BejaLabTechnion

Protein fibers, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s, spotted making deliveries to sperm | EurekAlert! www.eurekalert.org/news-release...

Not all nuclei are the same. We went to some of biology’s most exceptional nuclei 👉 dinoflagellates with genomes 80× ours 👉 Giardia’s twin nuclei 👉 ciliates carrying two nuclei in one cytoplasm & asked a simple question: what sets nuclear density? 🧵 Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🕷️💤 New paper in time for 🎃! Do #spiders really sleep? In our new study on #Portia fimbriata we tested all behavioural criteria of #sleep and found evidence for regulated, two-stage sleep with recurring REM-like stages. Out in @pnas.org! @roesslerdaniela.bsky.social 📄 tinyurl.com/3fky8ze7 🧵1/9

Fantastic #protistsonsky

Happy World Phage Day to all who celebrate... ... delighted to share new work led by Jacopo Marchi, Chadiga Khalek & joint w/Remy Chait on stable coexistence of phage with migrating bacteria driven by the forces of infection, lysis, and chemotaxis. A 🧵 at the interface between known & unknown.

First person infected with rare Shamonda virus: what we know www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Interesting 🤔 Why DNA uses thymine instead of uracil remains unresolved, since thymine is more susceptible to ultraviolet UV? www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Although thymine is more photoreactive, it preferentially channels UV damage into reversible lesions amenable to nonenzymatic self-repair

🚨 New preprint 🚨 We’ve discovered millions of viruses from sequencing data but we don’t always know who they infect. Our new tool, VHAMSTeR generates broad virus host predictions across the tree of life (prokaryote, plant, animal, fungi and protist hosts) A thread 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Has the next ice age already come and gone? | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Three years ago, my dad said that all fish are the same shape. Out of spite, I decided to draw all 478 families of bony fish listed in Nelson 2016. There's still some stuff I need to edit and some fish I want to redraw but, after 985 days, I finished my big dumb fish project last night.

so good to learn more about the enigmatic R-bodies now (in a way following up on our old post from 2016) #MicroSky #ProtistsOnSky

Today together with Prof. John McCutcheon lab @arizonastateuni.bsky.social we have visualized by cryoEM what looks like a very funky ribosome from an insect endosymbiont. We believe there are important evolutionary implications. Here the pre-print: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Don't miss the EMBO Global Lecture "Fidelity in obligate symbioses" by EMBO Young Investigator Hassan Salem (John Innes Centre) at the Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, #Japan, 6 November 2026. 🧪 #LifeSciences #research

Meet the giant Sissivirus (and its #virophage)! With 4 Mbp genome, Sissivirus is the champion of all known viruses (by genome size). Check the preprint to learn how it got so big. The study led by Julien Andreani, Frederik Schulz @fmschu.bsky.social & Bernard La Scola www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The Stoy Lab at FSU is recruiting MS and PhD students interested in insect symbiosis and mutualistic (co)evolution. Please share with any students who you think might be interested! Prospective students should email me and attach a CV at kstoy@fsu.edu. Lab Website Here: ksstoy.wixsite.com/stoylab

Discovery of phage defense systems through component modularity networks: Cell Host & Microbe

1/6 🧵 Six years in the making! Our new preprint is finally out! We used comparative single-cell transcriptomics to investigate how changes in gene expression contribute to the evolution of complex 3D structures, using Drosophila male genitalia as a model. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Improving optogenetic control over Gi/o-coupled receptor signaling by optimized GIRK channel expression www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A giant virus with a 4-megabase genome and a vastly expanded repeatome. | bioRxiv

A new structural study of neorhodopsin (NeoR) by Kirill, Matthias, and Igor! 🌟 The structural basis underlying its extremely red-shifted absorption is explored in this work 🔬 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It's a truth universally acknowledged that Current Biology rocks! So we thought, why not put a rock on the cover? True, not a super current rock, at 2.5 billion years old, but deeply connected to biology. To find out more, check out our special issue on Life & Earth! www.cell.com/current-biol...

How did Life shape Earth — feature by Michael Gross from our special issue! www.cell.com/current-biol...

New and evolving user programs will combine genomics with AI, automated experimentation and complementary capabilities across DOE user facilities — giving researchers integrated approaches hard to assemble in a single lab. More in our new strategic plan: jointgeno.me/stratplanrelease

Optimal growth temperature is not an adequate proxy of microbial cold adaptation | ISME Communications | Oxford Academic

This work led by @jennbrophy.bsky.social and her lead student Vivian in collaboration with my lab & lead student Michaela published online this morning at Nature Biotechnology www.nature.com/articles/s41... Helps limit engr'd microbial functions to target plants Exciting science & amazing collab

1/3 Remember our #Magnificent8? 8 mysterious lineages related to animals, known only from environmental DNA. 🧬 We suspected they were just the tip of the iceberg, hiding many more "unknown unknowns". Our new preprint suggests we were right. 🧵 👉https://bit.ly/3TUYowB #protistsOnSky

High-resolution structure of monomeric photosystem I from Thermosynechococcus vestitus link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Biofilm formation and dynamics in the marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In today's installment of the "Unknowns" series, I pitched in with colleagues @kchang.bsky.social & William Broad to tackle a teeny question: How Did Life Arise? Gift link: nyti.ms/4B9lbW5

The biogeography of giant viruses and interactions with Eukaryotes across European lakes www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Out Now! G-protein-coupled receptor sensing of farnesol controls fungal dormancy and is susceptible to bacterial interference #MicroSky

News: millions of years ago, hybridization gave rise to a tetraploid #fish with two distinct parental subgenomes & this is fascinating: as young barbels develop, they switch from using opsins from one subgenome as larvae to those from the other as adults, fine-tuning their colour #vision! 👁️🌈.

Nonlinear distributed sensing of light patterns leads to perceptual distortions in plants www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

After tRNA, rRNA, mRNA, RluA apparently also modifies phage RNA (E. coli) 🦠 A host enzyme pseudouridylates an RNA bacteriophage genome and accelerates virus production www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Functions and evolution of viral proteins #virology #viruses #proteins #MicroSky @asm.org journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Cover image alert 🎨🚨👇🏼 - check out the amazing drawing of Sophia Zimmermann from our group in Nature Microbiology @natmicrobiol.nature.com ! Fun fact: Sophia initially drew it as a present to Dorentina @humollidorentina.bsky.social when we celebrated her recent paper on TnSeq with phages 🥂😊.

Virophage-like viruses replicate with a candidate phycodnavirus of C. parva www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Viruses have parasites too. Our new preprint shows how phages use VIPR to silence parasitic satellites, and how the satellites fight back with its own decoy VIPR RNAs that redirect VIPR to DNA REP elements in the host genome!! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Defining the essential genome of diverse phages with phage Tn-seq www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Systematic mapping of bacteriophage gene essentiality with HIDEN-SEQ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Antisense RNA controls the degradation of phycobilisomes in heterocyst-forming cyanobacteria by a transcriptional interference mechanism academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

From hijackers to architects: the role of prophages in bacterial genome evolution journals.asm.org/doi/full/10....

Unprecedented atlas explores mitochondria across the tree of life www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Very nice discovery from the Jackson, Bravo and Basel labs. Cleaved tRNA ends, loaded with an amino acid, activate a form of bacterial immunity

Meet the Spaceship-like Vessel Made to Drift Over the North Pole | What The Future www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGzz...

A conditional upper-bound design map for rhodopsin-augmented electro-microbial CO2-to-biomass conversion www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Needed some red masking lights for the behaviour / imaging room. Turns out IKEA now sells these RGB lamps for cheap! 🧠

A new preprint by @amirfromm.bsky.social 📣 How do protists fight viruses in nature? Using single-cell sequencing in an isolated alpine lake, we uncover natural giant-virus infections and reveal the induction of viperin, an ancient antiviral defense, in wild protists 🏔️🦠->

Meet the person behind the illustrations of the 2026 Nobel Prize laureates. Check out artist @niklaselmehed.bsky.social. Here he is painting the illustrations for our new medicine laureates, Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel.