I think a major problem we have in science is the undervaluation of statistics. The expectation is that you run a test and show that p<0.05, but im my opinion that is not adequate and we need to do better!

In addition to this, you should always look at the effect size (i.e. the magnitude of difference or effect) and view this in the context of what it means biologically

When interpreting p values, it's important to understand a) p values are continuous values, they measure the departure of a test statistic away from the null, b) with large datasets, the chance that you will receive p<0.05 is very high, not necessarily because there is a significant difference...

It is crazy that in 2026, major research findings published in high impact journals are still being built on a dichotomous view of p-values without any consideration of effect sizes or biological context! Just because you get p < 0.05 that doesn’t mean it is biologically significant....

Seasonality drives temporal niche partitioning of pelagic prokaryotes Abstract. Prokaryote seasonality is well documented in lakes, coastal areas, and inland seas, yet microbial annual periodicity in diverse open ocean settin

Seasonality drives temporal niche partitioning of pelagic prokaryotes

academic.oup.com/ismej/articl...

Illuminating the newly produced viruses within the virosphere with bioorthogonal noncanonical amino acid tagging and single-virus genomic sequencing technologies Abstract. Marine viruses impact biogeochemical cycles through cell lysis, releasing organic matter and nutrients that fuel ocean productivity. Identifying

Illuminating the newly produced viruses within the virosphere with bioorthogonal noncanonical amino acid tagging and single-virus genomic sequencing technologies
#microbiology #virus #viruses #MicroSky
@isme-microbes.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1093/isme...

This is from 7 years ago (merenlab.org/2019/02/24/f...). We are talking about the same things today. We will be talking about the same things 7 years from now. There is no one to blame for this apart from ourselves. I find it very depressing.

GTDB release 11 based on RefSeq 232 (R11-RS232) is live at gtdb.ecogenomic.org. This release covers 901,341 genomes (23% increase) and has 199,923 species clusters (39% increase). Release notes at: forum.gtdb.ecogenomic.org/t/announcing.... Release statistics at: gtdb.ecogenomic.org/stats/r232.

Fast and accurate multiple-protein-sequence alignment at scale with FAMSA2 - Nature Biotechnology FAMSA2 accurately aligns millions of protein sequences at high speed.

10 years after the first FAMSA paper, its successor is now published in Nat Biotech! We believe that FAMSA2 can enable analyses of large protein collections that were previously unattainable. Thank you, Andrzej and Cedric, for great collaboration
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Does anybody have access to this article and could share a PDF with me ? www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

New preprint alert 🚨:

Who actually drives methane production in anoxic sediments 🧬🔥?

We point to a transcriptionally dominant 🦠 clade: VadinHA17.

shorturl.at/Rijc0

@bledinadede.bsky.social
@taylorpriest.bsky.social

Check out our latest preprint that showcases a connection between complex polysaccharide degradation and methanogenesis in an anoxic lake sediment - www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Unbinned contigs expand known diversity in the global microbiome - Nature Microbiology Re-analysis of over 92,000 metagenomes reveals hundreds of thousands of previously undescribed Bacterial and Archaeal clades hidden in plain sight.

A new study exploring the diversity of microbial life encapsulated in global metagenomic contigs reveals there could be at least 250,000 bacterial species and potentially up to 750,000, with only a fraction that have genomic representatives

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

Myloasm, our long-read metagenome assembler, is now published! w/ @mgmarin.bsky.social and @lh3lh3.bsky.social

Very rewarding after > a year of development and countless hours thinking about assembly. Thanks to beta testers, Li lab, and reviewers who gave very helpful feedback.

rdcu.be/famFj

River Microbiomes as Sentinels of National‐Scale Freshwater Ecosystems River biofilms are complex microbial assemblages that underpin aquatic food webs and play a central role in biogeochemical cycling. By responding to environmental signals over space and time, biofilm...

Using river biofilm microbiomes as sentinels of national-scale freshwater ecosystems

Very impressive coverage of England's river system with 700 sites included!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Decoupled timescales of organic carbon and phosphorus recycling in the global ocean | PNAS The ocean&rsquo;s biological carbon pump exports atmospheric CO2 to the deep ocean, where it can remain sequestered for decades to centuries, and attempt...

Decoupled timescales of organic carbon and phosphorus recycling in the global ocean | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Quantifying the effects of response diversity dynamics on ecosystem stability

A nice study showing the use of empirical dynamic modeling to quantify time-varying species responses to biotic and biotic factors simultaneously

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

Density-dependent feedback and higher-order interactions enable coexistence in phage-bacteria community dynamics Abstract. Diverse phage-bacteria communities coexist at high densities in environmental, agricultural, and human-associated microbiomes. Phage-bacteria coe

🚨NEW PAPER @isme-microbes.bsky.social on phage-bacteria dynamics. Collab between us and @joshuasweitz.bsky.social labs. "Density-dependent feedback and higher-order interactions enable coexistence in phage-bacteria community dynamics". 👉 doi.org/10.1093/isme...

Living patescibacterial (CPR) cells are a rare sight! Meet Strigamonas methylophilicida, a parasite of methylotrophic proteobacteria we just described in our latest paper:

doi.org/10.1128/mbio...

Water mass specific genes dominate the Southern Ocean microbiome - Nature Communications Southern Ocean microbial communities are less well studied. Here, the authors generate a circumpolar-scale gene catalog from 218 metagenomics samples revealing broadscale uniqueness and water-mass–spe...

A new study showcasing how the Southern ocean is filled with novel genetic content that is partially shared with the Arctic but largely endemic.

Thd study also provides the Antarctic circumnavigation metagenomic dataset!

#polar #marinemicrobes #metagenomics

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

Sub-daily virus sampling at the Bermuda Atlantic Time Series reveals diel and depth-structured population dynamics without community-level shifts Viruses are often studied in disease settings, but in the ocean they outnumber cells and shape ecosystems, yet their dynamics remain poorly understood. In this study, high-resolution sampling of blue-...

Sub-daily virus sampling at the Bermuda Atlantic Time Series reveals diel and depth-structured population dynamics without community-level shifts journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... #jcampubs 🌊

Out Now! Navigating the promise and pitfalls of artificial intelligence #MicroSky

Genome modelling and design across all domains of life with Evo 2 - Nature Evo 2 is an artificial intelligence-based biological foundation model trained on 9 trillion DNA base pairs spanning all domains of life that predicts functional properties from genomic sequences and p...

Genome modelling and design across all domains of life - Evo2

A biological foundation model trained on 9 trillion DNA base pairs to predict the functional impacts of genetic variation

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

Genome modelling and design across all domains of life with Evo 2 - Nature Evo 2 is an artificial intelligence-based biological foundation model trained on 9 trillion DNA base pairs spanning all domains of life that predicts functional properties from genomic sequences and p...

🤯 Evo 2, a model trained on 9 trillion DNA letters from curated genomic atlas across all domains of life “learns to accurately predict functional impact of gene variation...Model parameters, training code, inference code etc = fully open, to accelerate exploration & design of biological complexity”🧪

A new era for #ONT amplicon sequencing?
We show that #ONT #amplicon sequencing now achieves accuracy sufficient for #ASV resolution using standard Illumina-based pipelines. We validated this by sequencing identical amplicons on #ONT and #PacBio. @nanoporetech.com www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The MicrobeAtlas database: Global trends and insights into Earth’s microbial ecosystems MicrobeAtlas (www.microbeatlas.org) is an integrated, reference-based resource for truly planet-wide microbiomics, analyzing hundreds of thousands of microbial lineages across diverse environments, co...

Great to see this amazing resource finally published !

MicrobeAtlas - 2.4 million SSU rRNA gene sequence datasets systematically analysed against an extensive full length reference database enabling tracking of OTUs at global scales!

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Coral microbiomes as reservoirs of unknown genomic and biosynthetic diversity - Nature Reconstructing microbial genomes from 820 reef-building corals collected at 99 reefs across 32 islands throughout the Pacific Ocean highlights the importance of conserving coral reefs as vital reservo...

We are thrilled to announce the newest study from our lab (and great collaborators) is out now in @nature.com

We show that #coral #microbes are untapped "biosynthetic reservoirs", full of unique
natural products.

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Very happy to be able to contribute to this great research out now in @nature - where we reveal that coral associated microbes are rich biosynthetic reservoirs !

Microbial Cohorts: Bringing Ecological Meaning to the Modularity Concept of Co-Occurrence Networks Abstract. Microbial communities are structured through complex interactions that are difficult to observe directly. Co-occurrence networks offer a way to i

Microbial Cohorts: Bringing Ecological Meaning to the Modularity Concept of Co-Occurrence Networks

academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a...

The paradox of immune systems conservation between prokaryotes and eukaryotes Nature Reviews Microbiology, Published online: 05 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41579-026-01284-0The widespread prokaryotic immune systems, in particular restriction–modification, CRISPR–Cas and defensive toxin–antitoxin systems, are absent in eukaryotes, whereas relatively rare ones, such as Argonautes and antiviral STAND NTPases, became central to eukaryotic innate immunity. In this Comment, we hypothesize that the cause of this paradox is the drastic reduction of horizontal gene transfer rate in eukaryotes.

ICYMI: New online! The paradox of immune systems conservation between prokaryotes and eukaryotes