Alvaro Rodriguez del Rio 🍉

Logo of Bin Chicken (Australian white ibis) on a rubbish bin, pulling out a strand of DNA

“Bin Chicken” is now published in Nature Methods! It substantially improves genome recovery through rational coassembly 🧬🖥️. Applied to public 🌍 metagenomes, we recovered 24,000 novel species 🦠, including 6 new phyla.
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
@benjwoodcroft.bsky.social @rhysnewell.bsky.social
🧵1/6

Enjoyed the presentation 'Chrysalis. Artists in Labs' today as part of Berlin Science Week.

Up on the stage also the lab's @alvarordr.bsky.social and artist Helena Nikonole, who gave a presentation on their planned interaction.

Organized by our friends at Art Laboratory Berlin.

CHRYSALIS. ARTISTS IN LABS During 2025 and 2026, Art Laboratory Berlin is unfolding the new innovative project CHRYSALIS. ARTISTS IN LABS with an interdisciplinary exchange between art and science in Berlin science laboratories...

As a part of Berlin Science week, I look forward to the event "Chrysalis. Artists in Labs", also featuring our lab's @alvarordr.bsky.social and our artist-in-residence Helena Nikonole

berlinscienceweek.com/programme/ch...

A genomic catalog of Earth's bacterial and archaeal symbionts www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #jcampubs

Picture of MEME students on the beach

Do you want to do a Masters in Evolutionary Biology? The call for applying to the MEME program is now open! MEME is a fantastic 2-year MSc between four European Universities on all areas of Evolutionary Biology. Apply and study in Sweden/France/the Netherlands/Germany/USA/Switzerland! www.evobio.eu

Very happy to participate in the Berlin Science week 2025 w/ @artlaboratoryb.bsky.social ! Come join us in this exciting event 👇

ecoevojobs.net 2025-26

UPDATE: The 2025-2026 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resources! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

A periodic table of bacteria?: Mapping bacterial diversity in trait space www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #jcampubs

We are hiring a PhD student! Are you fascinated by microbes and evolution? Come join us in Barcelona!

mvif season 5 keynotes

Season 5 is going to start 🔜

Check out the program and
feel free to join the keynotes by presenting your work–abstract submission is open www.microbiome-vif.org/en-US/-/info...

@kathlemon.bsky.social ‬ @saramitri.bsky.social @simrouxvirus.bsky.social @halllab.bsky.social @deepaagashe.bsky.social

Celebrating the small wins in academia A little reminder...

Celebrating the small wins in academia….a reminder to myself (and maybe you….)

Please share with someone you think might also need this reminder :)

open.substack.com/pub/matthias...

Will be presenting our results on the effect of multiple global change factors on soil prokaryotes in #ESEB2025 poster 127 today, come say hi if you wanna know more!

More than 100 humanitarian groups warn of mass starvation in Gaza A joint statement says the Israeli government's "siege" has left aid supplies "totally depleted".

This is heartbreaking and needs to stop

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Non-antibiotics disrupt colonization resistance against enteropathogens - Nature Non-antibiotic drugs from a wide range of therapeutic classes can alter the ability of gut commensals to resist invasion by enteropathogens, a previously underappreciated side effect of such drugs.

Seeing this published is even better than eating sweets! I am so happy and proud of whole @lisamaierlab.bsky.social, especially Lisa and @jdlcz.bsky.social who walked the funny/exciting/rocky road with me until the very end. Check it out!
#science #microbiome #health

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Awesome work by Ziqi Deng: TreeProfiler: a tool for large-scale metadata profiling along gene and species trees.
biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Interactive dynamic visualization of large trees + custom traits, MSA, domain architectures, functional terms & more + summary of features at internal nodes

The rare microbial biosphere harbors many chemosensitive microorganisms undetectable by regular shotgun metagenomics. We can now explore them using our custom target-capture sequencing approach. Impressive work by
Claudia Sanchis, part of her PhD thesis!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Phylogenomic analyses indicate the archaeal superphylum DPANN originated from free-living euryarchaeal-like ancestors Nature Microbiology - Phylogenetic reconstructions with conserved protein markers from the 11 known DPANN phyla reveal their monophyletic placement within the Euryarchaeota.

📣 We are proud of the publication of the second paper of @bbaker24.bsky.social PhD thesis. In collaboration with friends in Halifax we have studied the difficult question of the phylogeny of the DPANN archaea, composed of several phyla of highly reduced, fast-evolving epiparasites 🧵

rdcu.be/erkkU

We have updated our work "TreeProfiler: a tool for large-scale metadata profiling along gene and species trees"
biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Interactive viz of large trees + custom traits, MSA, domain architectures, functional terms & more + summary of features at internal nodes.

Soil microbial responses to multiple global change factors as assessed by metagenomics - Nature Communications Soils are usually exposed to multiple global change factors (like warming or contamination by pollutants), but the response of soil communities to combined global change factors is poorly understood. ...

Paper just out in @natcomms.nature.com by @alvarordr.bsky.social

Soil microbial responses to multiple global change factors as assessed by metagenomics

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Soil microbial responses to multiple global change factors as assessed by metagenomics - Nature Communications Soils are usually exposed to multiple global change factors (like warming or contamination by pollutants), but the response of soil communities to combined global change factors is poorly understood. ...

Our paper on the effect of multiple global change factors on soil prokariotes and viruses, just published in @natcomms.nature.com !

@mrillig.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Microbial model communities reveal widespread auxotrophies in abundant bacteria
Our results highlight the value of cultivating microorganisms in groups to cultivate:
1) abundant microorganisms
tinyurl.com/miintmodcom

Stand up for Science rally in Boston

✊Massive turnout for STAND UP FOR SCIENCE rally in Boston #StandUpForScience

#NatureCommunity Behind the paper by Damian Hernandez
Big box, small box: bacteria either have all around big niches or all around small niches

communities.springernature.com/posts/big-bo...

A metagenomic ‘dark matter’ enzyme catalyses oxidative cellulose conversion - Nature A metalloenzyme capable of oxidatively cleaving cellulose, found in a microbial community specialized in lignocellulose degradation, could enable sustainable biofuel production.

A metagenomic ‘dark matter’ enzyme catalyses oxidative cellulose conversion www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

Taking Stock of the Known and Unknown Microbial Space - Biosciences Area Using publicly available genome sequence data generated over the past three decades, JGI researchers assess the known fraction of microbial diversity.

In Science Advances: "We took a deep dive into over 1.8 million bacterial and archaeal genomes to see how much of their diversity we’ve actually captured. Turns out that despite all the genomes we’ve sequenced, we’ve only scratched the surface." -Dongying Wu

🖥️🧬🦠

biosciences.lbl.gov/2025/01/17/t...

Looking for a new target microbes for cultivation? Check out our new review on "Earth's most needed uncultivated aquatic prokaryotes"!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Felicidades Puri!! 🎉

YouTube video by Life in the Soil Soil in crisis: global environmental change

New YouTube video out

Soil in Crisis: global environmental change

#Soil #WorldSoilDay
www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAzN...

Off-purpose activity of industrial and agricultural chemicals against human gut bacteria Contamination by industrial and agricultural chemicals like pesticides are a cause of great concern due to the risk to human and environmental health. While these chemicals are often considered to hav...

First go at using bsky! An opportunity to share our recent preprint on the off-purpose impact of 1000+ industrial and agricultural pollutants on 22 gut microbiome species 🧪🧫🧬 at the MRC Tox. doi.org/10.1101/2024...

Hello World!

We are new here, but we will be posting about our work, opportunities to engage, reaching out to other microbiome researchers &c

www.big-data-biology.org