Silvia Ramundo

Welcome to the Gregor Mendel Institute -Europe's HHMI for plant and algal biologists. Located at the Vienna Biocenter, we're privileged to have amazing colleagues in the neighboring institutes. Living and working in the world's most livable city, we're doing 🧪 what we love 💚! youtu.be/uoh9peXNtQ8

One picture, a few unforgettable scientists I met and talked to (including Ruzena Bajcsy) and a lifetime of inspiration!

Calling all 2nd- & 3rd-year PhD students: #GilliamFellows applications close TOMORROW, 10/27, 11:59 PM ET! Don't miss your chance at up to 3 years of PhD support, an incredible scientific community, prof dev for you & your faculty PhD advisor, & so much more: bit.ly/4kiJsTD. 🧪

Our Dept. of Genetics and Developmental Biology at the Institut Curie in the heart of Paris is hiring a new junior PI. It has a nice start up package and excellent I. Curie facilities. Please spread the word: Deadline Dec. 18th! jpi-recruitment-curie-umr3215-u934.curie.fr

Wonderfully inspiring by @francesarnold.bsky.social cen.acs.org/people/award... @nationalacademies.org

What if you could see light in a whole new way? Michael Shribak (@shribak.bsky.social), a senior scientist at the MBL, developed and patented a polychromatic polarization microscope that allows him to visualize an "invisible" property of light. 🔗 Read more here: go.mbl.edu/light

Calling all rising undergrad juniors & seniors: 9 weeks, mentorship from top scientists, up to $15K stipend to support "the most incredible" summer research experience. Want to learn more? Register for our live, #CechFellows webinar 10/26, 4pm ET! ➡️ bit.ly/4zKhIM8 | Program page: bit.ly/4dRWYJZ 🧪

🌱Our new preprint in @biorxiv-plants.bsky.social uncovers a novel role for Toc90 in regulating chloroplast senescence and photosynthetic protein abundance in Arabidopsis. 📄:https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.29.755046v1

A striking example of self-organization (I swear I did not arrange the bubbles 😅)

You may be interested in our recent review! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

16y ago 🙈!

In their Cell Science at a Glance article and associated poster, @phaips.vd.st, Benjamin Engel @cellarchlab.com & @manondemulder.bsky.social highlight the current insights and future directions of pyrenoid and CO2-concentrating mechanism research. journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

Very nice #TeamTomo learning resource! Thank you for making it all publically available. Well done! 🧪🙌

Happy to share my PhD work on the regulatory mechanism of E3 ligase RNF213! RNF213 is not a monomer, but a dimer that switches between inhibited and activated states in an ATP-dependent manner. We tracked the activation mechanism and showed how disease mutations can destabilize the inhibited state.

Huge thanks to my PI @vivekmutalik.bsky.social, Alexey Kazakov, @igmurray.bsky.social , and our collaborators Graham Hatfull, Michael Niederweis, Adam Deutschbauer, Katie S. Wetzel, Colin Lewis and Deborah Jacobs-Sera 🎉

Why does it matter? 👀 Understanding how phages infect their hosts helps us design phage therapies against pathogens like M. tuberculosis and M. abscessus 💉

What does it take for a mycobacteriophage to infect M. smegmatis mc² 155? 🦠🗺️ We mapped it for 70 phages using genome-wide CRISPRi. Our new preprint from the Phage Foundry is out! (phagefoundry.org) 🥳🧵 Read the preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A new preprint 🎉 from phagefoundry.org Mycobacteriophages are candidate therapies for drug-resistant mycobacterial infections, but we still don't know how most of them get into their hosts. Our new preprint tackles this challenge 👉🏽 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

could not be prouder of lillie and the fantastic story she uncovered - from a giant E3 ligase with an unexpected dimer switch to moyamoya mutations that hijack its regulation. a beautiful PhD project, full of surprises and scientific creativity doi.org/10.64898/202... - bsky.app/profile/lill...

Whether you're falling in love with a person or with science… chances are you'll find yourself asking the same question at some point in your career... 😉

“You blow a fuse Zing boom! The devil cuts loose Zing boom! So what's the use Wham bam! Of falling in love?” open.spotify.com/track/0OMNQy...

And finally a great one describing Human Behavior: open.spotify.com/track/5OnyZ5...

And here another one of hers about seeing beauty in everyday, ordinary moments: “Venus as a Boy” open.spotify.com/track/5G9Lvz...

An Army of Me by Bjork! One of the best songs about tough love and self-reliance open.spotify.com/track/3vEmpJ...

I often find people who think as I do. Like this student in my microbiology course at the University of Canterbury. I talked about cotransduction in microbial genetics, and then bacteriophage therapy to fend off antibiotic resistant bacteria. The student drew this in class, and showed it to me.

Did you ever want to sequence that one interesting cell you observed in your microscopy experiment? We have a new pre-print out today that describes a genetic barcoding method, Waldo, to perform live-cell imaging and single-cell sequencing on the same single cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A big thank you to the one and only @harmitmalik.bsky.social for such a thoughtful and memorable gift and for an unforgettable collaboration at Fred Hutch’s Basic Scuences Division @basicsci.fredhutch.org ! We love you, Harmit! ♥️

Application review for the GRC in Microbial Population Biology will start October 15th! Please apply before then if you are keen on coming. www.grc.org/microbial-po...

Challenge 3: functional integration. Rather than always inventing new genetic programs, nascent organisms often co-opt ancestral modules, turning environmentally induced cell states into spatially deployed cell types (e.g., Volvox regA, derived from a stress-response gene).

Challenge 2: the Darwinian threshold. Groups need a life cycle before they can evolve one, a classic chicken-and-egg problem. The way out: life cycles can be scaffolded "for free," either by the environment (e.g., floods dispersing cells) or by physics (packing stress fracturing snowflake yeast).

Challenge 1: forming groups. Across yeast, algae, bacteria and holozoans, lab evolution shows group formation arises fast (within 100–750 generations) and convergently, often through simple mutations like loss of ACE2 in snowflake yeast.

Multicellularity has evolved at least 45 times in eukaryotes alone, plus additional origins in bacteria and archaea. But how does it actually happen? We organize the paper around three perceived challenges: group formation, becoming a Darwinian individual, and functional integration.

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.

I'm not going to lie, this review puts the various challenges driving multicellularity very elegantly. For anyone excited about this field, this review is a must read. And damn this video is very very nice ! Congrats Will, Kai and Ozan.

Looking to do a PhD in evolutionary cell biology, chromosomes & centromeres? 🧬🔬 The winter call for the UNIGE PhD recruitment is open, and my lab is among those recruiting through the Molecular Biosciences program! 🗓️ Apply by Nov 1st: lifesciencesphd.unige.ch

This work has been a massive team effort! I’m very grateful to all authors from @plaschkalab.bsky.social, our collaborators in @ameressl.bsky.social, @luijsterburglab.bsky.social and @romangp.bsky.social labs and for the generous funding from EMBO and HFSP. (11/11)

I’m very excited to share my postdoc work in the @plaschkalab.bsky.social, where we investigated the very final act of splicing – spliceosome termination, revealing the stepwise dismantling of the spent spliceosome www.nature.com/articles/s41... (1/11)

After excising an intron, the spliceosome gets trapped on the branched intron-lariat RNA. How are such dead-end spliceosomes terminated? Our latest paper led by @vytaute.bsky.social investigates the mechanism of spliceosome termination www.nature.com/articles/s41... (1/6)

Together, our results point to convergent recognition of tobamovirus movement proteins by distantly related immune receptors. Their recognition ranges differ, and HREZ offers a complementary source of resistance to the pandemic virus. Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (8/9)

Then came the evolutionary surprise. HREZ and Tm-2² are not close relatives. They sit in distinct branches of the plant NLR immune receptor family. Yet both recognize tobamovirus movement proteins. Two evolutionary paths, one viral target. (5/9)

Hello World ! Its pre-print time ! Awesome collaboration led by Michel Cohen-Tannoudji (not on Bsky) and the one and only @deborahbourchis.bsky.social. #BFF We solved the molecular mechanism underlying a mysterious hybrid incompatibility in mice: the DDK syndrome. 🧵🍿 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...