So I'm giving a talk tonight at 9:30 PM IST online. Thankyou fishers fishes for hosting. Plus extra special coz my birthday today. Join in if you are available!

Congratulations Ira! Super proud of my mentor 🫶🫶

So thankful for this award, and I'm very excited for #SMBE2026.
I'll be talking about one of my projects, where I use an evolution experiment to understand the tension between genome plasticity and stability in bacteria.

If you will be at SMBE, please let me know! I would love to meet up

Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating).

A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)

Lovely feature on the spectacular theoretical research led by my brilliant friend and colleague Anna Erzberger 🤩

Priority effects inhibit the repeated evolution of phototrophy - npj Complexity npj Complexity - Priority effects inhibit the repeated evolution of phototrophy

New paper out! Here's a puzzle: phototrophy, the ability to use light for energy, is one of life's great innovations. It evolved early and transformed the biosphere. But it evolved 2x. Why not just once, why not more? Our work suggests the answer is priority effects.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

We came, we saw, we cooked! Lab fun after Varsha 2025 sem at Yash's home. Had so much fun!

Menu: Ghee-jeera rice(akash, me, anjali), chicken curry (TN style) by Akash, Paneer Kaju curry by me, shatarupa, anuraag, curd salad(group) and spicy mashed potatoes(jyoti et. al.)
Chopping: group efforts

Full house for @wcratcliff.bsky.social’s 45-min summary of 15 years of experimental evolution (including 8 years of MuLTEE) @pasteur.fr

Can we invite you to India given that you are on a sabbatical?

Writing a 2.5h mega lecture for my upcoming visit to Institut Pasteur. What a fun project/opportunity.

Also extremely looking forward to spending a week in Paris during my sabbatical.

You can see where my head is at!

Record it and put it on public platform!

I'm reviewing abstracts for an upcoming scientific conference, helping the planning team to select which attendees get a chance to present their work.

Some are amazingly good.

Some suggest that the applicant has not ever been taught how to write an abstract.

Here are some basic tips:

🧪

Merry Christmas and Happy New year!! Happy holidayssss......

After a small break we resumed with day 7 of Darwinter 2025. Anuraag presented a 2013 paper about how phages try to evolve as generalists and expand their host range over time, a paper by @lisabono.bsky.social

New in ACS SynBio: led by Dennis Bolshakov, we used the awesome power of yeast to define how expression levels, noise, and sequence program the dynamics of synthetic protein waves, allowing us to genetically encode new cellular timescales stable over generations!

pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

🗞️ New preprint from the lab, led by our postdoc Ana Garoña (not on here) in collab with @andreagiometto.bsky.social: “Experimental evolution of cellular miniaturization reveals a mechanism for cell size evolution”, aka: “honey, we shrank the yeasts!” 🎥
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Fisher's Fishes, a local yet all India theoretical bio student collective in India has arranged for the IgNobel Talk about the phase behaviour of cacio e pepe sauce. Join in on 17th December at 7 pm IST | 2:30 PM CET | 8 AM EST.

The discussion went for 2 hours and one curious question that Pratyay, a PhD student, came up with was about the magnitude of the stressor events along with the frequency of it. If stressor events are less frequent but higher in magnitude, will it affect differentiation?

Day 6 of Darwinter 2025. We discussed a preprint by @wcratcliff.bsky.social about costs of germ-soma differentiation, its relation to organismal size and developmental time, and what condition could drive the selection for higher organismal size given somatic cells exist. Presenter:Jyotishko, Intern

It is amazing that @dudinlab.bsky.social beautiful #ExM composition has been selected to highlight our #6mA work for the cover of @natgenet.nature.com. #Protists (and ichthyosporeans in particular) in the cover of NG must be quite unique!

Interested in cell adhesion, evolution of multicellularity, or developing tools for emerging marine models?

My lab at UM is hiring a postdoc, and the application is now open:
🔗 tinyurl.com/28jvu4aa

If you know anyone looking for a postdoc, please pass this along!

4th day of Darwinter 2025. We discussed a paper by our PI @yashrajchavhan.bsky.social The paper was about how population size can shape trade off dilutions and adaptation to a marginal niche unconstrained by sympatric habitual conditions. Paper was presented by Akash P, an intern in the lab.

3rd day of Darwinter 2025. We discussed a paper on Trait and Plasticity Evolution in mutualistic and competitive interactions. The discussion was moderated by Harini, an IPhD student.

After discussing how multicellularity can be clonal, Aggregative or mixed depending on the salinity levels and starting cell density in C. flexa, we moved forward to understand how metabolic constraints can shape spatial organisation in clusters.
Presenter: Anjali B
@yashrajchavhan.bsky.social

We have started Darwinter, a winter paper seminar at the Chavhan Lab for Understanding Evolution. Lab members and interns choose a recent interesting work or a seminal paper revolving around the research done in our lab and present it. I started with the C. flexa paper by @thibautbrunet.bsky.social

The fitness costs of reproductive specialization scale inversely with organismal size The evolution of reproductive specialization represents a fundamental innovation in multicellular life, yet the conditions favoring its evolution remain poorly understood. Here, we develop a populatio...

1/28 New preprint up, which I think is the best theoretical idea I've ever had. We asked a simple question: what are the costs of investment into non-reproductive somatic cells? Turns out these costs decrease with the *logarithm* of organism size!

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

An archaeal genetic code with all TAG codons as pyrrolysine Multiple genetic codes developed during the evolution of eukaryotes and bacteria, yet no alternative genetic code is known for archaea. We used proteomics to confirm our prediction that certain archae...

Some archaea—an ancient group of microorganisms—have an entirely novel genetic code, according to a new study in Science.

The findings expand our understanding of how alternative genetic codes evolve and hint at new molecular tools for biotechnology applications. https://scim.ag/4omApQ7

Looking forward to reading it!

So happy to announce our new preprint, “A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes.” We cultured a novel amoeba from Lassen Volcanic NP (CA, USA) that divides at 63°C (145°F) 🔥 - a new record for euk growth!
#protistsonsky 🧵

Diagram illustrating "feed the enemy's enemy": ampicillin inhibits Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Citrobacter freundii acidifies the environment, further inhibiting P. aeruginosa.

New preprint from our lab www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...! Andrea Dos Santos and Clément Vulin combine experiments and models showing how adding glucose can strengthen negative interactions between microbial species. This can be used in tandem with antibiotic treatment to inhibit pathogens!