🇨🇦 Marc Strous

Map showing locations of groundwater microbiome samples

#China and #Canada lead the world in groundwater microbial ecology... map from nice new paper from our Chinese colleagues www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Two more weeks to apply - come join us () in The Netherlands as a postdoctoral researcher on large-scale metagenomic exploration of new lineages!

We have an open position for a bioinformatics/theoretical microbial ecology PhD student to study viral strategies in the global Microverse! Join us at the @microverse.bsky.social at @uni-jena.de, please apply through this link:
jobs.uni-jena.de/jobposting/9...

Can the clean-energy revolution save us from climate catastrophe? Seven charts show the remarkable growth in renewable power and the challenges to ending the fossil-fuel age.

Snappy quick overview of where the world is heading in energy and climate change: www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Two fully funded PhD candidate positions in Electromicrobiology (3 years) Application deadline: 4 March 2026 at 23:59 hours local Danish time

In addition to the 2 postdoc jobs posted yesterday, we’re recruiting 2 PhD students (environmental microbiology/ molecular ecology) to join us from April. The projects will map microbial populations across niches in bioelectrochemical systems relevant to biomethanation & link them to performance.

Come work with us on #darkoxygen as part of the NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. It is an amazing opportunity to get up to 3 years of funding. Deadlines are March 1. and November 1. Happy to discuss your ideas! Details here: zintellect.com/Opportunity/...

@mblscience.bsky.social #astrobiology

Impact of human activities on groundwater biogeochemical cycles and microbial communities: Insights from metagenomic analysis Anthropogenic nitrogen pollution poses a systemic threat to microbial interaction networks and biogeochemical cycling in groundwater ecosystems, yet t…

Impact of human activities on groundwater biogeochemical cycles and microbial communities: Insights from metagenomic analysis www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Bacterial necromass recycling promotes diversity maintenance in bacterial communities via resource partitioning - Nature Ecology & Evolution In this study, the authors conduct experiments involving 276 soil-derived microcosms to reveal that the ecological process of necromass recycling promotes diversity maintenance in bacterial communitie...

Bacterial necromass recycling promotes diversity maintenance in bacterial communities via resource partitioning www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

Calling all OrthoFinder users!

We’ve just released GLADE, a tool to infer gene gains, losses, duplications, and ancestral genomes across a phylogeny.

GLADE runs directly on OrthoFinder results.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
github.com/lauriebelch/...

(1/10)

Emil Ruff Leads Team to Explore Dark Oxygen Through NASA Collaborative Award | Marine Biological Laboratory For more than a century, textbooks asserted that molecular oxygen (O2) on Earth is produced almost entirely by photosynthesis, through plants and microbes. But discoveries over the past decade have ov...

Meet "OxyMoRon" our 5-year NASA ICAR program to study dark oxygen production in Earth's hidden ecosystems. We have multiple positions and are happy about collabs.

Co-PIs:@valdeanda.bsky.social @microbiaki.bsky.social @valiergaly.bsky.social Ranjani Murali, Scott Wankel

www.mbl.edu/news/emil-ru...

🚨vConTACT3 now in Nature Biotechnology:
- >95% agreement with ICTV for known viruses
- Classifies both prokaryotic and eukaryotic viruses
- Extends beyond genus → subfamily, family & order
- Systematically assigns taxonomy to tens of thousands of previously unclassified viruses

Opportunity to join my lab for a postdoc or PhD student from outside Canada. Very short term. Very competitive. Send me your CV and cover letter before Jan 5. This runs via nserc-crsng.canada.ca/en/news/laun...

Interested in internships or graduate school in climate science, writ large? Get in touch with Jed! 🧪⚒️ @ucalgary.bsky.social @ucalgaryscience.bsky.social

Could we do that for environmental microbes and microbiomes? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A meta-analysis of environmental sequencing data reveals the global distribution and hidden diversity of marine anaerobic ciliates Anaerobic protists are diverse, ecologically important members of anoxic microbial communities, acting as grazers, nutrient cyclers, and partners in multi-domain associations, yet remain understudied ...

New preprint led by @annaschreck.bsky.social that capitalized on the wealth of publicly available 18S rRNA datasets to explore the oceanic distribution and diversity of understudied anaerobic ciliates. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

📢 20 postdoctoral positions (full-time, 4 years) for outstanding female scientists 👩‍🔬 🔬 @univie.ac.at

The E-STEEM programme call opens January 7th, 2026 and closes March 3rd, 2026.
careers.univie.ac.at/en/postdoc/e...

I participate as a host...

💾 Prokka 1.15.6 is released!

This is the last major release of Prokka. But don't be sad, because @oschwengers.bsky.social already has an excellent replacement called Bakta you can migrate to.
#bioinformatics #microbiology #genomics

github.com/tseemann/pro...

Call for Letters of Intent - HFSP Research Grants 2027

Attention scientists from all over the world🙃
The Call for Letters of Intent for #HFSPResearchGrants 2027 is now open! 🧪
Get your international & interdisciplinary team. It's time to put your bold research idea into practice!
🔗https://bit.ly/48VsGCG
📅 15 Dec 2025–26 Mar 2026
#sts #LifeSciences

Viral NblA proteins negatively affect oceanic cyanobacterial photosynthesis - Nature Viral NblA accelerates the cyanophage infection cycle, directs degradation of the host phycobilisome and other proteins, and reduces host photosynthetic light-harvesting efficiency.

Nice work! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Scikit-bio: a fundamental Python library for biological omic data analysis - Nature Methods Nature Methods - Scikit-bio: a fundamental Python library for biological omic data analysis

The scikit-bio paper in online in Nature Methods! Many thanks to our collaborators, community contributors and reviewers! We couldn’t have done it without you. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #Bioinformatics #OpenSource

Evaluation of statistical approaches for differential metaproteomics Metaproteomics characterizes and compares molecular phenotypes of organisms in communities by comprehensively analyzing their protein expression profiles using statistical methods. However, not all st...

Super excited to have this paper out. We developed a complex set of ground truth samples to test more than 110 statistical approaches for differential #metaproteomics
We can now give clear guidance on what tests perform well. Thank you Tjorven Hinzke and
@benoitkunath.bsky.social for the leadership

Hi researchers interested in Canada 🇨🇦 👋.
Call me 🤙
(Well actually email me).

Microsoft Teams Starts Telling Your Boss Where You Are—Now Just 8 Weeks Away Microsoft confirms start date for new Teams update — no more hiding places.

microsoft promised to "empower every user" and google to "revolutionise knowledge and technological innovation" but in reality what they have given us is an invasive surveillance dystopian nightmare hard to escape

www.forbes.com/sites/zakdof...

If you missed the four tenure track positions' deadline (today) in my department, there's another position in Geography @ucalgary.bsky.social as Assistant Professor in Climate Change and the Critical Zone. Come be my office neighbour! careers.ucalgary.ca/jobs/1710469... 🧪⚒️

The rise of free oxygen may have initiated on marine mud - Nature Geoscience The oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere ~2.45–2.30 billion years ago may have initiated in the oxidized bottom waters of marine shelves, according to a synthesis of thallium and nitrogen isotopes and cy...

The rise of free oxygen may have initiated on marine mud www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

Ok, I was slightly off: It was $45 (US) for 15 million paired end reads per sample, including lib prep, but excluding DNA extraction and labor, 192 samples pooled onto a NovaSeqX 3000M kit.

I believe 50-100M reads. Even though these are not well sampled environments, our pipeline does not rely on assembly or mapping and I believe we'll be able to get all the information we are looking for...

Anyway, at the same price and less work we get a nice metagenome of sufficient depth to get good community profiles as well as analysis of functional genes. No MAGs of course, but that is often not the objective.

This leads to higher costs, about 70 CAD per sample for amplicon sequencing perhaps including PCR and DNA extraction, but excluding the labor of manually extracting DNA and doing PCR, checking products with gels etc. That's the advantage of a large research conglomerate like Vienna I guess