Having a hard time keeping up with the fast-moving field of origin of eukaryotes/Asgards archaea? Our new perspective article can help, we review the status of research over the last decade and where it's going.
The archaeal roots of eukaryotic life
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Just to be completely clear: putting basil into a BLT is preposterous! 😜
We’re on the same page
Ha!
Very good name. Like a sandwich you’d get at an American-style diner in Italy.
I'm thankful to MBE for publishing this paper. I wan't sure anybody would. The handling editor (I now know was Jeff Townsend) was great, as were the 2 reviewers. It is not an outcome/product/discovery, it is my way of thinking about HGT & pangenomes 1/3 academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...
I went down to 30 but probably climbing again... I need supervision
My partner once cleaned out my sock drawer and counted 72 pairs! (I was shamed and many were subsequently discarded).
A tomahawk missile costs the taxpayers the same amount of money as one five-year major NIH research grant. Remember that every time they tell us one of those missed the target, blew up paintings of enemy aircraft or tanks, or was the fifth and unnecessary hit on the same target.
Loving the eagle nest on the big screen at my local bar. Who needs the hockey game?
Should I be the guy who asks to change it from the SoCal eagle to the BC eagle nest?
At ~$1 billion/day, the US has spent as much on the war in Iran in ten days as the entire FY25 budget for the National Science Foundation ($10 billion).
Trump's FY26 budget request for the agency declined to $3.9 billion, due to a "realignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment."
I was worried!
This! 👇
New preprint on the limits of detecting higher-order interactions in microbial communities.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We find that the dominance of additive and pairwise interactions on community function may not reflect biological simplicity, but fundamental limits of statistical detection.
Canadian average is probably pulled down from near 100% to 92% due to French people in the Plateau disliking other French people in the Plateau.
This chart. A measure of what different countries think of their own people. Top of the chart, 53% of Americans think their fellow Americans are bad people, immoral. In Canada, the very opposite, where 92% believe other Canadians are good people. Tell me that 49th parallel doesn't mean something. 🧵
On this International Women's Day, a reminder that intimate-partner violence has tripled in Quebec over the past decade, and the CAQ refuses to allocate the funds needed for adequate shelter space.
This is a systemic failure.
An editorial by @mtltoula.bsky.social.
#polqc
#OnThisDay in 1938, American evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis was born. Margulis is most known for developing and popularising the endosymbiotic theory, which explains how eukaryotic cells evolved organelles from simpler prokaryotic organisms that resided within another and became incorporated.
My International Women's Day message to all the girls and young women out there (and the older ones too!): Just keep on running like a gir!!!!!
🏃🏼♀️ #IWD2026
📹: @ambermac.bsky.social
New paper alert: Paralog interference contributes to the preservation of genetic redundancy www.cell.com/current-biol...
Call for applications, pls share!
2026 Evolutionary Medicine Summer Institute (EMSI) advances research in a frontier of evolutionary medicine. They provide training in methods needed to address cutting edge questions in that frontier.
2026 focus: Climate Change and Health
sites.duke.edu/emsi/
New paper out in MBE! 🧵
"Genomic Perplexity and the Evolution of Context-Dependent Function"
The big idea: genes don't have fixed functions. Function emerges from context - genomic, cellular, environmental. And we can quantify this. academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...
Working on a 🧵 Bacterial Tad pili extend
and retract pili using a single motor ATPase with a unidirectional catalytic mechanism. We find that the Tad motor achieves bidirectionality by physical inversion; alternating which face of the ATPase toroid engages the IM platform complex. #microsky
In case you missed it: our review titled "Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities" is out! 🚨
Let me hit you with some highlights on why spatial structure matters. (and why you should care!)
Sharing is appreciated 🙏 🧵👇
doi.org/10.1093/fems...
1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology.
We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.
Measles cases are resurging globally, but genomic surveillance at the global scale is sparse. In our new preprint, we show wastewater can provide population-level and low-cost data on virus spread and evolution.
See @kgandersen.bsky.social's post for a high level summary, more detail here though!🧵
Make no mistake this is a concerted and organised attempt to completely undermine science and expert opinion. This is Covid denialism on steroids and it’s on all of academia to see this for what it is and push back as strongly as possible
The fundamental premise behind AI-enabled cheating is that coursework is merely busy work, because your'e just doing it for professors.
We would never say that showing up for football practice is merely busy work because you're just doing it for your coaches.
