Giant virologist hard at work. Great time with tom delmont, Jeff Blanchard and Morgan Gaia. Thanks to amazing Visualization provided by River

A new preprint from our group. Detailed aaRS phylogenies for giant viruses and revealed that their ancestors possessed a complex but probably not complete set of aaRSs at the proto-eukaryotic era. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Virus enthusiasts in and around the lowlands: on March 22 we will have the annual Netherlands Association of Virus Ecology meeting in Groningen. Looking forward to seeing you there! See knvm.org/virology/netwo… for more details or PM me.

And while you are visting Groningen, why not join the Integrative / Quantitative Microbial Ecology Meeting on day before (21st of March)? Contact Thomas Hackl for details.

Are you interested in Microbial Ecology and want to join an awesome Dutch community? Consider signing up to the annual Integrative Microbial Ecology meeting in Groningen on March 21 2024. Visit sites.google.com/view/qme-nl/ for more information and a link to register!

The meeting takes place back-to-back with the annual Netherlands Association of Virus Ecology meeting the next day, which will also be great - make the most of a trip to Groningen! See this post for more information: x.com/Mark_P_Zwart/s…

Excited to finally share this work! This paper is years in the making... We uncover a global network of purine and pyrimidine cross-feeding among ocean microbes and begin characterizing the forces shaping it. 1/ biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

I’m hiring! Looking for a PhD candidate with a passion for soil microbiology to join me in Tübingen studying phage interactions with #soil (micro)habitats and the implications for their ecology. #PhDpositions Universität Tübingen Details here: uni-tuebingen.de/securedl/sdl-e…

Do endogenous virophages protect their protist hosts from giant viruses? For the marine heterotrophic flagellate Cafeteria sp., it very much seems so. Congrats to Anna Koslová, Thomas Hackl and co-workers at Max Planck Institute for Medical Research on a new study published in PNASNews ! pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

ICTV's long-anticipated Computational Virus Taxonomy Challenge is out! Bioinformaticians are asked to classify unknown virus sequences and contribute to making Virus Taxonomy more reproducible. See: ictv-vbeg.github.io/ICTV-TaxonomyC… - please RT, tell your bioinformaticians and colleagues!

Starships carry important cargo genes that have been previously investigated. These include the biosynthetic gene clusters for Fumihopaside A, and Fumigermin. As well as the HAC cluster that contributes to virulence, hypoxia, and biofilm formation.

Interested in quantifying phage parameters from growth curves? Then this is your workshop! October 31, Utrecht (NL): docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…

detectEVE: fast, sensitive and precise detection of endogenous viral elements in genomic data biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… #biorxiv_bioinfo

Happy to finally see our (improved) version of our EVE detection pipeline out for everyone to use :) with Nadja Brait and Thomas Hackl

Are you interested in finding giant viruses, virophages, and PLVs inside your metagenomes? Struggling to figure out an easy way to do so? Look no further than BEREN, a one-stop-shop tool for recovery, taxonomy, and annotation of these viruses. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Many of us want to detect & infer roles of giant virus in metagenomes but are limited by available tools and bioinfo expertise. BEREN is a modular, one-stop-shop for giant virus & virophage identification in metaG datasets. Latest from our lab, spearheaded by Benjamin Minch !

Super proud of the discoveries on Antarctic virus diversity by Gonçalo Piedade 🏳️‍🌈! nature.com/articles/s4146…

We have a 3-year postdoc position in our group at the HIFMB to study plasmids and plasmids systems of the marine environment to survey their utility in microbial responses to environmental change. Please see the official job ad here and spread the word: jobs.awi.de/Vacancies/2002…

Funded postdoc + PhD opportunities in marine microbial ecology! Please share with folks that might be interested. Start date is flexible (fall 2025 to summer 2026) More about the lab + applying (Postdoc rolling, PhD apps due Oct/Jan): sites.google.com/uncc.edu/micro…