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🇨🇦 Marc Strous

@marcstrous.bsky.social

390 followers 89 following 69 posts

Canada Research Chair in Geomicrobiology. Fascinations include alkaline soda lakes and ancient groundwater.

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Environmental science 56%

Biology 18%

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Reposted by Simon Roux, Marc Strous

Cameron Thrash @jcamthrash.bsky.social · 1d

Direct single-molecule detection and super-resolution imaging with a low-cost portable smartphone-based microscope www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

Direct single-molecule detection and super-resolution imaging with a low-cost portable smartphone-based microscope - Nature Communications

Loretan and colleagues present a low-cost smartphone-based microscope capable of detecting single-molecule fluorescence. This approach opens doors to personalised and widely distributed applications in diagnostics, biosensing, and science education.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Elena Litchman, Marc Strous, Allan Konopka

Jarrett Byrnes @jebyrnes.bsky.social · 2d

Heeeeey #Microbial #Ecology folk! My department has a job opening for a tenure track Microbial Ecologist! Feel free to DM me with questions. Come join our awesome supportive whip-smart & kind crew in the Biology Department of @umassboston.bsky.social! employmentopportunities.umb.edu/boston/en-us...

The ISC - your new home at UMass Boston?

The view of Boston Harbor from front of campus

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Reposted by Marc Strous

Cameron Thrash @jcamthrash.bsky.social · 3d

Global constraint principle for microbial growth laws www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... #jcampubs

Global constraint principle for microbial growth laws | PNAS

Understanding complex living systems requires identifying universal phenomenological laws that are independent of species and molecular-biological ...

www.pnas.org

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Reposted by Andy Baker, Jed O. Kaplan, Marc Strous

Dr Dan Shugar 🇨🇦 @watershedlab.bsky.social · 6d

🚨FOUR tenure track positions in my dept @ucalgary.bsky.social @ucalgaryscience.bsky.social in applied & computational geophysics, subsurface geochemistry, sedimentary geology, and sustainable soil science. careers.ucalgary.ca/search/jobs?...

(please reskeet widely!) #academicsky 🧪⚒️🇨🇦

Opportunities matching 'earth'

Search 4 Careers available at University of Calgary.

careers.ucalgary.ca

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🇨🇦 Marc Strous @marcstrous.bsky.social · 13d

My lab is attempting ancestral reconstruction of some very large trees using ALEml (amalgamated likelihood). Does anyone know if a multithreaded implementation of ALE is available somewhere? Our HPC is unhappy with us running a single thread for >24h on the bigmem node...

Reposted by Marc Strous

Cameron Thrash @jcamthrash.bsky.social · 13d

A roadmap for equitable reuse of public microbiome data www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

A roadmap for equitable reuse of public microbiome data - Nature Microbiology

In this Consensus Statement, a consortium of microbiome scientists discuss current sequencing data sharing policies and propose the use of a Data Reuse Information (DRI) tag to promote equitable and collaborative data sharing.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Marc Strous

Cameron Thrash @jcamthrash.bsky.social · 16d

BONCAT-Live for isolation and cultivation of active environmental bacteria journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.... #jcampubs

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Reposted by Marc Strous

Cameron Thrash @jcamthrash.bsky.social · 20d

GPU-accelerated homology search with MMseqs2 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

GPU-accelerated homology search with MMseqs2 - Nature Methods

Graphics processing unit-accelerated MMseqs2 offers tremendous speedups for homology retrieval from metagenomic databases, query-centered multiple sequence alignment generation for structure predictio...

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Marc Strous

Dr. Jennifer Pett-Ridge @jeffinerca.bsky.social · 21d

isme-microbes.org/isme-scholar...

Call for Applications – ISME Scholar Mobility Fund – ISME

ISME supports MSc/PhD graduate students and postdocs to develop academically via the Scholar Mobility Fund. Please submit your application by 1 October to study at a host institution abroad.

isme-microbes.org

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🇨🇦 Marc Strous @marcstrous.bsky.social · 21d

Rings true... we can do better than that. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Equity in science is a beautiful lie — and I’m done pretending

Science isn’t really moving towards equity; institutions are just perfecting the appearance of equity. We need to build an alternative system.

www.nature.com

Reposted by Marc Strous

Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 26d

Here's a GIANT one: C3 photosynthesis using RUBISCO is inefficient, but scientists have designed and run a new and more efficient photosynthetic pathway in Arabidopsis:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/09/new-pathway-engineered-into-plants-lets-them-suck-up-more-co₂/

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🇨🇦 Marc Strous @marcstrous.bsky.social · 29d

Major step forward in pinning down legal responsibility for climate change: Unravelling the individual contributions of Energy Companies to specific heatwaves: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Systematic attribution of heatwaves to the emissions of carbon majors - Nature

Climate change made 213 historical heatwaves reported over 2000–2023 more likely and more intense, to which each of the 180 carbon majors (fossil fuel and cement producers) substantially contributed.

www.nature.com

Reposted by Marc Strous

James Bradley @drbradbrad.bsky.social · Sep 10

2 Postdoc vacancies: Microbial dormancy in the cryosphere
@erc.europa.eu #ERC_SIESTA
📢 PLEASE RT

Experimental:
🧬 Single cell microbial activity measurements, flow cytometry, omics, biogeochem

Modelling:
🖥️ Bioenergetics, thermodynamics, ecological, biogeochem

☀️ Marseille, France
‼️ Apply by 30 Sept

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Reposted by Marc Strous

Stephen Heard @stephenbheard.bsky.social · Sep 4

Do you mentor scientific writing, or use written assignments in the science courses you teach? Do you find mentoring/teaching writing hard, or time consuming? (Because it is!) Our new book can help, and it's getting close to being in your hands.

Owls, blurbs, and a cover – oh my! “Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences” is getting close

We (that’s Bethann Garramon Merkle and I) are getting very excited about our new book, Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences: An Evidence-Based Approach. Over the last few months, we’ve be…

scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com

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Reposted by Vı́ctor de Lorenzo, George A. O’Toole, Marc Strous , and 1 more Vı́ctor de Lorenzo, George A. O’Toole, Marc Strous, Kiran Raosaheb Patil

Tanmay Bharat @tbharat-lab.bsky.social · Aug 31

Sub-cellular chemical mapping in bacteria using correlated cryogenic electron and mass spectrometry imaging

Congrats Hannah Ochner and authors on this important paper! Strong collaboration with @kiranrpatil.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
@mrclmb.bsky.social @wellcometrust.bsky.social

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🇨🇦 Marc Strous @marcstrous.bsky.social · Aug 28

Can someone recommend a good current textbook on protist biology and ecology?

Reposted by Marc Strous

Science News @scinews.bsky.social · Aug 27

🎯How did life get multicellular?

Five simple organisms could have the answer

"Single-celled species that often stick together in colonies have researchers rethinking the origin of animals."

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

How did life get multicellular? Five simple organisms could have the answer

Single-celled species that often stick together in colonies have researchers rethinking the origin of animals.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Marc Strous

Jon Mifsud @jonathonmifsud.bsky.social · Aug 25

There’s been a bunch of new approaches looking at deep viral evolutionary history. We’ve put together a mini review highlighting some recent advancements in structural phylogenetics and time-dependent rate models and what they could do for the field 🦠
🔗 journals.asm.org/doi/full/10....

Recent advances in the inference of deep viral evolutionary history | Journal of Virology

Phylogenetic studies examining the origins, emergence, and spread of viruses have arguably been one of the most active and successful areas of evolutionary biology and form the bedrock of the flourishing field of genomic epidemiology. This, in part, reflects the ability of viruses, particularly those with RNA genomes, to evolve at rates much greater than their cellular counterparts (1). The rapid rate at which viruses evolve and accumulate mutations enables evolutionary signals to be identified through comparative genomics at short timescales relevant for outbreak investigation and response. The integration of phylogenetics and epidemiology, known as phylodynamics, has become a vital tool in response to numerous viral outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics, including Ebola (2), Zika (3), and, more recently, COVID-19 (4) and mpox (5).

journals.asm.org

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Reposted by Marc Strous

Cameron Thrash @jcamthrash.bsky.social · Aug 25

Redox conduction facilitates direct interspecies electron transport in anaerobic methanotrophic consortia www.science.org/doi/full/10.... #jcampubs

Redox conduction facilitates direct interspecies electron transport in anaerobic methanotrophic consortia

Methane-consuming microbial partners use redox conductors to pass electrons.

www.science.org

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Reposted by Marc Strous, Zen Faulkes, Hisham Zerriffi , and 1 more Marc Strous, Zen Faulkes, Hisham Zerriffi, Frédéric Delsuc

Andrew Roger @andrewjroger.bsky.social · Aug 25

I gave a symposium talk at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology 2025 (#eseb2025) meeting last week and this was my title slide showcasing how I was speaking as an independent scientist because @dalhousieu.bsky.social @dalhousie.bsky.social has locked us out.

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🇨🇦 Marc Strous @marcstrous.bsky.social · Aug 23

To me the increasing economical and political power of older people, who have no stake in the future, is a concern. Lack of economic growth also challenges our social fabric, leading to polarization, especially combined with high inequality... but both still easier than climate change...

Reposted by Marc Strous

Zeynep Baharoglu @zeynepbaharoglu.bsky.social · Aug 23

Aggresomes protect mRNA under stress in Escherichia coli
www.nature.com/articles/s41... "prolonged stress leading to ATP depletion in Escherichia coli results in increased aggresome formation, compaction and selective mRNA enrichment within these aggresomes" 🦠 #microsky #rnasky

Aggresomes protect mRNA under stress in Escherichia coli - Nature Microbiology

Ribonucleoprotein aggresomes exclude ribonucleases and protect mRNA to promote rapid translation reactivation and cellular recovery after stress alleviation in Escherichia coli.

www.nature.com

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🇨🇦 Marc Strous @marcstrous.bsky.social · Aug 22

I thought Nature Feature about population was completely off: Rapid decline of the human population is already inevitable due to climate change. If that happens naturally, without war or plague, that is a massive win! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

People are having fewer babies: Is it really the end of the world?

Steep population declines in most countries are expected to have negative impacts over the next several generations, but adaptation is possible.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Marc Strous

angela oliverio @oliverio.bsky.social · Aug 22

New lab pre-print up! "Twelve species of human parasites make up half the literature on microbial eukaryotes"
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

We (led by UG Joanna Lepper and with @hbrappap.bsky.social) quantified all mentions of protist species in the scientific literature 🧵

#protistsonsky #microsky

Twelve species of human parasites make up half of the literature on microbial eukaryotes

Although microbial eukaryotes comprise the majority of eukaryotic phylogenetic diversity and inhabit nearly all ecosystems globally, most research focuses on only a few species of human parasites. Her...

doi.org

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Reposted by Marc Strous

Nature Microbiology @natmicrobiol.nature.com · Aug 22

#NatMicroPicks

ACL Circuit: Gut Signal Switch! 🦠

ACL is a density-dependent signaling mechanism in Bacteroidota that regulates the production of diverse secreted molecules via a unique lysine-based biosynthetic pathway playing an active role in the host.

#MicroSky

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Discovery of a widespread chemical signalling pathway in the Bacteroidota - Nature

The N-acyl-cyclolysine system regulates the expression of co-localized operons encoding diverse secreted molecules in Bacteroidota.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Marc Strous

Jonathan Gropp @biogeochem345.bsky.social · Aug 21

Our story about microbial methane is out! We found that reducing the expression of a key gene of methanogenesis modulates the isotopic composition of the methane:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Check out also the coverage at the UC Berkeley News website:
news.berkeley.edu/2025/08/14/s...

Modulation of methyl–coenzyme M reductase expression alters the isotopic composition of microbial methane

The stable isotopic composition of microbial methane varies substantially, and the underlying causes are debated. In this work, we experimentally controlled the abundance of the central enzyme in meth...

www.science.org

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Reposted by Marc Strous

Mitja M. Zdouc @mmzdouc.bsky.social · Aug 21

Into natural product biosynthesis & tailoring enzymes? Frustrated by the lack of a dedicated resource to explore their functions? Tired of endless literature searches for reaction info? Meet the MITE database, freely available at mite.bioinformatics.nl. Preprint: doi.org/10.26434/che... (1/8)

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Reposted by Marc Strous

Monir Moniruzzaman @giantvirus.bsky.social · Aug 19

We’re recruiting a PhD student (Fall 2026) to study the ecology & evolution of aquatic giant viruses! Research spans lab experiment, field sampling, & bioinformatics. Background in microbiology/bioinforamtics encouraged.

More info & contact email here: monirlab.com/join/

Please share. Thank you!

Join the Lab | Monir lab

monirlab.com

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Reposted by Andreas J. Bäumler, Marc Strous

Julie Pfeiffer @jkpfeiff.bsky.social · Aug 18

Faculty search announcement 2025: Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Microbiology at UT Southwestern. We seek candidates working in microbial pathogenesis (some preference may be given to bacterial pathogens). Come join our community! (1/5) www.utsouthwestern.edu/departments/...

Department members sit at a very long table in the hallway eating a pre-Thanksgiving potluck feast.

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Reposted by Simon Roux, Marc Strous

Susie Grigson @susiegriggo.bsky.social · Aug 18

Thrilled to share our new review just published in Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews (@asm.org #MMBR):
“Computational Function Prediction of Bacteria and Phage Proteins”
with @gbouras13.bsky.social @linsalrob.bsky.social @bedutilh.bsky.social
🔗 journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Computational function prediction of bacteria and phage proteins | Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews

SUMMARYUnderstanding protein functions is crucial for interpreting microbial life; however, reliable function annotation remains a major challenge in computational biology. Despite significant advance...

journals.asm.org

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