Max Emil Schön

I have a postdoc position in metagenomic exploration available in my group. Candidates with documented experience in phylo & metagenomics and preferably with petabase-scale data mining and GLM workflows are encouraged to apply. Come join us! 🧬🦠💻

Please repost

Apply here: www.wur.nl/en/vacancy/p...

Our study on the first rhodopsin channels known to respond to UV light is now published in PNAS! And they come from our favourite protists, apusomonads! #protistonsky

www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

🚨 In case you missed it… our 4-year time-series analysis of Arctic Ocean viruses is out now!

Near-monthly samples — including through the dark, cold, polar winter ❄️ — using long-read metagenomics.

Short thread 🧵👇

Repressive cytosine methylation is a marker of viral gene transfer across divergent eukaryotes Abstract. Cytosine DNA methylation patterns vary widely across eukaryotes, with its ancestral roles being understood to have included both transposable ele

Happy to see our latest work out in @molbioevol.bsky.social. We revisit the evolution of 5-methylcytosine across neglected eukaryotic supergroups, establishing an ancestral repressive role silencing genome invaders, both transposons and viral elements👾: academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-... 🧵 1/7

WitChi: Efficient Detection and Pruning of Compositional Bias in Phylogenomic Alignments Using Empirical Chi-Squared Testing Convergent evolution, where unrelated taxa independently evolve similar nucleotide or amino acid compositions, can introduce compositional bias into biological sequence data. Such biases distort phylo...

1.
🧵 New preprint out!
WitChi: a fast, open-source Python tool to detect, quantify & prune compositional bias in MSAs.
Lightweight, tree-free, scalable to 5k+ taxa... so we applied it to the GTDB archaea MSA.
#ArchaeaSky #MEvoSky #MicroSky
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
💻 github.com/stephkoest/w...

We have several more chlorarachniophyte genomes (also ~ chromosome level), several B. natans strains but also others (species/genera)! Not published but hopefully soonish...

New vacancy in my team!

PhD student position on microbial genome evolution, focusing on the evolutionary principles underlying bacterial genome architecture.

Please repost and share with talented MSc students in #evobio, bioinformatics or related :)

www.uu.nl/en/organisat...

#MEvoSky #MicroSky

Yes!

Congrats Luis!

First study from the lab is out! We describe ApuRs, a new family of microbial rhodopsins unique from apusomonads. ApuRs represent the first anion-conducting rhodopsin channels that can be controlled by UV light, offering potential as new optogenetic tools. #protistsonsky
doi.org/10.1101/2025...
👇

Happy to have played a small part in this. Prometheid is a proposed supergroup that contains previously deep orphan lineages.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#protistsonsky

Chimeric origins and dynamic evolution of central carbon metabolism in eukaryotes Nature Ecology & Evolution - Analysis of the eukaryotic gene repertoires mediating central carbon metabolism identifies ancestral contributions from Alphaproteobacteria, Asgardarchaeota and...

Asgardarchaea & Alphaproteobacteria: key players for the assembly eukaryotic central carbon metabolism! Our new study reveals their gene contributions to glycolysis & TCA cycle, supporting synthrophic scenarios of eukaryogenesis.
rdcu.be/eb0aK

#ProtistsOnSky

tidk: a toolkit to rapidly identify telomeric repeats from genomic datasets AbstractSummary. tidk (short for telomere identification toolkit), uses a simple, fast algorithm to scan long DNA reads for the presence of short tandemly

tidk: a toolkit to rapidly identify telomeric repeats from genomic datasets. #TelomericRepeats #AssembledGenomces #LongReads #Bioinformatics 🧬 🖥️
academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

Interested in protist parasites? Want to learn some fun bioinformatics? Think this apicomplexan looks cool? Great! Come and do some protist genomics at @uniofbath.bsky.social!

We're advertising a fully-funded PhD studentship open to UK & International applicants!

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Stoked about this manuscript, many years in the making. We present an original resource of ~700 highly curated plastid MAGs of marine pelagic algae. Among these we found a novel deep branching group of plastid genomes; we informally call them leptophytes
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

FEBS Press The acquisition of bacterial endosymbionts by ancient host cells followed by massive adaptation of the partners gave rise to mitochondria and plastids. Today, various systems with younger and less in...

Out today! Our review on the current evidence of protein import into endosymbionts/early organelles. We cover protists, insects and plant systems, so something for everybody!

With Mygg Stiller, Lena Kröninger and Eva Nowack.

#protistsonsky #SymbioSky

febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Unveiling the Hidden World of Antarctic Marine Viruses

We found new #Crassvirales clades on #Antarctica (prospective families): @goncalopiedade.bsky.social's new paper on the viruses in Antarctic waters is out! Check out the manuscript (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) and Gonçalo's "Behind the Paper": communities.springernature.com/posts/unveil...