An ant that behaves like a cleaner fish? With awesome photos. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

We have a new exiting PhD position in our program on the skin microbiome of amphibians, supervised by @cortazar-chinarro.bsky.social! Follow the link to read more and apply: www.uu.se/en/about-uu/.... Deadline the 8th of May.

Postdoctoral Position - BMB APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS: CURRENT PENN STATE EMPLOYEE (faculty, staff, technical service, or student), please login to Workday to complete the internal application process. Please do not apply here, a...

Check out this squid-vibrio postdoc position at Penn State with my colleague Tim Miyashiro, especially if you have a background in proteomics/metabolomics.

psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic...

Hi @homerej.bsky.social. The position will most likely involve a large scale comparative genomics analysis of 300 symbiont strains to understand how host ecology shapes their genomes. Predictions will be validated in the wet lab. Email me your CV at l.henry@qmul.ac.uk and I can explain more!

Come join us! We're recruiting 3 new academic posts in the School of Biology, University of Leeds, closing 23/04/26.

Assoc Prof Plant Science tinyurl.com/4x48jc78
Assoc Prof Animal Biology tinyurl.com/2s4sk85s
Lecturer in Ecology, Zoology, Biodiversity or Ecosystem Management: tinyurl.com/39dwp47j

LondonEvoDevo meeting's website

May 5th: if you are around London, please join the London #EvoDevo symposium at QMUL / Charterhouse campus, as usual we will have selected talks and post-event 🍻. A warm up for #EED2026 in Glasgow. Registration £0, more info here: londonevodevo.co.uk

Evolution of host–microbe symbioses: linking horizontal gene transfer to ecological function at Queen Mary University of London on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Evolution of host–microbe symbioses: linking horizontal gene transfer to ecological function at Queen Mary University of London, listed on FindAPhD.com

🚨 PhD opportunity in evolutionary microbiology!

Join our lab to study how horizontal gene transfer drives host–microbe symbioses and ecological function

Plus: a PDRA position in comparative genomics is available

✉️ l.henry@qmul.qc.uk

Apply below

#PhD #Postdoc #Microbiology #Evolution #Genomics

Ento26 Call for Abstracts and Earlybird Registration Now Open

Registration and abstract submission are open for our annual conference, #Ento26 🦋

Join the entomological community this September, with opportunities to present your work, meet new contacts and build collaborations.

✨ Find out #WhatsOn at #Ento26 🔽

Associate Senior Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Molecular Microbiology The Department of Biology conducts research and teaching in many subject areas such as ecology, evolutionary biology, organismal biology and molecular biology. A total of approximately 300 people curr

Associate Senior Lecturer/Assistant Professor position in Molecular Microbiology available at Lund University, Sweden:
lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

Associate Senior Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Molecular Microbiology The Department of Biology conducts research and teaching in many subject areas such as ecology, evolutionary biology, organismal biology and molecular biology. A total of approximately 300 people curr

Great opportunity to join Lund University as an Assistant Professor in bacterial molecular biology (open to anyone with up to 7 years of experience post-PhD).

lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

A phylogenetic tree of insects is shown annotating the presence or absence of a an antimicrobial peptide gene across winged insects

Various phylogenetic secondary loss events are mapped to a tree of insects to explain the parsimony calculations necessary to explain the diversity of insect Drosomycin antimicrobial peptide genes

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are key defence molecules of the innate immune system of plants and animals. Understanding the evolutionary origins of AMPs can help to explain how immune systems acquire novelty and vary in their defensive capabilities. However, AMPs evolve rapidly, and so the origins of similar AMPs across organisms is often unclear. Furthermore, false negatives due to low search sensitivity are common and can hinder confident annotations about true absences. Due to these difficulties, understanding whether similar AMP genes found in diverse organisms represent ancestral molecules or evolutionary novelties has been challenging. In this report, we present evidence of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) of the antifungal peptide gene Drosomycin across insects. We show that in Diptera, the presence of Drosomycin is restricted to the Melanogaster group and additionally the distant relative Drosophila busckii. We go on to recover Drosomycin genes in cockroaches (Blattodea), mantises (Mantodea), one katydid (Orthoptera), various beetles (Coleoptera), and a recently acquired pseudogenized Drosomycin locus in Liposcelis booklice (Psocodea), but no other insects. Explaining this diversity through shared ancestry requires at least 50 independent loss events, or just seven HGT events. Previous studies have suggested that similar AMPs found across divergent species reflect conservation from a common ancestor, or due to their small size, that they arose via convergent evolution resulting from pathogen-imposed selection. Our findings suggest horizontal gene transfer can be responsible for the presence of some AMP genes found scattered across the tree of life. By presenting a mechanism through which immune systems can acquire novelty, our study also suggests a possible explanation for certain lineage-specific competencies for defence against infectious disease. While loss of AMP genes is common in certain lineages, here we suggest gain of AMPs can occur just as suddenly.

Pleased to finally share this fun collab that began at #Ento23

@cedricaumont.bsky.social presented & I had seen NCBI annotated some cockroach genomes as "contaminated." Turns out NCBI & I were wrong (much more fun).

Horizontal transfer of an #AntimicrobialPeptide across insects
bit.ly/DrsHGT

1/🧵

Amazing opportunity to join the @hassansalem.bsky.social lab studying symbiosis of leaf beetles!

Join @berasymbionts.bsky.social , @tatsuyanobori.bsky.social and us for a postdoc on the remarkable developmental biology of symbiosis!

Applications are due March 25th 🪲🦠

@johninnescentre.bsky.social @thesainsburylab.bsky.social

🚨JOB alert🚨

We have three (yes, THREE) 🌟lectureships🌟 advertised in the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol.

Broad remit, including #AnimalBehaviour & #GlobalChangeBiology

⏱️Deadline: 8th March 2026
🙏Please circulate widely

😊Come join us!

Full #job details: tinyurl.com/y3us95rc

A parasitic, parthenogenetic ant with only queens and without workers or males Hamaguchi, Kinomura and colleagues describe an ant species that lacks workers and males and consists exclusively of queens.

📄 A parasitic, parthenogenetic ant with only queens and without workers or males 🐜

⬇️
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Studying adaptation at the invisible scale | PNAS In order to understand adaptation by natural selection, it is necessary to observe organisms in their natural habitat. For this reason, the field o...

How to study adaptation in organisms that we can’t see, living in environments that we can’t visit? Some thoughts in our perspective piece out today in @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... @biology.ox.ac.uk @stuwest.bsky.social

Awesome work Piotr and team! 👏

The visualization of two bacterial genomes, of 50 and 52kb, representing independent instances of extreme genomic reduction in ancient heritable endosymbionts of planthoppers.

Our new paper in @natcomms.nature.com is now online-early!

We describe independent evolution of bacterial genomes of only ~50–52 kb — the smallest known outside cellular organelles — revealing striking convergence toward minimal gene sets.

🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Awesome paper guys! 🙌🏼

How specific are heritable symbioses?

And what can we learn from swapping obligate symbionts across host species?

We address this in our latest, led by @inespons.bsky.social & in our collaboration w/ @microbiome.bsky.social 🦠🪲 Out today in @natcomms.nature.com!

1/n
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Awesome work Ines and Hassan! 🙌🏼

We understand a great deal about how and why cooperation evolves, but what about its long-term consequences?

Great to see our new review on this out now in @asn-amnat.bsky.social!

Eusociality has independently evolved in multiple arthropod lineages

Eusociality has independently evolved in multiple arthropod lineages

Comparative analysis across 5,678 insect species shows that, when you control for phylogenetic bias, eusociality has not evolved at a faster rate in haplodiploid species. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

NEW: Registration is now FREE for graduate students and postdocs for the 14th Annual Yosemite Symbiosis workshop. THANKS to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation! Space is limited. Learn more and REGISTER here: snri.ucmerced.edu/form/symbios...

@alexdemendoza.bsky.social

Lecturer in Ecology and Evolution position available in Biology Department at Stanford University. Apply by April 1, 2026. (Photo by Rick Morris)
academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31606

Research Group Leader Do you want to lead groundbreaking research in computational biology? Join us at EMBL-EBI! EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) is seeking talented and highly-motivated scientists to jo...

We are hiring for group leaders again — EBI is a great place to start your research group!

embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/EMBL/job/Hin...

Uppsala in late autumn

Join us at the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University. We’re searching for an Assistant Professor in Biology. www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

New preprint! Symbionts provide critical functions—but how do they impact host phenotypes in nature? We show a horizontally transferred plasmid in a heritable symbiont drives divergence in defensive traits across insect populations, revealing how mobile DNA rapidly shapes pathogen resistance. 👇