Tom Williams (tweethinking.bsky.social)

Microbial #eukaryotes have a fascinating evolutionary history and are our windows to learning about early eukaryotic life. 👇 First peek into our #preprint on the #transcriptome of a free-living relative of trichomonas and analysis of how/if they differ! Tinyurl.com/pkeilini

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

Many novel Asgard genomes, cultivated Lokiarchaeia, new phylogenetic analyses: what insights do these and other recent studies provide into the enigmatic origin of eukaryotes? In this review in @Nature , we discuss the latest findings and open questions: nature.com/articles/s4158…

biorxiv.org/content/10.110… This looks interesting --- a meaty paper on a difficult question. Congratulations to all the authors!

Happy to share a chapter of my PhD thesis🐣! We review the diversity of the cell envelope in Terrabacteria which tell us a lot about outer membrane biogenesis and the diderm-to-monoderm transition. Thanks to my co-authors Najwa Taib @ChrisBel70 @SGribaldo nature.com/articles/s4157…

@KaHochberg Awesome! Congrats Georg!

Marburg has been an unbelievable place for me to start my group, with incredible mentors, colleagues, and group members . I'm very grateful we've been given a chance to stay on. Many exciting things are brewing, so here's to the future. uni-marburg.de/de/aktuelles/n… (excuse the German)

Can free-living eukaryotes exist without mitochondria? In a new paper from my group led by @retortacarp, we show that the answer is probably yes! nature.com/articles/s4146…

@andrewjroger Yes, it's a definite possibility. It would help to nail down the species tree, root, and the origins of the various genes, however...

Could methanogenesis be ancestral to Archaea?

Plants growing in extreme conditions – like algae on ice – can provide insights into the evolution of alternative solutions to old problems, like responses to UV stress. An excellent Commentary by Cäcilia F. Kunz et al. on recent work by Bowles et al.: nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/np…

Registration open for free meeting @royalsociety Nov 11-12 "Chance and purpose in the evolution of biospheres" on the coevolution of Life and Earth - as well as other planets. Organised by @glpcjd @anjspa1 @gramolius Samir Okasha and Tim Lenton. Register: royalsociety.org/science-events…

...and provide some pointers for trying out the methods. Many thanks to co-authors @sllsi @PhilHugenholtz @anjspa1 @eme_laura @Paul__Sheridan Adrian Davin @AlexisCompBio @wwood @micecoevo @drenal_eu @RochelleSoo1 Noah Wahl

Our review article about phylogenetic (gene tree-species tree) reconciliation is out. We make the case that reconciliation methods provide a natural framework for modelling/studying microbial evolution, summarise some previous work... academic.oup.com/ismej/advance-…

Phylogenetic reconciliation: making the most of genomes to understand microbial ecology and evolution @ISMEJournal from @sllsi with @PhilHugenholtz @anjspa1 @micecoevo @Paul__Sheridan @eme_laura @RochelleSoo1 @wwood @drenal_eu academic.oup.com/ismej/advance-…

Very happy to have been part of this project!

In our new paper at Cell (@CellCellPress), we reveal secrets of how the third form of life, archaea, make energy. We uncover new lineages of hydrogen-using enzymes, both minimal and complex. These help archaea thrive in all sorts of extreme environments. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Delighted to see the work from my postdoc at @BristolUni on algal evolution on ice and land out in @NewPhyt @tweethinking | @glpcjd | Doug Campbell | @MicroLabBristo1 @Bristol_Glac | @BristolPalaeo nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/np… 1/6

Happy to share our preprint about the evolution of Glycolysis and TCA cycle, demonstrating that eukaryotic metabolism also have archaeal origins and underwent a highly dynamic evolution. Special thanks to Anja Spang and Berend Snel for promoting this interesting project! @anjspa1

DECODING GENOMES - from sequences to phylodynamics: We are proud to present our book on how to analyse genomic sequences with an evolutionary perspective. See decodinggenomes.org for a free pdf, Amazon links for print orders, and further information. Great team effort 1/2

Our oral microbiome evolution from ancient DNA data review is out! Led by @GDahlquistAxe and @fstandeven193 with @DrATedder and Camilla Speller, published in MGEN @MicrobioSoc and of interest to @spaam_community and others in microbiome evolution or aDNA. microbiologyresearch.org/content/journa…