Julia Van Etten

I have a new review out in TiG titled, “The ecology of horizontal gene transfer”! I’ve been thinking about these ideas for years and this field is growing so fast it’s becoming impossible to review it. I hope this paper sparks discussion on different ways we can look at DNA transfer!

🔬Postdoc position available! Interested in uncovering the molecular mechanisms underlying host-endosymbiont interactions? Join our group and help us explore these fascinating biological partnerships! Deadline: 29. Oct Details & application: karriere.hhu.de/index.php?ac... Please spread the word!

My department (Biology) at University of Maryland is hiring!

Get your breasts checked and if you suspect something is wrong, don’t rest until you find a doctor who takes you seriously!!!

This work is so cool!

Today I asked Google search AI to give me a list of years from 1920 to 2026 for a Google form I was making. Easy right? Well it inexplicably skipped 1949 which actually ended up messing up my data collection since once of the respondents was born in 1949. LLMs get basic things wrong all the time!

A planktic melange from the Gulf of Maine featuring juicy diatom chains from 100m depth waters.

Spread the word! I’m looking to recruit a PhD student to grow the Paulinella project. Some details can be found here: www.vanettenlab.org/join

Spatial proteomics reveals carboxysome adaptation and mitochondrial proteome in Paulinella chromatophora www.cell.com/current-biol...

I love this! Thanks for sharing Maggi! (Also, I have had many of those exact filter holders get too much back-pressure from a pump in the lab or field and spray absolutely disgusting, gag-inducing, sulfurous gray water in my face!)

"Our results highlight the limits of using extant, species-depauperate lineages to infer deep ancestors and the importance of fossils and other evidence that more directly sample early evolutionary history."

inspiring journey to read amidst bleak times for US science @couchmicroscopy.bsky.social! (still grappling with news yesterday there is no love for my 9% then 3% R01 renewal at end of fiscal year). however, i smirked at this line. (pooters aka mouth pipettors are still used by some fly fanciers). 🪰

this story about @couchmicroscopy.bsky.social captures science at its best: a scrappy team, a homemade microscope in a motel room, working under funding duress, pursuing a fundamental question about the evolution of photosynthetic organelles. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/s...

💫 Meet our latest awardees, who are pushing the boundaries of what we know about brain aging, protease specificity, immune inheritance, ocean food webs, & cell physics. Learn more about their projects: bit.ly/HFAwardees. Join us in celebrating the them in our 🧵 below! /1

Congrats to Beryl and Angela, et al! This is amazing work!!!

Listen to Chuck Delwiche talk about the origin of eukaryotes, algae, and plants on the Crime Pays podcast!

You all have been asking me for years if James Van Etten, discoverer of giant viruses, is my dad or uncle. He is not and we had never met until a month ago. Listen to this podcast episode to learn about Jim’s fascinating 60+ year career, why chloroviruses are cool, and if we are indeed related!

The White House budget proposal for FY27 slash NSF funding by more than 50% and would drastically reduce support for PhDs, postdocs & investigator-initiated research. Selling something is not the same as doing something. Science is hard. This 'new golden age' won't make it easier.

Out now in Science: Two papers from our lab reveal VIPR, an RNA-guided DNA-targeting system in bacteriophages, providing clues to the origins of CRISPR www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Congrats to Peter Yoon, @kenjmloi.bsky.social @terryzzy.bsky.social, T.Docter & team

Yikes! Scientists are pushing back on this and I totally agree with their criticism, but what I worry about the most here is that others outside of academic science (e.g., in Silicon Valley) will veer into their typical reductionist mindset and declare, “we’ve solved papers!” 🤮

The Department of Integrative Biology at UT Austin has two open positions for assistant professors, one in evolutionary biology and one in mechanistic processes. Please share. Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/193270

Phylogeny-guided curation reveals widespread misannotation of Asgard archaeal 16S rRNA gene sequences in public databases #microbiology #archaea #Asgard #MicroSky @isme-microbes.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/isme...

UNC Greensboro Department of Biology is hiring for three positions this year including one in microbiology! spartantalent.uncg.edu/postings/35918

9/11 mentally and physically impacted my family in ways I won’t discuss here. More than 9000 people have died from illness related to toxic debris exposure since (>3x more than attack itself) with thousands of others sick. Some of this could have been prevented if the city didn’t put $ over safety.

We wanted to share this asap for everyone to use ! This will remain a #preprint for the time being. We are happy to recieve feedback, hear whether or not ot works in your hands and continue to apply it across #eukaryotes as part of #ExÂME You want to know more : www.dudinlab.com/exame

A beautiful piece of detective work by @honour.bsky.social + colleagues revealing the origins of Ralstonia disease of bananas on Martinique. As so often, ICEs (ICERs!) prove to be extraordinary capacitors for evolutionary change. Evolution for evolution's sake 🤔 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...

NSF just posted the call for the annual Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology (PRFB). You must propose a project to apply AI to biological research. Deadline is Sep 29, 2026 www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

She would have been 78 today but she died in the Challenger disaster 40 years ago.

Pls share: We have a new position for an Assistant Professor of Evolutionary Biology at UNLV. tinyurl.com/4uhpav4j

Our new paper in Science Advances asks how animals' genomes have changed since their origin from a common ancestor over 600 million years ago, and what patterns in their DNA have arisen in the churn of speciation and extinction. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Some info from Chuck Delwiche on Desmodesmus, our national alga.

NSF just announced its GRFP solicitation due in October - deadline varies by field: www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo... Now for the bad news... * NSF estimates they will issue 1,500 awards, down from 2,500+ last year. * NSF removed STEM Education and Learning Research as a Major Field.

A new preprint from the lab! "Green algal symbionts are stably retained and provisioned in the dark despite a clear physiological cost" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

So we all pay taxes and spending that money on researching cures to diseases is bad and needs to be stopped, but 20 million dollars for electric shock gloves for ICE is good? Got it.

This week, @maxkozlov.bsky.social wrote a piece on how the NIH is limiting funding on the health effects of public policies. What is striking is that the current NIH director's career was all about the health effects of policies, social & economic conditions. scholar.google.com/citations?hl...

Why a Chloroplast Needs Its Own Genome Tethered to the Thylakoid Membrane—Co‐Location for Redox Regulation - Allen - 2026 - BioEssays - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Trump has tanked the economy and filled our streets with ICE agents who murder with impunity. But a liberal candidate I've never heard of in a state I've never been too says we should stop celebrating Thanksgiving. I have never felt more politically homeless.

NPR asked an aspiring scientist in Philadelphia to interview an adult who is living his dream about his career in conservation science. n.pr/3TtUaeQ

I'm giving a public talk next Wednesday, August 5, on approaches to studying mid-water animals in situ. It will be light on technical details, and more conceptual and a journey to the deep than a regular science talk. Please join if you are interested! #marinelife www.bigelow.org/news/cafe-sc...