Removed myself as an Frontiers Editor today. Frontiers seems to be adopting a MDPI style system, gaming IF whilst pushing fast, not thorough, peer-review & inevitably shifting to less qualified reviewers. Frontiers is no longer somewhere I would recommend publishing quality work.

Massive status bias in peer review. 534 reviewers randomized to review the same paper revealing the low status, high status, or neither author. 65% reject low status, 23% reject high status. Amazing work by Juergen Huber and colleagues. #prc9

Want to bring a major evolutionary biology conference to your city?

The tripartite attachment complex in T. brucei: p197 determines the distance between the basal body and the mitochondrial outer membrane. Check out our joint paper with the Ochsenreiter lab by Salome, Ana Kalichava, BS, Bianca, Clirim and Philip.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Our paper about the evolution of a particularly important type of the CO2 fixing enzyme Rubisco is out in Science today. If you care about the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis, biochemical novelty, or the evolution of essentiality, read on. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

1/ This Hubble picture of the week shows two galaxies in the galactic triplet Arp 248 or Wild’s Triplet. The two large spiral galaxies visible in this image flank a smaller, unrelated spiral galaxy and appear connected by a luminous bridge. Read more: esahubble.org/images/potw224…

This was awesome to be part of! Eukaryotic Cell biology is coo-mmm-plex!!. Mitochondrial presence/involvement observed to be ubiquitous. Everything in between...Fertile Food for thought!! #eukaryogenesis #mitochondria #complexlife doi.org/10.7554/eLife.…

Microbial predators form a new supergroup of eukaryotes | Nature nature.com/articles/s4158…

Reconstruction of plastid proteomes of apicomplexans and close relatives reveals the major evolutionary outcomes of cryptic plastids pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36610734/

Can't believe I missed this! Is this why eyesight drops due to ageing?? Mitochondria in cone photoreceptors act as microlenses to enhance photon delivery and confer directional sensitivit… pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35235359/

How appointments work in Germany Me: Can I get an appointment for an MRT? Them: Next February Me: Morning or Afternoon Them: What difference does it make one year from now? Me: The electrician will come in the morning!

"The internalisation of a symbiont cell within an archaeal host cell in the absence of phagocytotic machinery is relevant for models on the origin of the eukaryotic cell."...Very cool indeed! biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Check out our latest paper Georg Hochberg Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in fruitful collaboration w/ Marcus & Thomas TU Berlin featuring blind chance as the leading architect for building a novel protein-protein interaction out now NatureEcoEvo: nature.com/articles/s4155…. 1/11🧵

Check out the latest publication of Niklas and Georg Hochberg. Awesome work in which they show how protein protein interaction occurs just by chance.

It is always refreshing to see after a difficult peer review 2/3 reviewers had similar thoughts. Now my anxiety can choose a different topic!! #peerreview #science #academia

Predicting structures of large protein assemblies using combinatorial assembly algorithm and AlphaFold2 This approach "exhaustively enumerates possible assembly trees, maximizing the probability of correctly assembling the complex" biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Check out this paper from the Bode group, which we contributed a little bit to. These enzymes have very bizarre evolutionary histories that are quite interesting (though not the focus here). Sebastian Kaiser did the evolutionary analysis from our lab. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Our latest preprint: Sriram Garg calculate a general substitution matrix for structural phylogenetics and used it to root the tree of life. biorxiv.org/content/10.110… 1/n