Happy to be part of the amazing SymbNET PhD Summer School #HostMicrobe Symbioses @IGCiencia. I learned a lot and met great people. Thank you to everyone involved 😊. I'm also thankful to Hassan Salem for his encouraging support. We got a prize 🥳

Thank you to all the amazing organisers, faculty, students, administration, and sponsors - all listed in the long thread👇, for making the 2-week SymbNET Summer School on #HostMicrobe Symbioses @IGCiencia a great success! Your support and enthusiasm are truly appreciated.

Fusarium is causal to many a plant blight. But it is also increasingly found in stable, functionally diverse symbioses with insects. We examine how the fungus balances this dual act in our latest, with Hassan Salem & Shounak Jagdale in PLOS Pathogens! journals.plos.org/plospathogens/…

👏Congratulations to the winners of this year’s MetaorganismResearch poster prizes SymbNET Summer School, and to all students who played a part in enriching our course! 🥇Marleny García Lozano 🥈@DigelLeonid 🥉Rita Melo-Miranda, francesspragge, Anastasiia Barilo 👉metaorganism-research.com/news/symbnet-p…

Our new paper is out! We found a endosymbiotic Clostridia within the cells of protists in termite guts. Our results indicated that the clostridial endosymbionts are obligately-intracellular parasites like Chlamydia and Rickettsia. nature.com/articles/s4139…

Elated to be joining this year’s cohort of EMBO Young Investigators! Proud of the whole lab & thankful for the chance to science w/ some exceptional folks @MPI_Bio.

I am thrilled to share our work on ants from the #Galapagos! By combining fieldwork and museum specimens, we studied more than 382,000 introduced and endemic ants in the islands. Thanks to ESPOCH, Charles Darwin Foundation-Fundación Charles Darwin, @Galapagospark and Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences! zookeys.pensoft.net/article/107324/

Marleny, Hassan and other colleagues' amazing work on the evolutionary dynamics of digestive symbionts of leaf beetles is now online: Paleocene origin of a streamlined digestive symbiosis in leaf beetles: Current Biology cell.com/current-biolog…

And here’s the Tweetorial! Amazing work by Marleny García Lozano Hassan Salem and colleagues showing a ‘complete story’ of how symbioses allowed beetles to become strict herbivores and diversify. Setting a high bar for symbiosis research. Well deserving of a second retweet! 😉👏

Are you looking for a postdoctoral researcher position? There is an opening in my lab for a 5 year position to work on microbial interactions in aquatic environments uol.de/stellen?stelle… Please RT

Parasitism demands the work of specialists. We defined the weird and wonderful secondary metabolism of Escovopsis, fungal parasites of fungus-farming ants. Out today in EIC Jack Gilbert! journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/ms…

Thrilled to be in Kyoto w/ the lab & Aileen Berasategui for ICE ‘24 🐞 Lots of great science to look forward to & old friends to catch up with! Look out for talks by Ines PONS, Marleny García Lozano, and a poster by Christiane Emmerich.

Tortoise beetles snuck into the opening plenary of #ICE2024! If you are intrigued about their cool symbioses, be sure not to miss talks by Hassan Salem, Marleny García Lozano, Ines PONS, and a poster by Christiane Emmerich! I will talk about their fungal mutualists on Thursday.

Some news 🎉 Elated to share that our work will soon be supported by an European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant! There will be openings to join the lab, so if you are keen to learn how plant pathogens double as insect mutualists, do reach out! Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (inactief) VU Faculteit der Bètawetenschappen #ERCStG

Microbial bases of herbivory in beetles Review by Marleny García-Lozano (Marleny García Lozano) & Hassan Salem (Hassan Salem) @MPI_Bio dlvr.it/TDjklg

Beetles are masters at coopting microbial genes, enzymes & metabolites. In this Trends in Microbiology article, Marleny García Lozano & I review how microbes shaped one of the most successful animal radiations, thru horizontal gene transfer & symbiosis: cell.com/trends/microbi…

Wonderful review on beetle symbioses by Hassan Salem and Marleny García Lozano, check it out! 🪲

New paper led by Yadira Peña-García! Even though opossums have kids at 0.5 years, they still have typical male-biased mutation (though not quite as high as humans).

So glad to share my fieldwork experience with Methods in Ecology and Evolution! Joining efforts to study ants, wasps and bees in the #GalapagosIslands ESPOCH University of Toronto EEB Charles Darwin Foundation-Fundación Charles Darwin Galapagos Park BiologicalSciencesTTU