Daniela Barillà

@lorentzcenter.bsky.social is a fantastic venue and the members of staff are awesome 🤩. Enjoy your meeting!

Oxygen metabolism in descendants of the archaeal-eukaryotic ancestor - Nature Sequencing of marine sediments finds 136 newly identified Heimdallarchaeia and several novel lineages, and indicates that Heimdallarchaeia evolved distinct metabolic capabilities from other Asgar...

#NatMicroPicks

Aerobic archaeal-eukaryotic ancestor? 🦠🫁

The ancestor of eukaryotes may have combined hydrogen metabolism with aerobic respiration, shaping early cellular complexity.

#MicroSky

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

Xiaofeng combined 2D live-cell single-particle tracking with 3D simulations to specifically measure the bacterial nucleoid accessibility and viscosity! Our preprint describes how these nucleoid properties respond to cellular processes! Code is available too.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

AlphaFast: High-throughput AlphaFold 3 via GPU-accelerated MSA construction AlphaFold 3 (AF3) enables accurate biomolecular modeling but is limited by slow, CPU-bound multiple sequence alignment (MSA) generation. We introduce AlphaFast, a drop-in framework that integrates GPU-accelerated MMseqs2 sequence search to remove this bottleneck. AlphaFast achieves a 68.5x speedup in MSA construction and a 22.8x reduction in end-to-end runtime on a single GPU, and delivers predictions in 8 seconds per input on four GPUs while maintaining indistinguishable structural accuracy. A serverless deployment enables structure prediction for as little as $0.035 per input. Code is available at https://github.com/RomeroLab/alphafast . ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. U.S. National Science Foundation, 2529581 National Institute of General Medical Sciences, 5R01GM150929

AlphaFast: High-throughput AlphaFold 3 via GPU-accelerated MSA construction | bioRxiv https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.17.706409v1

Papers are like buses... You wait for ages, then two come along at once.

Huge congrats to @bornanovak.bsky.social and @jefflotthammer.bsky.social for pushing and driving every aspect of this work, preprinted ~1 year ago to the day (Friday before BPS), now published!

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

We are happy to share our newest preprint on a novel strain of Ca. Lokiarchaeum ossiferum, that contains an active provirus, capable of excision and independent replication! We propose a novel virus family: Fylgjaviridae.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Peak Wuthering Heights gothic gloom at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, this morning. Perfectly timed for the release of the new film adaptation of Emily Brontë's masterpiece next Friday.

Universal paralogs provide a window into evolution before the last universal common ancestor The study of early evolutionary history provides an account of how the foundational features of life as we know it first emerged. Phylogenetic analysi…

Universal paralogs provide a window into evolution before the last universal common ancestor - ScienceDirect https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666979X26000029?via%3Dihub

It’s not me, it’s you: Anti-phage nuclease specificity inside a bacterium

Very timely review; thank Alex Hong and @jbdsf.bsky.social for putting this together
journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

Congratulations to Sonomi Yamaguchi for her paper at @nature.com. Sonomi discovered Clover defense and explained how nucleotide signals control each step of viral sensing, immune regulation, and viral restriction – named for her beautiful "four-leaf" structures 🍀

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

One of the biggest questions in biology is how complex cells evolved about 2 billion years ago. Here's my new story on how scientists are solving the mystery of eukaryotes like us. Gift link: nyti.ms/4qMbo22

Finally out in @nature.com: a new piece of the puzzle of how complex life evolved. Lead by @archaeal.bsky.social & @katyappler.bsky.social. Great collab with @greening.bsky.social and @kassipan.bsky.social. More pieces to follow soon! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Koonin's lab in NIH is looking for postdocs. If you know someone who is interested, please spread the word. The details about the position are below: www.training.nih.gov/jobs/pdf-ecb...

Horizontal gene transfer and gene loss drove the divergent evolution of host dependency in Micrarchaeota | National Science Review | Oxford Academic https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/13/4/nwaf542/8351087?login=true

Anyone interested in applying for a BBSRC Fellowship on projects involving;
Microbial evolution
AMR
Mobile genetic elements, inc. insertion sequences
3D culture models

Feel free to get in touch, happy to discuss supporting or host potential applicants!

#AMR #UTISky #MicroSky

tinyurl.com/46fdyfppv

Our latest preprint: Together with the team of Jan Löwe, @danieltamarit.bsky.social and many others we discovered and characterized several Asgard tubulin genes and propose that microtubule architecture and dynamics evolved in Asgard archaea prior to eukaryogenesis
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It's not easy to avoid a whole host of different biases when judging others. I've seen some shocking examples at grant-giving committees. Some reflections on Conflicts of Interest occamstypewriter.org/athenedonald...

Active virus-host system in a Lokiarchaeon culture Asgard archaea are considered the closest prokaryotic relatives of eukaryotes and having a crucial role in eukaryogenesis. Only few organisms have been cultivated from this group and their viruses were previously described only through metagenomic reconstructions. Here, we report the first successful cultivation of an Asgard archaeal virus infecting a novel strain of Ca. Lokiarchaeum ossiferum B36. The 16 kbp integrated provirus is capable to excise and replicate independently leading to the formation of virus particles. Network analysis of shared protein clusters with other archaeal viruses places it in a new family, Fylgjaviridae . The host encodes a distinctive repertoire of antiviral defense systems, including Septu, Wadjet, and type II CBASS system, all different from the defense systems of the related strain Ca. L. ossiferum B35. Our cultures provide the first opportunity to study interactions of a virus-host system in Asgards and hold significant potential for developing genetic tools. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. FWF Austrian Science Fund, 10.55776/EFP25, Z437 European Research Council, Advanced Grant #695192: TACKLE Max Planck Society, https://ror.org/01hhn8329

Active virus-host system in a Lokiarchaeon culture | bioRxiv https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.13.705702v1?rss=1

📢 Save the date! #Biophychrom2027 will take place at Paris-Saclay in July 2027. More details coming soon!

Mark your calendars for the next incarnation of the Biology and Physics of the Prokaryotic Chromosome meeting to be held in Paris on July 6-9, 2027.

See the web site for further information biophychrom2027.sciencesconf.org

Done! Well done, Thalia! 🌸

We are very proud that Thalia has been nominated for three Yorkshire Choice awards - Please vote here: www.yorkshirechoiceawards.co.uk/vote

Three years ago, Thalia was diagnosed with a devastating brain tumour. She has fought back and done her best to raise awareness and funds to support others!

"While it is very interesting, I feel that your article might be better suited to a specialist journal", rock'n'roll edition.

I am going to be brutally honest here. I need some help. Can anyone offer any support of turning a medical focused project on the evolution of AMR in polymicrobial communities to a BBSRC application?

PlasAnn: a curated plasmid-specific database and annotation pipeline for standardized gene and function analysis Abstract. Conjugative plasmids are key drivers of bacterial adaptation, enabling the horizontal transfer of accessory genes within and across diverse micro

Big week: welcomed a new baby boy Harris Lopatkin, AND our PlasAnn paper is finally out: academic.oup.com/nar/article/... (obviously the first more important than the second 🥰). Currently on leave but if anyone has the need to annotate large plasmids, go check it out!

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

Early Career Researchers Response to UKRI Investment Approach Dear PhD students, PDRAs and early career researchers, You may be aware of a recent UKRI funding restructure announcement (there is a discussion here:  . In STFC-funded science,  particle physics, …

UK Solar Physics early career researchers rightly deeply concerned at the savage cuts to #STFC science (and I'd add apparent contempt for their plight by #UKRI). They have an open letter... uksolphys.org/general-news...

How to write even when the words won’t come Books, articles and grant proposals do not arrive in a single stroke. They are created, like sculptures, through a thousand small movements. Here, Catherine De Vries explains how to develop ‘skill pow...

"How can we keep writing when we don’t have the spark (which, truthfully, is most of the time)?"

This @timeshighered.bsky.social article discusses skill power for academic writers - to make progress even when inspiration is missing.

#academicsky

www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/how-w...

Excited to share our preprint on integrase directionality here.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1610 Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship awarded out of 17066 applications.
Over 50,000 reviewers… Can you fathom the amount of work involved? And sadly the level of waste?