Nikiforos has just joined the lab for a research practice has part of his Master degree at Uppsala University. He will work on assessing picozoan diversity in metagenomic datasets. Most welcome!

Together with Patrick Keeling from UBC, Fabien just published a review paper discussing the current view on the eukaryotic tree of life (eToL). Among other topics, the fitting of environmental diversity in the tree and its increasingly lopsided appearance are discussed. Check it out: ​https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.07.031

Long metabarcoding of the eukaryotic rDNA operon to phylogenetically and taxonomically resolve environmental diversity. This is a paper where we describe the use of pacbio to sequence eDNA, and apply a novel approach to resolve the environmental diversity of microbial eukaryotes (protists) using phylogenetics.
Link to the pre-print: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/627828v1

We welcome Elena Coulier in the team. Elena is from the Université Clermont Auvergne in France and will be with us for a 3 months internship as part of her studies.

Fabien recently became Associate Editor for Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, handling protist papers. The goal is to increase the protist-focused paper in this journal, so please send your manuscript along!

Boum boum, 2 new papers from the lab were recently published:

1. A Quick Guide in Current Biology on the ascetosporean parasites (29(1):R7-R8)
2. The description of TSAR, a new very very large group of eukaryotes, in Molecular Biology and Evolution (right now in advance access format)
   

We recently said bye to Jürgen, who went back to Germany after a successful 2 years in the lab. Sad, but we welcomed a new member last week: Anders Alfjorden, who is doing a PhD on various aspects of Ascetosporean parasites.

Good news! A collaborative work between Simon Whelan, Iker and Fabien has just been accepted for publication in Bioinformatics. PREQUAL is the name of a neat new tool that implements a full probabilistic approach to detect and deal with stretches of non-homologous characters in sets of unaligned sequences. This will be very useful to prepare phylogenomic datasets. Stay tune for the paper.

This is a long due post, but in January we welcomed the newest member of the lab, Ioana. She's a postdoc working on the genomics of Ascetosporea, and developing microfluidics to improve the genome sequencing of protists.