Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

1/ BRAKER4 hatched!
The Earth BioGenome Project is on track to sequence ~1.5M eukaryotic species. Every one needs a structural annotation. No Perl monolith was going to survive that. So we rewrote BRAKER from the ground up. github.com/Gaius-August...

Eukaryotes didn't just arise from two partners. Phylogenomics of the LECA proteome reveals multiple waves of bacterial HGT, some predating mitochondrial endosymbiosis, plus a possible role for giant viruses.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10....

Very honored to receive the Graduate Student Excellence Award from SMBE! I’m excited to share my work on convergent genome evolution in terrestrial animals in my upcoming talk.

IMPACT OF PARENTHOOD ON UNIVERSITY EMPLOYMENT. Line graph shows how the probability of holding a research position changes from four years before to seven years after having children.

Becoming a parent is much more detrimental to women’s academic careers than it is to men’s

Read the full story: go.nature.com/4v4rxmQ

How would chromatin look and work in Asgard archaea? @damelab.bsky.social and I share our ideas in our Trends in Genetics review, out now at doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

And professors…

“L’Estat ha de retornar la dignitat a les persones que van morir i a les que van patir abusos durant el servei militar obligatori” El documental Et faran un home. Morts silenciades, realitzat i emès al Sense Ficció (3Cat), denuncia la mort de 1.900 joves durant el servei militar obligatori en democràcia a l’Estat espanyol. La santcugatenca Cristina Aymerich n’és una de les protagonistes, germana d’un dels reclutes que van perdre la vida a Melilla....

DRETS ⚖️ || Entrevista a Cristina Aymerich, Francesc Robelló i Mònica Muntada, familiars de joves morts en estranyes circumstàncies durant la 'mili'. Busquen suports a un manifest per fer una comissió d'investigació al Congrés. #SantCugat

The most disturbing aspect of the AI era is realizing how many people have only ever valued others for their labor and not their humanity.

«The real danger is […] is that the default assumption that taking on students is simply part of any professor’s academic journey will quietly erode.»

The need for academic jobs will erode even faster if public funders ever realise they're not being used to teach anything to anyone…

He seemed not to know the uses of silence.

The ecology of horizontal gene transfer Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) generates genetic variation in populations across all domains of life; however, most studies focus on individual transf…

I have a new review out in TiG titled, “The ecology of horizontal gene transfer”! I’ve been thinking about these ideas for years and this field is growing so fast it’s becoming impossible to review it. I hope this paper sparks discussion on different ways we can look at DNA transfer!

Preprint Editors – Development's next step into the preprint landscape - the Node Development announce an open call for experienced, research-active Preprint Editors. Read the Editorial and apply by 30 March 2026.

Preprint Editors – Development's next step into the preprint landscape

@dev-journal.bsky.social announce an open call for experienced, research-active Preprint Editors. Read the Editorial and apply by 30 March 2026.

#Preprints #Publishing #DevBio #StemCells

thenode.biologists.com/preprint-edi...

Could you expand on that? Which kind of models do you have in mind? Genuinely curious.

Si només tens un metre, tot són llargades.

Diversity, ecology, cell biology and evolution of the Asgard archaea - Nature Reviews Microbiology The Asgard archaea have become a cornerstone of archaeal research, particularly for studies aiming to unravel the origin and early evolution of eukaryotes. This Review outlines the current state of th...

Just over ten years after the discovery of the first Asgard archaeal genomes, we revisit the rapid expansion of this remarkable archaeal lineage. From diverse genomes and metabolisms to eukaryotic signature proteins and the first cultured representatives.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Forty grisly years
it lasted—
the heavy boots,
fistfuls of nails,
the unending jeers
…

Però foren quaranta anys
terribles
de botes feixugues
de mans amb claus
d’ocells de becs constants

[…]

«Puig Antich», de Vicent Andrés Estellés

Congratulations @thibautbrunet.bsky.social and all the authors! This is an awesome story! Very excited to have these critters in the lab now 😍

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)

«That which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun…»

Blue, but not like thaaaaat.

«I want the yellow bottle.»

«We don't have a yellow bottle.»

«I want the blue bottle.»

«Ok, here you go.»

[Toddler takes the blue bottle] «It's yellow.»

It's hard to recreate that mindset now, because know we *know* - we've *seen* a world brought to a halt. But this was incomprehensible then. How do you just - stop everything?

What situation would we not believe today? Or are we more likely to believe overall?

Will I ever have that feeing again?

It was the unprecedentedest of times, it was the precedentedest of times…

Morning poem from Mary Oliver, curated by @samantharhill.bsky.social

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted—

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead—
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging—

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches—
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

I just read Gunther Stent’s 1977 review of The Selfish Gene (in the Hastings Center Report), and oh boy. A 🧵

Some samples:
Dawkins’ “perverse” definition of the gene “denatures the meaningful and well-established central concept of genetics into a fuzzy and heuristically useless notion.” /1