Alvaro Rodriguez del Rio 🍉

In case you missed it: our review titled "Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities" is out! 🚨

Let me hit you with some highlights on why spatial structure matters. (and why you should care!)

Sharing is appreciated 🙏 🧵👇

doi.org/10.1093/fems...

Beyond thrilled to share that our study has been published!
This project encompasses years of work, including my thesis research on Asgard archaea in the @archaeal.bsky.social lab at @utmsi.bsky.social and
@texasscience.bsky.social!!!
#MicroSky #ArchaeaSky 1/12

🌍🧬 Our Environmental #Metagenomics course with @oskolkov.bsky.social & @luispedrocoelho.bsky.social is back (Oct 12–16)!
Learn state-of-the-art metagenomic analysis with real Illumina & @nanoporetech.com data. From reads to high-quality #MAGs using modern #bioinformatics workflows

shorturl.at/Pi4Qt

Environmental drivers can shift in effect direction when acting in concert with other factors Results from a recent paper from our group in Nature Communications

Environmental drivers can shift in effect direction when acting in concert with other factors

open.substack.com/pub/matthias...

mvif 46 program

It's Friday!
...and a new #MVIF program is out! 🤩

Free registration: cassyni.com/s/mvif-46

Highlights:
🇺🇸 Rebecca L. Knoll
🇯🇵 Akito Sakanaka

Keynote:
🇺🇸 @simrouxvirus.bsky.social

⭐️ Talks:
🇦🇺 @jeremyjbarr.bsky.social
🇨🇦 @erikbakkeren.bsky.social
🇨🇳 Guanxiang Liang

Closely related microbes tend to live in similar communities across Earth’s environments.
We call this pattern community conservatism - extending established ecological patterns to the microbial world.
🧬🌍 #MicrobialEcology #Evolution

Read the full article here: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Last days to apply for these postdoctoral positions, including one in my group.

auspire.eu/research-tea...

In remembrance of Peer Bork  | EMBL EMBL and its community are deeply saddened by the death of Peer Bork, the organisation’s Interim Director General.

I woke up to some very sad news...

Peer was a giant of bioinformatics and computational biology and an inspiring mentor to everyone who had been in his group. I find myself repeating things he said all the time and will probably keep doing so for the rest of my life

www.embl.org/news/embl-an...

Interested in working on the theory of and concepts behind multiple factor impacts on ecological systems and beyond?

Please send expressions of interest. Starting Jan 2026, I would be awarding up to three postdoctoral fellowships on this topic (12 months; 2,5K €) to drive progress on this topic.

Constructing a “periodic table” of bacteria to map diversity in trait space Abstract. Despite an ever-expanding number of bacterial taxa being discovered, many of these taxa remain uncharacterized with unknown traits and environmen

New paper up - inspired by the periodic table of the elements, we attempted to organize bacterial diversity in genome-inferred trait space academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

MetaPointFinder:
A new approach for detecting mutation-driven antimicrobial resistance directly from metagenomic reads.
Fills a major gap in current resistome profiling by capturing chromosomal AMR mutations that metagenome tools miss.

github.com/aldertzomer/...

Logo of Bin Chicken (Australian white ibis) on a rubbish bin, pulling out a strand of DNA

“Bin Chicken” is now published in Nature Methods! It substantially improves genome recovery through rational coassembly 🧬🖥️. Applied to public 🌍 metagenomes, we recovered 24,000 novel species 🦠, including 6 new phyla.
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
@benjwoodcroft.bsky.social @rhysnewell.bsky.social
🧵1/6

Enjoyed the presentation 'Chrysalis. Artists in Labs' today as part of Berlin Science Week.

Up on the stage also the lab's @alvarordr.bsky.social and artist Helena Nikonole, who gave a presentation on their planned interaction.

Organized by our friends at Art Laboratory Berlin.

CHRYSALIS. ARTISTS IN LABS During 2025 and 2026, Art Laboratory Berlin is unfolding the new innovative project CHRYSALIS. ARTISTS IN LABS with an interdisciplinary exchange between art and science in Berlin science laboratories...

As a part of Berlin Science week, I look forward to the event "Chrysalis. Artists in Labs", also featuring our lab's @alvarordr.bsky.social and our artist-in-residence Helena Nikonole

berlinscienceweek.com/programme/ch...

A genomic catalog of Earth's bacterial and archaeal symbionts www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #jcampubs

Picture of MEME students on the beach

Do you want to do a Masters in Evolutionary Biology? The call for applying to the MEME program is now open! MEME is a fantastic 2-year MSc between four European Universities on all areas of Evolutionary Biology. Apply and study in Sweden/France/the Netherlands/Germany/USA/Switzerland! www.evobio.eu

Very happy to participate in the Berlin Science week 2025 w/ @artlaboratoryb.bsky.social ! Come join us in this exciting event 👇

ecoevojobs.net 2025-26

UPDATE: The 2025-2026 list of faculty and postdoc positions in ecology and evolutionary biology is out! Be sure to check out this active and helpful community run resources! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

A periodic table of bacteria?: Mapping bacterial diversity in trait space www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #jcampubs

We are hiring a PhD student! Are you fascinated by microbes and evolution? Come join us in Barcelona!

mvif season 5 keynotes

Season 5 is going to start 🔜

Check out the program and
feel free to join the keynotes by presenting your work–abstract submission is open www.microbiome-vif.org/en-US/-/info...

@kathlemon.bsky.social ‬ @saramitri.bsky.social @simrouxvirus.bsky.social @halllab.bsky.social @deepaagashe.bsky.social

Celebrating the small wins in academia A little reminder...

Celebrating the small wins in academia….a reminder to myself (and maybe you….)

Please share with someone you think might also need this reminder :)

open.substack.com/pub/matthias...

Will be presenting our results on the effect of multiple global change factors on soil prokaryotes in #ESEB2025 poster 127 today, come say hi if you wanna know more!

More than 100 humanitarian groups warn of mass starvation in Gaza A joint statement says the Israeli government's "siege" has left aid supplies "totally depleted".

This is heartbreaking and needs to stop

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Non-antibiotics disrupt colonization resistance against enteropathogens - Nature Non-antibiotic drugs from a wide range of therapeutic classes can alter the ability of gut commensals to resist invasion by enteropathogens, a previously underappreciated side effect of such drugs.

Seeing this published is even better than eating sweets! I am so happy and proud of whole @lisamaierlab.bsky.social, especially Lisa and @jdlcz.bsky.social who walked the funny/exciting/rocky road with me until the very end. Check it out!
#science #microbiome #health

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

Awesome work by Ziqi Deng: TreeProfiler: a tool for large-scale metadata profiling along gene and species trees.
biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Interactive dynamic visualization of large trees + custom traits, MSA, domain architectures, functional terms & more + summary of features at internal nodes

The rare microbial biosphere harbors many chemosensitive microorganisms undetectable by regular shotgun metagenomics. We can now explore them using our custom target-capture sequencing approach. Impressive work by
Claudia Sanchis, part of her PhD thesis!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Phylogenomic analyses indicate the archaeal superphylum DPANN originated from free-living euryarchaeal-like ancestors Nature Microbiology - Phylogenetic reconstructions with conserved protein markers from the 11 known DPANN phyla reveal their monophyletic placement within the Euryarchaeota.

📣 We are proud of the publication of the second paper of @bbaker24.bsky.social PhD thesis. In collaboration with friends in Halifax we have studied the difficult question of the phylogeny of the DPANN archaea, composed of several phyla of highly reduced, fast-evolving epiparasites 🧵

rdcu.be/erkkU

We have updated our work "TreeProfiler: a tool for large-scale metadata profiling along gene and species trees"
biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Interactive viz of large trees + custom traits, MSA, domain architectures, functional terms & more + summary of features at internal nodes.

Soil microbial responses to multiple global change factors as assessed by metagenomics - Nature Communications Soils are usually exposed to multiple global change factors (like warming or contamination by pollutants), but the response of soil communities to combined global change factors is poorly understood. ...

Paper just out in @natcomms.nature.com by @alvarordr.bsky.social

Soil microbial responses to multiple global change factors as assessed by metagenomics

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