Pedro Leão

Widespread and intron-rich mirusviruses are predicted to reproduce in nuclei of unicellular eukaryotes - Nature Microbiology Environmental metagenomic explorations show that Mirusviricota lineages lack essential replication and transcription genes and contain spliceosomal introns, suggesting nuclear reproduction.

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

Thrilled to share our new study! We show that mirusviruses include lineages packed with spliceosomal introns and likely replicating in the nucleus of unicellular eukaryotes—a sharp contrast to most large and giant eukaryotic viruses that replicate in the cytoplasm.

Comparison of virus-host prediction from Hi-C and in silico tools. Top: Eular plot showing the overlap of viruses with host predictions obtained from the experimental Hi-C linkage approach, or one of two in silico tools (iPHoP and VirMatcher) that use different probabilistic models to aggregate output of various sequence-based features to create host prediction scores. Bottom: Comparison of virus-host predictions across all samples between Hi-C and iPHoP, shown with and without applying a Z-score filter for the Hi-C linkages. Black bars indicate congruent predictions identified from both tools and gray bars indicate non-congruent predictions. Note: Although many viruses had multiple predicted hosts from each tool, only the top-scoring prediction for each virus was considered in this comparison.

#Virus discovery has accelerated but linking viruses to hosts is hard. @sullivan-lab.bsky.social use synthetic #microbiomes to optimize & benchmark #Hi-C for virus-host linkage inference, applying this to existing #soil data to reveal 100s of novel linkages @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3MlAENO

Awesome work! Congratulations to you all! 🎉

🚀New preprint from our lab!
I am very excited to finally share what has been the main focus of my PhD for the past almost 3 years! It is about viral dark matter and a powerful tool we built to shed light on it. 🧬💡
Continue reading (🧵)

#AsgardArchaea team, led by @archaeal.bsky.social fr @texasscience.bsky.social — sequencing the DNA collected fr mouth of Rio de la Plata to the continental shelf of Uruguay to detect Asgards, a group of single-celled organisms & our closest microbial relatives on the tree of life. bit.ly/3MdniTH

The Drain of Scientific Publishing The domination of scientific publishing in the Global North by major commercial publishers is harmful to science. We need the most powerful members of the research community, funders, governments and ...

The Drain of Scientific Publishing details very clearly how for-profit publishers making >30% profit margins have corrupted any solution the research community has attempted.

Let's cut ourselves free.

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: bit.ly/StrainQSS
Oligopoly: bit.ly/OligSciPub

12/12

Deep‐branching eukaryotes and early events in protist evolution The first eukaryotes evolved from their archaean ancestors in the early Proterozoic, likely ca. 2000–1800 million years ago (Mya). Their macroscopic multicellular descendants, such as plants, heterok...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
#protistsonsky

Ocean-M: an integrated global-scale multi-omics database for marine microbial diversity, function and ecological interactions Abstract. Multi-omics analyses have significantly advanced the understanding of complex marine microbial communities and their interactions. Despite notabl

Ocean-M: an integrated global-scale multi-omics database for marine microbial diversity, function and ecological interactions academic.oup.com/nar/advance-... #jcampubs 🌊

Blavatnik National Awards

Blavatnik National Awards

Blavatnik National Awards

Blavatnik National Awards

Congratulations to Philip J. Kranzusch, Ph.D., Professor of Cancer Immunology and Virology, who was one of three scientists awarded top honors at the 2025 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists.

Watch to learn more about his work: bit.ly/4pZUDkF

Always a good call! 😂

elmo the sesame street character is sitting on a ledge ALT: elmo the sesame street character is sitting on a ledge

Anecdotal, but a lot of highly trained immigrant PhD colleagues and friends have been moving back to their home countries this year.

Every one of those said the reason was safety

"Breakthroughs rarely announce themselves on the good days — they are earned quietly, by refusing to quit on the lousy ones, even when impostor syndrome tells you otherwise."

open.substack.com/pub/leaopel/...

Coincidental and exciting! Anaerobic methanotrophic archaea (ANME) do like carbon monoxide - two independent studies showcasing CO metabolism across freshwater and marine ANME (ANME-2d and -2b).

ANME-2d: doi.org/10.1101/2025... (Welte lab)
ANME-2b: reposted (Orphan lab)

Of the 10 defense systems originally discovered in Doron et al 2018, Kiwa was one of the last to be studied - until now

Kiwa is a membrane-embedded complex activated in phage attachments sites to degrade phage DNA

A nice study by the Nobrega lab

open.substack.com/pub/leaopel/...

open.substack.com/pub/leaopel/...

Value the People Behind the Science Great labs aren’t defined by flashy papers — they’re defined by the culture that nurtures people.

open.substack.com/pub/leaopel/...

Manipulation of the nucleotide pool in human, bacterial and plant immunity - Nature Reviews Immunology Modification of the nucleotide pool is emerging as key to innate immunity in animals, plants and bacteria. This Review explains how immune pathways conserved from bacteria to humans manipulate the nuc...

We wrote a review on the free nucleotide pool as a central playground in human, bacterial, and plant immunity – now out in Nature Reviews in Immunology

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

Was fun to write this piece with Dina Hochhauser!

Here is a thread to explain the premises

1/

Just a heads-up so people don't get caught off guard. 🔥😎🔥

YES!

PARIS (AP) — French President Macron announces that France will recognize Palestine as a state.

French President Macron says France will recognize Palestine as a state French President Emmanuel Macron has announced that France will recognize Palestine as a state, amid snowballing global anger over people starving in Gaza.

French President Emmanuel Macron has announced that France will recognize Palestine as a state, amid snowballing global anger over people starving in Gaza.

With all the memes and the drama over the CEO on the Coldplay cam...

Let me make something crystal clear:

📢 CHARACTER IS A PERSONAL TRAIL, NOT A PROFESSIONAL SKILL

Be aware of people that don't respect their partner...

Nature should be the model for microbial sciences | Journal of Bacteriology Historically, our understanding of microbes has been based on laboratory cultures. Much of what we know at a mechanistic level is based on “model organisms” which are species that readily grow in labo...

Today's reading: Nature should be the model for microbial sciences journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... by @brettbakker.bsky.social @emilyraehyde.bsky.social and @pedroleao.bsky.social

Looks ideal for a talk I am working on on model organisms ...

I hope you enjoy it Jonathan! 😊

Viromics approaches for the study of viral diversity and ecology in microbiomes Nature Reviews Genetics, Published online: 21 July 2025; doi:10.1038/s41576-025-00871-wIn this Review, Roux and Coclet outline current viromics approaches and discuss how they have contributed to our growing understanding of viral genomic diversity, focusing on uncultivated viruses of microorganisms.

New online! Viromics approaches for the study of viral diversity and ecology in microbiomes

Science Thrives on Trust: Why Collaboration Is Our Greatest Strength In a competitive academic world, building bridges instead of walls may be our most powerful tool to accelerate discovery and rebuild public trust in science.

"In a competitive academic world, building bridges instead of walls may be our most powerful tool to accelerate discovery and rebuild public trust in science."

I'm very happy with this article piece! 🥳

www.the-scientist.com/science-thri...

Structural insights into light harvesting by antenna-containing rhodopsins in marine Asgard archaea - Nature Microbiology Uncultured open-ocean Asgard archaea can harvest light energy using rhodopsins and diverse hydroxylated carotenoid antennas.

OUT NOW:

Structural insights into light harvesting by antenna-containing rhodopsins in marine #Asgard #archaea

@bejalab.bsky.social @labinoue.bsky.social

#microsky 🦠🧪

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

The archaeal S-layer is not only pretty, it also carries crucial cellular functions, and the list keeps growing! @sshamphavi.bsky.social @marleenvw.bsky.social @archaellum.bsky.social and I wrote a little sheath sheet (+10 pts if you got the pun)
📖 Curr Opin Cell Biol
🔗 doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...