1 with an upregulated JA signaling output. (1/n) academic.oup.com/ismej/articl...

Upregulated jasmonate signaling shifts Arabidopsis microbiota interactions and stress adaptations through a positive feedback loop

Abstract. The model plant Arabidopsis thaliana hosts diverse microbial communities collectively known as the microbiota. The plant microbiota is generally

academic.oup.com

pretty cool, a special brew for #Botanik-Tagung2026 🍺

Anyone posting from the Plasmid meeting in Berlin? Wondering how it is going

A beautiful piece of detective work by @honour.bsky.social + colleagues revealing the origins of Ralstonia disease of bananas on Martinique. As so often, ICEs (ICERs!) prove to be extraordinary capacitors for evolutionary change. Evolution for evolution's sake 🤔 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...

Interspecies Exchange of Mobile Genetic Elements During a Plant Disease Outbreak

Abstract. Outbreak sequencing provides insight into the origin and evolutionary processes acting on emerging pathogens. Sequencing a historic multihost out

doi.org

Super excited of obtaining a ERCstg to support our project MORPHEUS 🎉🎉 Receiving this grant is a pivotal moment for my lab at @zmbp-tuebingen.bsky.social as will allow to extend the scope of our research in cellular reprogramming using ribosome dormancy as entry point 😴🌱❄️🔬 @erc.europa.eu

European Research Council (ERC)@erc.europa.eu · 4w ago

📣 Good news! 📣 Results of the ERC 2026 Starting Grant call are out! Funding worth a total of €705 million will go to 421 early-career researchers across Europe. Discover who, what and where 👉 link.europa.eu/9M3MmN 🧪 #ERCStG #FrontierResearch #HorizonEurope 🇪🇺 @scienceinnovation.ec.europa.eu

I'm excited to share that my newly funded #ERCStG FRONTERA is recruiting two postdoctoral researchers at @ipbhalle.bsky.social 🌱🔬 If you are passionate about plant immunity, proteolysis, membrane proteins, or proteomics, I'd love to hear from you. 🧵 Please RT/share!