Our group enjoyed this workshop last year, Highly recommend!

Unifying Ecology Across Scales - Gordon Research Conference.

With @jennsunday.bsky.social as Chair

www.grc.org/unifying-eco...

You could argue that the true core of a university is the intellectual relationship between teacher and student, and the shared pursuit of new knowledge through research... Everything else is infrastructure.
When we forget that, we mistake administration for mission and metrics for meaning.

Beautiful image!

I am honored that my microscopy image has been selected as the cover of a @newphyt.bsky.social issue for the third time. Thanks to the production team for selecting my image.

So when do authors preprint? Many do long before they submit to a journal (to get feedback to improve the work?); many submit around the same time (just want the work out?). Only a minority are submitting once the paper is under review [evidence against claims by some detractors]. 3/n

Motion to stop referring to it as Next Generation Sequencing. That's like saying The Matrix is a recent movie

Well, years are years, right? So still a mere 38 years. But the #LTEE is now past 82,000 generations. 🎉

I have to say, I am quite impressed with Claude-Opus-4.6. I had very interesting conversation with it trying to explain a puzzling phenomenon that we observed in our experiments. The internal monologue is fascinating and reveals solid reasoning characteristic of a very good 1st year PhD student.

On this day on February 26, 1948, the Max Planck Society was formally founded in Göttingen as the successor organization to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, in the cafeteria of the KWS's aerodynamic testing facility in Göttingen.

Happy birthday to....well, to us, actually! 😉🎂🥳 On this day on February 26, 1948, the Max Planck Society was formally founded in Göttingen as the successor organization to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, in the cafeteria of the KWS's aerodynamic testing facility in Göttingen.

Best practices for moving from correlation to causation in ecological research - Nature Communications Different scientific traditions offer seemingly disparate approaches to inferring causal relationships in ecological systems. This Perspective unifies the causal assumptions and methods from...

Excited to share our new paper in @natcomms.nature.com We synthesize causal discovery & inference approaches across traditions (regression adjustment, quasi-expts, SEMs, Granger causality, convergent cross-mapping, and more) into a unified workflow for ecologists. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Happy Birthday!

I first read about the LTEE in high school in a science magazine my Bio teacher had in the classroom. I don't think I thought "I want to be a microbiologist," but the article planted the seed.

Amazing that it's nearly at "mid life" (by human standards)., excited for what's next!

Happy 38th birthday to the #LTEE!
#BOTD in 1988.
Keep on evolving!

#science #evolution #microbiology

The editor:
We need a catchy title

Daniel Defoe:
The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on ...

Career – Schneeberger Lab

🌾 We have an open postdoc position in Plant Genomics in our group at HHU Düsseldorf!

If you enjoy computational biology, asking big questions, and the satisfaction of code working on the first try, check out schneebergerlab.org/career/

Apply by Mar. 31 | 3-year postdoc | German skills required

Existence of Causation without Correlation in Transcriptional Networks www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02...

The incredible vulnerability that reproduction poses for plant species in a warming world

Crop scientists have long recognized that reproduction is going to be the first point of failure for plants with rising global temperatures. However, this has often been overlooked by those studying natural populations. In this new review, we try to change that. ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

I'm super happy to share my new preprint reporting a study in collaboration with the Seebeck (Basel) and Sasso (Leipzig) labs: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We discovered that ovothiol A, a thiohistidine, is a major antioxidant in the green alga Chlamydomonas. (1/4)

She is an amazing skier but also a beautiful and brilliant woman! Just watch how she responded to the journalist who told her, "Two silver medals also mean two lost gold medals…”

Good luck!

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

Koonin's lab in NIH is looking for postdocs. If you know someone who is interested, please spread the word. The details about the position are below: www.training.nih.gov/jobs/pdf-ecb...

Scientists have seen Asgard archaea crawling for the first time. When it comes to the origin of eukaryotes, this is like seeing a feathered dinosaur in the wild. (Video courtesy of Philipp Ralder)

Beautiful structures, poetic name and great paper !

Congratulations to Sonomi Yamaguchi for her paper at @nature.com. Sonomi discovered Clover defense and explained how nucleotide signals control each step of viral sensing, immune regulation, and viral restriction – named for her beautiful "four-leaf" structures 🍀

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

graph showing number of each community profiling type (amplicon, shotgun-nanopore and shotgun-illumina). Amplicon and shotgun-illumina are in the millions of runs, while shotgun-nanopore is in the tens of thousands of runs.

There was a 34% increase in shotgun metagenomes in 2025 vs 2024 (64% increase for nanopore, now ~15,000), but amplicons are still king.

What happens to microbial genomic evolution in highly stable, closed ecosystems? In this preprint, authors look at 111 MAGs from a Romanian cave isolated from external influences for 5.5My(!) and see more pseudogenisation of core genes & limited HGT. Unsurprising?
🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How do evolutionary forces shape bacterial adaptation to the plant environment? 🌱🦠

Curious? Read our new review in @femsjournals.bsky.social Microbiology Reviews.

#PlantMicrobiome #MicrobialEvolution #HostMicrobeInteractions #Rhizosphere #Microbiome

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/fems...

CEPLAS, the cluster of excellence on plants sciences, is looking for PhD candidates for a number of exciting projects. See below for more info on the topics and on the recruiting process, and here: www.ceplas.eu/en/training-...

"Seasonal enhancement of the viral shunt catalyzes a subsurface oxygen maximum in the Sargasso Sea" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67002-1

Viruses transform microbes, populations, & ecosystems.

In new work jointly led w/@tn-marine-micro.bsky.social + more, we find a link between enhanced viral infection and productivity 50 meters below the surface in the otherwise nutrient limited Sargasso Sea.

a 🧵

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

Evolutionary mechanisms underlying bacterial adaptation to the plant environment Abstract. Plants and bacteria have coevolved over hundreds of millions of years, forming complex associations ranging from mutualism to pathogenicity that

Evolutionary mechanisms underlying bacterial adaptation to the plant environment

in @femsjournals.bsky.social Microbiology Reviews by @zakisaati.bsky.social et al

academic.oup.com/femsre/advan...