Anna Schrecengost

Happy to see @annaschreck.bsky.social's paper with Erin Frates, Alia Al-Haj, and @wallyfulweiler.bsky.social out in @isme-microbes.bsky.social Communications! Check it out if you like anaerobic ciliates or meta-analysis of 18S rRNA datasets for diversity discovery! academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a...

Season 3 of the Tiny Living Beings podcast is out with new episodes every 2-4 weeks! Here are the interviews I’ve done so far so you can catch up! I’ll continue to post updates here. The show is now supported by @asm.org and available everywhere you get podcasts. Subscribe so you don’t miss new eps!

PhD position in arctic protists at the Natural History Museum in Oslo #arctic #marine #protists #diversity #ecology #metabarcoding

Tiny unicellular #eukaryotes, big #biomaterial inspiration. Excited to share our Nature Communications study showing that tintinnid ciliates build their chemical- and heat-resistant shells from self-assembling proteins we call Tintinnidorins. doi.org/10.1038/s414... #protistsonsky 1/3

New #ISEPpapers #preprint! A billion-year-old bacterial machinery replicates plastid DNA and supports kleptoplastidy www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #Protists #Algae #Microbes #Bacteria #Evolution #Symbiosis #Plastids

New preprint about closely-related #methanogens living inside ciliates and animal guts!! We found that ciliate symbionts are functionally indistinct from free-living spp, while gut symbionts have streamlined genomes encoded for scavenging. read on if you're curious why 🤔 #ProtistsOnSky #SymbioSky

We stumbled upon an unusual gene called 'rqua' in the genome of some freshwater sponges. In microbes, this gene confers the ability to make a ubiquinone analog - rhodoquinone - which can help the respiratory chain run without oxygen.

How common is multicellularity in bacteria? And archaea? And how does it evolve? We wrote a short review "On the architecture and evolution of prokaryotic multicellularity". Preprint link: bit.ly/4ta06Gq Sharing and comments are much appreciated. 1/4

New paper alert!

Our new article on #protist global distributions combining the #Mixoplankton and #metaPR2 databases with newly revised functional annotations. rdcu.be/fanlx

receiving the onion in print each month brings me a lot of joy, this is a true steal

love when there's an article about how life is sustainable in the superheated waters surrounding a hydrothermal volcanic fissure on the ocean floor and then like six paragraphs in you find out the author's parents are chemosynthetic bacteria 🙄

Check out our latest pre-print of our favourite pets - the breviates. This work was led by Zhezhen Yi in collaboration with @andrewjroger.bsky.social and many others! By studying diverse breviates we were able to see how different metabolic pathways can evolved in response to low-oxygen.

glad so many of you *like* the 𝘝𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘺𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘢 having lunch 🙂 but don't miss the recent work of beryl rapaport et al. on another amoeba, 🔥 𝘐𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘦𝘣𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘴 🔥dancing at 63°C on STC 👉 smallthingsconsidered.blog/schaechter/2...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #protistsonsky

Excited to share that @michelle-hauer.bsky.social's paper with @katiekliermicrobe.bsky.social @maggielangwig.bsky.social @karthik-a.bsky.social on phage interactions with chemosynthetic symbionts was published today. #NSF and @schmidtocean.bsky.social supported. academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a...

The day is finally here!! On behalf of all the co-organizers the Comparative Genomics of Unicellular Eukaryotes website is open. comparativegenomics2026.com Invited speakers will be added to the website in the coming weeks. Watch this (well, that^) space!

The villains in this story are us...complicity is shared, whether we voted for the US administration that is responsible for this wave of violence or [not] ... its up to us to stop it & spend the rest of our lives making amends to the rest of the world. 500womenscientists.org/updates/2026...

End-of-year preprint dump! A collaboration with @messorensen.bsky.social and German and Korean colleagues: "The phylogenetic context for the origin of a unique purple-green photosymbiosis " doi.org/10.64898/202...

“A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known" - Bertrand Russell, 1976. Time-lapse video of Vampyrella lateritia eating Spirogyra algae from Science Source/Oliver Skibbe. 🦠

Just on time for the holidays! Happy to share the published version of the discovery of leptophytes, a new deep-branching and widespread group of microalgae based on plastid MAGs (ptMAGs). Now with additional support from a mitochondrial MAG (mtMAG) of leptophytes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Announcing our next #NSFfunded workshop on "Telling Stories Through Data", co-lead by myself + @vgwschutte.bsky.social! It’s half bioinformatics data viz & half #SciComm - this year’s focus is host-associated microbiome datasets. Apply here to join us (form closes 1/10) bit.ly/TSTD2026 #symbiosky

So excited to see this preprint out!! There is so much gold hiding in public eDNA studies, just waiting for taxon-focused investigations to pull out stories like this. Congrats on a great analysis @annaschreck.bsky.social @symbiosisrox.bsky.social

Respiratory endosymbionts, that allow their ciliate hosts to breathe nitrate instead of (or in addition to) oxygen are frequent members of the wastewater microbiome. 🦠 🖥️🧬 Great to see this work by @louison-nicolas.bsky.social published in ISME coummuncations! doi.org/10.1093/isme...

Check out our preprint!! So many cool analyses you can do with public rDNA datasets. Especially if you work with understudied groups or habitats! #ProtistsOnSky

Microbes can store “memories” by collectively altering their environment. These externalized “memories” impact how microbial communities assemble. isme-microbes.org/bacterial-me... #MicrobeMemory #MicrobialEcology

Wisconsin Evolution is accepting applications for our Seminar Series' Early Career Scientist Award. Come share your evolution research and visit UW-Madison's evolution community. Open to grad students and postdocs (<5 yrs post PhD) from outside UW-Madison. Apply by Dec 15th here: shorturl.at/4a4O6

How do cells adapt morphology to function? In a 🔥 preprint by @zjmaggiexu.bsky.social , with @dudinlab.bsky.social and @amyweeks.bsky.social , we identify a self-organizing single-cell morphology circuit that optimizes the feeding trap structure of the suctorian P. collini. 🧵 tinyurl.com/4k8nv926

And vice versa, sulfur-oxidizing bacteria are masters of colonizing marine hosts! This was a wonderful collaboration with Sam Vohsen, Eslam Osman, Mandy Joye, Matt Saxton, grubervodicka.bsky.social, @ibaums.bsky.social

We are looking for a PhD student to work on an exciting plastid endosymbiosis in microbial eukaryotes. This position involves sampling, exciting microscopy such as CARDFISH, ExM and FIBSEM, single-cell transcriptomics and more. #protistsonsky 1/2

Job Opening **ASSISTANT PROFESSOR MARINE ECOLOGY**, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Rhode Island. jobs.uri.edu/postings/15960

This past Thursday I successfully defended my dissertation! Thank you @symbiosisrox.bsky.social and the rest of the lab for making it a super fun celebration! I dressed up my son as a #ciliate for the occasion and we jumped into Narragansett Bay at @urigso.bsky.social beach afterwards #ProtistsOnSky

This is a long shot but does anyone know how to pronounce Epalxellidae?? 😂 #ProtistsOnSky

Happening tomorrow!

🎃 👻 Happy Halloween! Last-minute costume idea: giant tubeworm. 🦑 🌊

✨🌊 The ones who get it, get it. ⬇️ 💭 What are we missing? #URIGSO

Database Release: PPSDB, a Linked Open Data Knowledge Base for Protist–Prokaryote Symbioses onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #jcampubs

#SymbioSky #MicroSky #ProtistsOnSky the plot thickens 👇 as we all suspected and feared(?), organellogenesis is not straightforward, but rather, well,... a thicket ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Love #protists? Then you'd love this! Beautiful collection of hand-drawn critters represented here at the Oxford-Japan symposium on ethological dynamics in diorama environments sites.google.com/view/oxford-... #ciliates #testateamoeba #diatoms

From MBoC: Wallace F. Marshall (UCSF) and team profile the giant ciliate Stentor pyriformis—symbiotic algae in microtubule baskets, symbiont-dependent phototaxis, and a standard genetic code. Paper: www.molbiolcell.org/doi/10.1091/... #CellBiology