L. Felipe Benites

Foraminifera. @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 899 #livingbioreactors #MarineLife

YouTube video by Ant Lab Jumping Ants! Gigantiops destructor

Guys I need you to watch this video about this ant.

It is the best ant.

That is all.

A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life. RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but their large size and structural ...

How could a simple self-replicating system emerge at the origins of life? RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but existing ones are so large that their self-replication seems impossible. Could they be smaller?

Excited to share our latest work in @science.org on a new small polymerase.
1/n

We are proud to unveil the world’s longest underwater timelapse, starting May 1st 2023 and running 1,000 days through January 28, 2026. This 10fps period covers summer 2023’s coral bleaching mortality event, but then recovering and growing through ‘24 & ‘25 into ‘26 #coralcitycamera

Mapping of the viral shunt across widespread coccolithophore blooms using metabolic biomarkers | PNAS The viral shunt is a fundamental ecosystem process which diverts the flux of organic carbon fixed through photosynthesis during algal bloom events ...

🌊Paper announcement! 📣
Viral infections rewire the metabolic makeup of their host and thereby create distinct chemical signatures. Can we use metabolic biomarkers to diagnose infections of algal blooms in the ocean?
Well, take a look at our new article led by Conny Kuhlisch in @pnas.org
>>

Multiple protein structure alignment at scale with FoldMason Protein structure is conserved beyond sequence, making multiple structural alignment (MSTA) essential for analyzing distantly related proteins. Computational prediction methods have vastly extended ou...

FoldMason is out now in @science.org. It generates accurate multiple structure alignments for thousands of protein structures in seconds. Great work by Cameron L. M. Gilchrist and @milot.bsky.social.
📄 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
🌐 search.foldseek.com/foldmason
💾 github.com/steineggerla...

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!

Luo Lab - Microbial Ecology - join Lab members will have access to state-of-the art wet lab, and computing, and sequencing resources, including in-house sequencing for both short and long reads (Illumina NextSeq and Nanopore GridION). ...

Our lab has an opening for a fully funded postdoc position! Start date is flexible; ideally summer 2026. Apply by Feb 20th for full consideration. For more about the lab and how to apply:

sites.google.com/uncc.edu/mic...

OoL Digest — January 26

OoL digest is out! 🧬🪐 21 new papers — astrobiology & biosignatures, interstellar peptide formation, metabolically active protocells, Proterozoic ocean oxygen, and Europa's icy shell.

YouTube video by Melómano Mugriento The Meeting Places- Find Yourself Along The Way Full Album

Saturday Soundtrack (recent discovery):
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAVP...

Registration form for iVoM4 After submitting this form, you will receive the instructions to join our webinars at the email address you provide.

New 2026 iVoM series coming up!

Each session includes SCR and 3 ECRs, & plenty of opportunities to interact with the speakers and ask questions.

Sign up for links/updates: docs.google.com/forms/d/1hAB...

First up: Viral Biotechnologies Wed, 28 th January at 17:00 CET / 11:00 EST / 08:00 PST

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below!
Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

Impacts of Nearby Algae on Recruitment Success and Early #Microbiome Development of the #Coral Acropora cytherea enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Join #MVIF 45 cassyni.com/s/mvif-45

and #MeetTheSpeakers

🇺🇸 Lilian Caesar (@liliancaesar.bsky.social) will discuss how space and species sculpt stingless bee microbiomes!

Last days to submit your cool symbiosis abstracts to our cool symbiosis-astrobiology session at #AbSciCon26!!!

OoL digest — January 5

New OoL digest is out! 🪐 12 new papers, ft. the Viking missions, exoplanet habitability, and lava tubes on Mars.

#OriginOfLife #Astrobiology

🚀 Planning to attend #AbSciCon2026 and study the role of metals in life evolution and life elsewhere? Then consider submitting an abstract to our session #20- Transition Metals in Habitability and Biological Evolution. Details below and at this link: agu.confex.com/agu/abscicon...

post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't nirvana, pearl jam, soundgarden, or Alice In Chains. >>> Hard one to choose, but this one from MBV (Loveless) still one of my favorites!

Endogenized polinton-like viruses in the dinoflagellate Oxyrrhis marina uncover novel PolB fusion Marine viruses are ubiquitous entities that impact the biology of a large fraction of prokaryotic and eukaryotic diversity. Dinoflagellates are heterotrophic, mixotrophic and photosynthetic eukaryotes...

🎄 Just published 🎉! Our ongoing genome sequencing of the basal dinoflagellate Oxyrrhis marina uncovered a new lineage of endogenized Polinton-like viruses, OmPLV. Notably, OmPLV encodes ... [cont]
#VirEvol #MicroSky #Mevosky #SymbioSky #ProtistsOnSky

6 - These results highlight host traits and cross-kingdom microbial interactions as key drivers of colony-level microbiome assembly, beautifully illustrated by @lifesciencestudios.bsky.social in the final fig. We hope this guides discussions in microbiome research to bee eco-evo and conservation.

Our manuscript on the microbiome of a stingless bee hive is out! 🦠🐝 So excited! Here’s a short thread with some findings, going from the assembly of a consistent multi-kingdom microbiome to discussions on host traits that contribute to it. Please take a look and share : ) rdcu.be/eVNFJ

Introducing the Fire Amoeba

🚨 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

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...

De novo genome sequence assembly of the model algal endosymbiont Micractinium conductrix derived from its host Paramecium bursaria 186b Endosymbiosis is a major driver of evolutionary innovation and underpins the function of diverse ecosystems. The origins and evolution of endosymbiosis are challenging to study experimentally due to t...

De novo genome sequence assembly of the model algal endosymbiont Micractinium conductrix derived from its host Paramecium bursaria 186b.

Guy Leonard, Irma Vitonyte, Fiona R Savory, Erika M Hansson, Duncan D Cameron, Michael Brockhurst, Thomas A Richards
bioRxiv doi: doi.org/10.64898/202...

An alternative view of a Serpulidae (bristle worm) larva! Such a cutie!
#marineplankton 🦑

Lost and Found in Modern Microbiology: An Ethnography of Modern Microbiologists A paper on how microbiologists navigate the tension between reductionism and complexity in their everyday practices, and my 2 cents on it.

New blog post for my microbiologist colleagues:

merenlab.org/2025/12/15/r...

In which Meren talks about a paper by Valentina Marcheselli on how microbiologists navigate the tension between reductionism and complexity in their everyday practices.

Any plans for a mac version? Also can I dream with a PS5 release, physical disc one day? : )

This light installation in @rbgkew.bsky.social is what I imagine #coccolithophores 👀 like in sunlight ocean 🫧🌊

Confused by all the histones that are cropping up in organisms that are decidedly NOT eukaryotes? check out our review - fantastic work by team NucEvo in the #Lugerlab
The Expanding Histone Universe: Histone-Based DNA Organization in Noneukaryotic Organisms - www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Meta-virus resource (MetaVR): expanding the frontiers of viral diversity with 24 million uncultivated virus genomes Abstract. Viruses are ubiquitous in all environments and impact host metabolism, evolution, and ecology, although our knowledge of their biodiversity is st

🦠🧪🧬🚨 New paper and database alert: the new IMG/VR release is now MetaVR ! We have a new website - meta-virome.org - with quick search capabilities for the >24M viruses, >12M vOTUs, and >42M protein clusters (including >790k with predicted structures !). academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...