This is awesome! Congratulations @ddiazescandon.bsky.social ! What fascinating results!

Black background with white letters 'metalichen lab'. Right and lower part of the image taken by a macro photo of a bright yellow lichen. The lichen surface has numerous cup-shaped fruiting bodies with orange inner surface

Thrilled to share that I recently got a position of an Assistant Professor/SciLifeLab Fellow at Stockholm University, where I will continue my work on #lichen symbiosis. The lab opens in April 2026, and if you are interested in joining please get in touch! #newPI

Congrats Gulya, this is great :)

A screenshot of the "Making Fungal-Photobiont Symbioses in the Lab: Past, Present, and Future of the Elusive in Vitro Lichen" by Arseniy Belosokhov and Toby Spribille published in Annual Review of Microbiology, Volume 79, 2025. Link: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-micro-051524-031834

#Lichens form their complex thalli through a partnership involving at least a fungus and an alga. But can these living structures be rebuilt in vitro? For more than a century, people have tried. With @spribille.bsky.social we revisited 150 years of #lichen #resynthesis to ask: has anyone succeeded?

happy to share PDFs of course :)

and here (paper2): www1.montpellier.inra.fr/CBGP/acarolo...

Get the papers here (paper1): www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

This has been a super fun and exciting collaboration between members of the Lichnology and Acarology groups at University of Graz and colleagues from the Charles University in Prague. Big thanks to everyone who helped to get this out! More to come on this soon ...

It seems that these common mites use C. rubrotincta as kindergarden. Our observations suggest that adult mites bite cavities into the lichen tissue and lay their eggs into them. We observed mite eggs and (the hitherto undescribed) juvenvile stages of the most commonly associated mites.

Paper 2: We could show that Cladonia rubrotincta, C. norvegica and C. coniocrea have a high number of mites associated with them. Three species of the genus Carabodes and one species from Mycobates are the most common. But this is not all...

Paper 1: We describe Cladonia rubrotincta as a new species, distinct from C. norvegica. C. rubrotincta produces red pigment (rhodocladonic acid) as a response to the presence of mites. Red pigmented material previously assigned to C. norvegica probably has to be revised.

Lately we have been working on the interactions of #lichens and #mites. This has been super exciting and the first two publications with our findings are now out. Here a quick summary (thread).

Could be Lambiella?

In honor of #OzzyOsbourne (RIP) my daughter & I went out to #YoloBypass to see the bats. And though the bats may have thought they were safe with Ozzy gone, it seems Ozzy was resurrected as either a Swainson's Hawk or peregrine falcon because they were out there snatching and eating bats. #birds

We are wrapping up the 4th edition of our course Reproducibility in Bioinformatics!

A big thank you to Christoph, Philipp and all participants for the great discussions, hands-on sessions, and commitment to making bioinformatics more reproducible
Looking forward to the next one! 🚀
shorturl.at/xPlrM

UVC-Intense Exoplanets May Not Be Uninhabitable: Evidence from a Desert Lichen | Astrobiology Many of the recently discovered Earth-like exoplanets are hosted by M and F stars, stars that emit intense UVC, especially during a flare. We studied whether such planets are nevertheless habitable by irradiating a desert lichen, Clavascidium lacinulatum, with 254-nm 55 W/m2 UVC nonstop for 3 months in the laboratory. Only 50% of its algal photobiont cells were inactivated. To put this in perspective, we used the same setup to challenge the photobiont cells but grown in pure culture, and Deinococcus radiodurans, the most radiation-resistant bacterium on Earth. Entire monolayers of hundreds of cells were inactivated in just 60 s. Further studies indicated that the cortex of the lichen was rendered UVC-opaque by deposits of phenolic secondary metabolites in its interstices. The lichen was injured only because, while most photochemical reactive oxygen species were quenched, photochemical ozone was not. We conclude that UVC-intense exoplanets are not necessarily uninhabitable to photosynthetic organisms.

Okay, now this is wild - You can expose a desert lichen Clavascidium lacinulatum to UVC radiation for 3 months, at same dose that kills Deinococcus radiodurans, the most radiation-resistant bacteria, in 60 sec - and it survives! Lichens rock!

www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/...

Excited to see the German translation of our book “Lives of Lichens” now available for preorder. And a switch-up of the cover photo: this time Rusavskia elegans from Montana!

NIH funding supporting the HMMER and Infernal software projects has been terminated. NIH states that our work, as well as all other federally funded research at Harvard, is of no benefit to the US.

A special issue dedicated to lichen research with emphasis on new approaches to the study of the symbiosis: The diversity of organisms present in thalli (including all fungi, algae and bacteria); Their physical and metabolic interactions; Their contributions to the functioning of the lichen symbiosis. In addition to original research, we also welcome perspectives, reviews and methods papers. Submission deadline: September 2025. Guest editors: Veera Tuovinen Nogerius, Ioana Onut Brännström, Gulnara Tagirdzhanova, Ellen Cameron

🌟Call for Papers on #Lichen #symbiosis🌟 Thrilled to be a guest editor for The Lichenologist, together with @veera-t-nogerius.bsky.social, @ioanabrannstrom.bsky.social, and Ellen Cameron. Send us papers on the inner workings of lichens, submission is open till September 2025!
tinyurl.com/2w7wwubm