Javier del Campo

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

Work by @rociomozo.bsky.social, @andreailla.bsky.social (also an undergrad in the lab at the time), and @fonamental.bsky.social at @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social. Isolates are cryobanked, 16S sequences on NCBI 🙌 Paper 📄 doi.org/10.1007/s002...

Notes from the bench 🔬 Half-strength marine agar beat everything. TCBS gave nothing, even with Vibrio around. Coral extract recovered strains that no other medium did. And three weeks of patience brought out the slow growers.

Strong host specificity: 70% of genera came from a single coral species, and only Ruegeria turned up in all four. Many isolates show traits linked to biofilms, surface colonization, and polysaccharide degradation, the toolkit for settling on a coral 🪸 #Holobiont

The haul: 84 pure isolates, 37 OTUs, 20 genera across four bacterial classes 🧬. Six isolates sit below 97% 16S identity to any described species (Vibrio, Pseudoalteromonas, Alteromonas, Shewanella, Tritonibacter), so they are likely new taxa.

We sampled four species by scuba diving along the NE Iberian coast 🤿: three gorgonians (Eunicella singularis, Paramuricea clavata, Leptogorgia sarmentosa) and the stony coral Cladocora caespitosa, from the Medes Islands to the Columbretes. #MarineBiology

Why culture at all? Metabarcoding has mapped who lives on corals, but sequences alone say little about what symbionts actually do. Isolates let us test physiology, interactions, and function in vitro. So we went back to the plates 🧫 #MicrobialEcology #Microbiology

New paper from the lab, led by @rociomozo.bsky.social during her @csic.es JAE Intro undergraduate internship (her first paper 🙌). We cultured bacteria from four Mediterranean corals and built a cryobank of 84 isolates. Out now in Microbial Ecology, open access 🪸🦠 #Corals #Microbiome

Out Now! Steroid hormones produced by coral-associated Endozoicomonas influence coral immune response during thermal stress #MicroSky

🚨 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...

📄 Do not throw away your chloroplast reads. Plastid-derived 16S sequences carry real ecological signal, and microeukaryote-inclusive surveys are needed to understand the coral holobiont. Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #corals #microbiome #symbiosis

🌱 Ostreobium: six distinct clades recovered, three described here for the first time. The North West Pacific emerges as a potential hotspot of Ostreobium diversity. #algae #corals

🧬 New #protist diversity hiding in the discard pile. Phylogenetic placement of apicomplexan reads classified most as Corallicolida and revealed ASVs consistent with a novel apicomplexan-related lineage, tentatively named ARL-XXI.

🧩 Host specificity is strong. The most abundant ASVs are mostly restricted to particular coral lineages, a pattern consistent with phylosymbiosis and supported by ASV-level community profiles across the whole dataset. #corals

🔬 Two groups dominate everywhere, across lineages, health states and oceans: Corallicolida (coral apicomplexans) and Ostreobium (skeleton-boring green algae). After Symbiodiniaceae, these are the most widespread plastid-bearing coral symbionts. #symbiosis #protists

🌍 Scale: 2,679 samples from 45 studies, reprocessed into 10,950 ASVs from 13 million read pairs. 73 coral species, 23 families, all major ocean regions and three host health states. #metabarcoding #CoralReef

🗑️ The idea: in coral 16S rRNA #microbiome datasets, reads assigned to “chloroplast” are usually discarded as noise. But those reads come from real organisms: the plastid-bearing eukaryotes in the holobiont. Joana went back and kept them. #corals

🪸 New lab preprint and a first lead-author paper for @joanakrause.bsky.social: a global meta-analysis of the plastid-bearing microeukaryotes of #corals, built from sequences most 16S studies throw away. With @bradweilerdives.bsky.social and @fonamental.bsky.social, at @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social.

Why are coral reefs not found in the Mediterranean today? #mediterranean #corareefs link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Method-dependent biases in cell type detection between single-cell and single-nucleus RNA sequencing in the photosymbiotic acoel Praesagittifera naikaiensis #singlecell www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Stability in flexibility: Shifting alliances stabilize the symbioses of marine animals over 150 million years #symbiosis #microbiome www.science.org/doi/full/10....

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

Kamino: fast proteome-wide variant calling for amino acid phylogenomics academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

Genome-resolved ecology and evolution of the microbiome enabled by quantitative long-read metagenomics #microbiome www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Spatial proteomics reveals carboxysome adaptation and mitochondrial proteome in Paulinella chromatophora #protists

A phenotype-based framework to measure functional redundancy in microbial ecosystems #microbiome besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Underrated deep-water scleractinian species: an ecological study along the Italian coasts (Mediterranean Sea) #mediterranean #corals link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Single-cell transcriptomics reveals life cycle and cell cycle gene expression dynamics during in vitro growth of two Leishmania species #protists #singlecell www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Comparative analysis of mitochondrial proteomes across the tree of life #protists www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel – awarded the 2026 medicine prize – discovered a remarkable protein, channelrhodopsin, in a single-celled alga. Hegemann wondered how Chlamydomonas, a single-celled alga, is able to swim towards a light source.

A conserved GTPase complex gates exocytosis for defence and parasitism across alveolates #protists www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧬🦋 Demà, descobreix la recerca de l’#IBE_Barcelona a l’#OpenPRBB2026! El @prbb.org obre les portes amb activitats científiques gratuïtes dels set centres de recerca del parc. No t’ho perdis! 🧵👇 https://shorturl.at/WCq2T

Yesterday, @joanakrause.bsky.social presented the latest advances in her PhD research at the ΣPhD Ecological Symposium at @ceabcsic.bsky.social! 🦠🔬 Amazing work, Joana, keep it up!

Oxygen in photosymbiosis evolution #symbiosis www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Convergent symbioses: morphology, life history, and niche specialization in coral and lichen mutualisms #symbiosis #corals academic.oup.com/femsre/artic...

CoMR: an integrative scoring pipeline for comprehensive mitochondrial proteome reconstruction across eukaryotes #protists academic.oup.com/bib/article/...

👏 👏 👏 ---> Stop paying predatory publishers of academic journals—A policy proposal to restore scientific integrity and transparency febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A genomic catalog of Earth’s bacterial and archaeal symbionts #symbiosis www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Algae-specific immune modulation influences responses to heat and pathogen challenge in a symbiotic coral #symbiosis #coral www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Symbiotic interactions and climate change implications of the octocoral microbiome #coral #microbiome #symbiosis academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

Comparative genomics and microbiome profiling reveal a conserved Vibrio rich mucus microbiota of the Florida false coral (Ricordea florida) #coral #microbiome #symbiosis www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

An eco-evolutionary theory of host-associated microbiomes #symbiosis www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

A great resource 🪸 ---> The genome of the coral model sea anemone Exaiptasia diaphana (Aiptasia) strain F003 #coral #genomics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I totally agree 🙌 ---> A wake-up call: diversify global research funding 💰️ www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Cross-feeding enables robust coexistence between four bacterial species www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... #cooperation #microbiology

Surveying Biodiverse Coral Reef Ecosystems Across the Tree of Life With Environmental DNA onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #coralreefs #protists

The Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2025 report is out! 📊🪸 Peer-reviewed by ICRS, it tracks global hard coral & macroalgae cover over 44 years. ➡️ Swipe for key takeaways! 💬 What’s happening on your local reefs? Share what you see below!

Databases may contain lots of misannotated 16S rRNA sequences, which can hinder accurate taxonomic assignment in metabarcoding and metagenomic analyses. We have addressed this issue for Asgard archaea and generated a curated set of high-quality 16S rRNA sequences: academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a...

What a nice feeling to come back from holidays and see the last paper of my PhD finally published in its final form in @natcomms.nature.com !! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Want to learn a bit more about the genomic basis of animal terrestrialization? A thread 🧵1/14