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We are incredibly honoured, humbled, and excited to receive an ERC Consolidator grant to pursue research on the origin of plastids. We are grateful to all the people who made this possible. Thanks to all, #ERC for the thorough review process, the 7 reviewers for their valuable feedback and the panel for their time and believing in this project. Stay tune for hiring announcement, we will hire PhD students and postdocs  A fully funded PhD position is open in the lab, to work on figuring out what are the photosynthetic "organelles" in the protist Meringosphaera. The overarching goals of this four-year PhD project are to identify the closest free-living relatives to the endosymbionts, and to characterize the levels of cellular, genetic, and metabolic integration of the endosymbionts to pinpoint the nature of this endosymbiosis. A suite of single cell methods will be employed, including single-cell genomics and metagenomics, and we have also planned for confocal scanning microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and focused ion beam-secondary electron microscopy (FIB-SEM). This is a collaboration with the lab of Rachel Foster at Stockholm University. More info and how to apply here: https://uu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:464881/type:job/where:4/apply:1  The editors at Nature Communications have chosen to feature our article “Single cell genomics reveals plastid-lacking Picozoa are close relatives of red algae” in the Editors’ Highlights webpage of recent research in “Ecology and evolution”. The Editors’ Highlights pages aim to showcase the 50 best papers recently published in an area. The highlights can be accessed at www.nature.com/collections/jadchbbhdi.  We are delighted that the Swedish Research Council has granted us funding for four years to continue our work on characterising the endosymbiotic relationship in the marine protist Meringosphaera. This work started off with a scholarship from Carl Tryggers that supported Dr. Vasily Zlatogursky (see here for the paper), and is now being carried out by Megan Sorensen in collaboration with the lab of Dr. Rachel Foster at Stockholm University with a postdoc grant from SciLifeLab. With this new grant, we will be seeking soon a PhD student; stay tuned.  We recently welcomed two new members of the lab: Christina who is visiting us from Aalborg University to develop an environment specific database using long-read amplicon sequencing, and Thomas as a master student who will explore metagenomic datasets for plastid genomes.
But we are also getting ready to see Mahwash graduate with PhD, which will be a very special moment for us (first PhD student of the lab) but also sad because it means that she will soon leave. We are happy to announce the publication of two papers, now available at:
Iker Irisarri, Jürgen F H Strassert, Fabien Burki, Phylogenomic Insights into the Origin of Primary Plastids, Systematic Biology, 2021;, syab036, https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syab036 Zlatogursky, V.V., Shɨshkin, Y., Drachko, D. and Burki, F. (2021), The Long-time Orphan Protist Meringosphaera mediterranea Lohmann, 1902 [1903] is a Centrohelid Heliozoan. Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology. Accepted Author Manuscript e12860, https://doi.org/10.1111/jeu.12860 |
