Ben Larson

And now it's out! Happy that PNAS selected for the cover this SEM image snapped by @samjlord.bsky.social, one of the most evocative visualizations of Euplotes that I have ever encountered. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Stay tuned for what is shaping up to be some fascinating follow-up in the lab...

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...

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!

Ever see a snake do a barrel roll? Scientists disentangle the locomotor kinematics of this behavior in rolling snakes. Learn more in Current Biology: spkl.io/633287ntaA Yosuke Kojima & colleagues @currentbiology.bsky.social

Stentor coeruleus is a unicellular protist with amazing wound healing and regenerative abilities, making it amenable to grafting and micro surgical experiments. In the spirit of the Halloween season, I channeled my Dr. Frankenstein energy and created a 7-headed Stentor #protistsonsky

1/ There are a ton of cool papers coming out on evolutionary transitions in individuality right now! Here are five recent ones I've really enjoyed, spanning Snowball Earth, volvocine algae, plasmids that fuse into a new individual, the relatives of animals, and... water kefir

Applications for Microbial Diversity are now open! A once-in-a-lifetime experience is an application away! www.mbl.edu/education/ad... @mblscience.bsky.social #MicrobialDiversity

⏰ EARLY AND ROLLING ADMISSIONS! Apply to early admissions round 2 for Semester in Biological Discovery program by October 15, with the final deadline on December 15. 🔗 More info here: go.mbl.edu/SBD

How fast can speciation be? In less than 100 years, certain strains of lab mice have already (partly) lost the ability to hybridize with each others. The molecular mechanism has just been worked out - read below for a genetics detective story ⬇️

Please enjoy this new offering from the lab: we discover that #excavates - ancient flagellate lineages with a voracious appetite for bacteria - change their behaviour depending on the availability of said prey! Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #protistsonsky

Out today in @nature.com: our review on how single cells evolve into multicellular organisms. With Ozan Bozdag, @kaitong25.bsky.social, Peter Yunker, and @matthewherron.bsky.social. rdcu.be/9ZuiKow9twKa For an overview, check out the video below.

A colleague just thoughtfully dropped this off for me. I had never heard of it before, but it turns out to be a fantastic little resource for protist identification. Nice drawings with good descriptions of behavior and sampling tips. #protistsonsky

An atlas of eukaryotic centromere architecture reveals recurrent evolutionary dynamics #protists www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Are you interested in learning how genomes of weird fungi and protists evolve and are you looking for an exciting PhD opportunity? Jolien van Hooff and I are looking for an enthusiasic PhD candidate at Wageningen University: www.wur.nl/en/vacancy/p... #TEworldwide #Fungi #Protists #Genome

One reason (among many) to study protists: as a toolbox, nature is unbeatable

Call for manuscripts on bacterial chemotaxis and swimming! I'm partnering with JoVE to assemble a new collection of method, reviews, and research. ➡️Abstracts due Nov. 23rd. I invite you to share your love (and knowledge) of swimming bacteria! www.jove.com/topical-coll... 🧪 🦠 🧫 #microsky

Your favorite website for illustrations of almost all organisms is looking for donations to help cover its running costs! Please consider donating to help keep this open-source platform running: www.phylopic.org/images

Our paper on the dynamics of Asgard archaea (Promethearchaeota) is now out in Nature! Huge thanks to the reviewers for helping make the manuscript stronger. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Two “Lokis” stained for Lokiactin (FastAct, magenta), reaching toward each other to celebrate 🎉 #archaea

Wonderful profile of our new colleague in the Dept. of Biology in Maryland, @couchmicroscopy.bsky.social with secrets yet to be uncovered into a major evolutionary transition hanging out in murky waters. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/s...

We have a new branch in the family tree of animals: Atreyea- a previously unrecognized lineage among the closest unicell relatives of animals. Led by @konsmitsi.bsky.social & @freejakoba.bsky.social together with a fantastic team of collaborators. 🔗 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... #protistsOnSky

Big day for transposon biology! (two paper thread) #mustread www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

We're recruiting a postdoc in #protist #genomics! This is an exciting opportunity to work on a highly collaborative technical project overcoming barriers in protist sequencing. 🗓️ Apply by: 01 October 2026

Just a few cyanobacteria in this plankton tow from Lake Chautauqua. If you look closely, you might spy a few of the critters we were after in the sample…

Our group discovered that reasoning models produce fractals when asked to solve hard problems. We can use nonlinear dynamics to probe the thinking processes of recurrent depth models on Sudoku, mathematics, and even ARC-AGI (1/N) arxiv.org/abs/2609.04963

I am looking for a lab manager for my group that I will be starting at the @fmiscience.bsky.social in February! We will use in situ structural biology to investigate dynamic ciliary processes. More info here —> bsky.app/profile/comp... #cilia #teamtomo #proteomics #protistsky

Yep, they got me. I had stable convergence by about question 30/60. Apparently, pronouncing "crayon" as "cran," "crayfish," and using the word "pop" for sweetened, carbonated beverages really sealed the deal. Didn't realize there was such overlap between pacific northwest, Montana, and midwest

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨 Choanoflagellates reorganize their global cytoskeletal architecture within seconds to explore confined microspaces. This is the main PhD work of the amazing @maitefreired.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A tread 🧵⬇️

Start-of-semester-plotes has replaced Surf-plotes on the student office door

At the Aspen Center for Physics, even the cosmologists are talking about protists

Single-cell ecology!

Coral bleaching looks like a reef-scale catastrophe. But it starts as a breakdown between single cells. Published in @microbiomej.bsky.social, led by @ambonacolta.bsky.social we watched it at that scale for the first time: the first single-cell transcriptomics of a bleaching coral 🪸 #CoralReefs

Very happy to see our Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology Roadmap out! A fantastic collective effort, led by Carsten Janke and Zdenek Lansky, together with an amazing group of colleagues, and sparked by inspiring discussions at the Fondation des Treilles. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What's that? You wish we had more data on those bizarre dinoflagellates WITH EYES? Have no fear! With @protistwtmostest.bsky.social, Gordon Lax, and @pjkeelinglab.bsky.social, who also have eyes.

What does a single-celled organism tell us about the origins of complex behaviour? Delighted to see the final version of our paper: Embodied behavioural complexity in a ciliated microorganism out in@natcomms.nature.com (Funded by @erc.europa.eu ERC) doi.org/10.1038/s414... #cilia #protistsonsky

Integration and regulation of stolen organelles in a marine protist academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc... #jcampubs

Preprint📣: Living tissues can exhibit odd mechanics without chirality. Our minimal model shows that orientational order can generate an odd modulus—inferable from experiments—and reproduces flows & stress localization around 1/2 defects. @sreejithsanthosh.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Eukaryotic-like microtubules and dynamic instability of Asgard archaeal tubulins #eukaryotes #archaea #MicroSky @science.org www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Cell biology: Cytoplasmic rivers carry molecular cargo: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

Do #tintinnids dream of electric sheep? 🤯 Here is a single cell capable of building a lorica and living inside it for protection... it also swims, feeds, hunts Can even detect and habituate to mechanical cues! #celllearning #protistsonsky #cilia Read more in our preprint doi.org/10.64898/202...

So happy to share our new paper out now in @natmicrobiol.nature.com! We establish Pirsonia-Coscinodiscus as a model pathosystem and uncover how this tiny parasite infects and kills bloom-forming marine diatoms 🌊🦠 rdcu.be/fuQyF

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Sol-gel Transition Drives Hyper-fast Mixing in a Giant Cell super cool work on longstanding question about gel-sol transitions in cells using the giant amoeba Chaos carolinensis! @wallaceucsf.bsky.social

📢 APPLICATIONS OPEN! Applications are open for the MBL’s Semester in Biological Discovery, a spring semester or quarter program that provides an immersive research experience in discovery-driven biological sciences modeled on the MBL’s world-renowned ARTCs. 🔗 mbl.edu/sbd

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Multiple evolutionary routes to cytoskeletal arborization revealed by the rhizarian amoeba Filoreta ramosa

Excited to share our new paper, now published in Nature Cell Biology! 🎉 We asked a fundamental question in cell biology: How do cells maintain polarity while migrating? Especially how do cancer cells navigate confined spaces? www.nature.com/articles/s41556-026-01981-1

Discovery of an adhesion GPCR regulating mating in choanoflagellates, by Alain Garcia de las Bayonas & Nicole King. Absolutely stunning work - choano cell biology is going next level www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...